Unlocking seamless customer journeys: Explore the power of digital customer experience

Ever since the shift toward remote work and digital shopping during the pandemic, we’ve all come to expect more from digital customer experiences. And yet, most brands still struggle to meet those expectations. In 2022, customer experience (CX) quality dropped for 19% of brands. It’s no wonder, then, that 56% of customers report most companies treat them like numbers.The key business benefits of implementing a digital customer experience strategy

In many cases, these issues don’t arise from a lack of care but one of strategy. Faced with the increasing number of digital marketing channels, marketing teams are simply overwhelmed with developing a cohesive digital customer experience (DCX) strategy that considers all target audiences.

If that’s you, keep reading to find out why and how you should develop a DCX strategy and how to adapt it to future-proof your brand.

Developing a thorough DCX strategy is no longer a luxury but a necessity. If you’re still struggling to justify the time investment to develop one, here are some of the undeniable benefits your enterprise can expect:

Implementing a DCX strategy isn’t just about setting up digital technology; it’s about aligning digital platforms with customer needs and business goals to create meaningful interactions that benefit both your customers and your business.

With more and more factors to consider and customer expectations rising, creating a seamless experience requires extensive preparation to keep your clients happy for years to come.

For starters, your omnichannel DCX strategy needs to be based on comprehensive user research. Make sure your analytics feed into a unified dashboard to understand the preferences and behaviors of your target audiences. You can combine that approach with more active market research methods like surveys and interviews.

Before moving any further, it’s best to implement routines for regular feedback loops from employees across departments as well as various customer groups. Through thorough user testing and analytics, you can continuously gather insights for iterative improvements.

Once you’ve collected all that data, it’s time to translate it into a corresponding omnichannel CX strategy. The key to success here lies in consistency. Make sure you maintain a uniform visual language, tone of voice, and editorial style to provide a cohesive and positive customer experience.

Think of responsive design not just as device-specific. Instead, consider adaptive design techniques that help you tailor content to operating systems or specific types of digital interaction. Try to ensure that engagements like clicks or data inputs are consistent in their feedback and design, and eliminate any unnecessary friction points that might affect the user experience.

In all of this, the user should be at the center of your endeavors, not the content or your technical backend. If you seamlessly integrate every digital channel while maintaining a consistent brand experience, you’ll allow users to effortlessly transition between channels like social media, website, and mobile apps without losing any context or functionality.

To allow for these smooth transitions, it’s advisable to prioritize performance, whether you optimize image formatting or set up additional caching.

Another often overlooked ingredient of a user-centric strategy lies in ensuring accessibility for users of all abilities. Resources like the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) provide best practices for diverse needs such as screen readers or keyboard navigation.

If that still sounds like a mammoth task, don’t worry. With a composable digital experience platform (DXP) like Magnolia, you can leverage automation to perform all those tasks in unison and more efficiently.

Let’s say you’re tailoring your DCX for multiple brands through targeted marketing campaignstargeted marketing campaigns. That can be a tall order because now, you’re dealing with even more data about customers expecting the same level of personalization. Not to mention the additional research and customization required to expand into new niches or international markets.

A DXP like Magnolia can keep your strategy on track, no matter how many channels and brands you’re overseeing. Unlike content management systems, DXPs are built with a seamless end-to-end experience and not just with content production in mind.

For you, that means you can create a digital replica of your entire organization rather than slap on a marketing funnel at the end. You can easily integrate customer data from across your websites, your ecommerce system, customer relationship management, and analytics to get a clear picture of who’s engaging with your brand.

At the same time, customizing experiences for those customers doesn’t require endless workflows. Instead, you can store all your brand assets in our digital asset management solution to keep your brand consistent. When it’s time to publish, you can simply create your content once and adjust variations for different target audiences within the same interface.

The customers we mentioned earlier, who feel like they’re treated like anonymous numbers, are not asking for the impossible. And, every brand wants to show its clients that their voice is heard; yet, the sheer scope of it can feel overwhelming if you address this task without a thorough strategy.

For predictable business success, you want to keep the focus on your customer and evolve DCX strategies to adjust to their needs.

As we’ve discussed, the first step is to regularly gather and act upon customer feedback. However, the format in which you receive feedback often won’t allow for quantifiable strategies. By translating it into these metrics, you can track your DCX strategy over time to keep clients happy.

As technology advances and your business grows, you’ll find that your CX strategies will have to adapt as well. That’s why it’s important to rely on a flexible solution that allows you to switch marketing and analytics tools flexibly without compromising on the production workflows that allow you to maintain consistent branding.

However, you’ll often find that even tools that DXPs claim to be composable lock you into using a predefined set of tools, whether you’re using them or not. At Magnolia, we’ve designed our platform to be entirely open, so that you can embed any software you like, whether you’re switching to a new artificial intelligence tool for copy generation or want to pull your analytics from three different providers.

The vote is in. Even if it is easier to treat all your customers the same in the digitization process, more and more of them are also demanding personal experiences online. If you want to future-proof your business, you can’t treat content production and marketing analytics like the printing press any longer.

A flexible solution like Magnolia’s allows you to adjust to future innovations and evolving customer demands with ease, even across multiple brands and product lines. Care to learn more? Download our new white paper “What can a DXP do for marketers?” and get started.