Marketing
The Digital Experience: Your Go-To Guide
Companies’ expectations of the average consumer with regard to their marketing and communication have grown rapidly over the last two decades – and a lot of this has to do with the growth in digital technology.
We live in times where many retailers only exist in the digital sphere and even those who still have brick and mortar outlets put a huge amount of energy into their digital presence.
That being said, how do businesses big and small create digital interactions that satisfy customers and speak to the quality and innovation of their brands?
As digital marketing continues to be an integral part of the purchase funnel and customer journey, providing digital experiences that are innovative, engaging, memorable, intuitive and interactive to users is crucial if companies want to influence consumer behaviour.
In this comprehensive guide, we will explore various aspects of the digital experience, diving into topics such as the digital customer experience and the difference between the digital experience and the digital customer experience.
We will also provide you with real-world examples of outstanding digital experiences to inspire and illustrate the principles discussed.
So, whether you're a business owner, a designer, a marketer, or simply someone interested in understanding the intricacies of the digital experience, this guide will equip you with the knowledge and insights to create remarkable digital experiences that leave a lasting impact:
What is a digital experience?
In recent years, the concept of a digital experience has gained prominence due to the widespread digital transformation occurring across industries.
A digital experience is a singular interaction a user has with an organisation (a business, company, brand etc.) made possible by digital technology (smart devices, the internet).
As businesses adapt to the digital landscape, they strive to deliver seamless, engaging and personalised experiences to their customers.
A digital experience provides an opportunity for businesses to meet the ever-increasing demands of the modern consumer in a way that adds value to the overall experience they have in their interactions with a business.
What a digital experience does is allow organisations to utilise specific features and components of digital experience platforms to deliver interactions that go beyond basic digital communication.
An example of a basic digital piece of communication could be a document on a static webpage that has no interactive elements.
This webpage can be turned into a digital experience by making it a pdf that includes links to other relevant documents, right-click functionality, social media buttons and auto-translations, for example.
A compelling digital experience leverages real-time capabilities to provide immediate responses and interactions.
Real-time chatbots, instant messaging and live customer support contribute to a sense of responsiveness and enhance user satisfaction.
Understanding customer behaviour and preferences is also crucial in crafting personalised digital experiences.
By collecting and analysing customer data, businesses can optimise their offerings, tailor recommendations and create targeted marketing campaigns.
In today's digital landscape, e-commerce plays a vital role in delivering seamless digital experiences.
Integrating e-commerce platforms with intuitive interfaces, secure payment gateways and efficient order fulfilment processes enhances the overall customer journey.
A great digital experience requires optimising digital channels for speed, usability and accessibility. Performance optimisation ensures that users can navigate effortlessly, reducing frustration and increasing engagement.
Automation technologies, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, enable businesses to deliver personalised experiences at scale.
From recommending relevant products to tailoring content, automation enhances efficiency and customer satisfaction.
To meet the demands of the digital experience landscape, numerous providers offer tools and solutions that empower businesses to enhance their digital interactions.
These providers offer platforms for website development, customer relationship management, analytics, personalisation and more.
Choosing the right provider aligned with your business objectives is essential for achieving optimal digital experiences.
A well-crafted digital experience has the potential to foster strong customer loyalty and engagement.
By consistently delivering personalised and enjoyable interactions, businesses can build trust, establish emotional connections and create advocates for their brand.
Leveraging real-time capabilities, customer data utilisation, e-commerce integration, optimisation, automation and personalisation are key to creating exceptional digital experiences.
What makes a great digital experience?
Something that’s important for companies to understand is that simply having presence on or utilising a digital platform doesn’t automatically mean they’re providing a digital experience.
It’s not enough to just exist on these platforms; companies have to be strategic about how each one serves a purpose that benefits the customer.
A great digital experience strategy takes into consideration aspects such as consumer digital behaviour, the customer journey, the purchase funnel, customer profiles, user intent, customisation and the unique elements/mechanisms of each platform so that the final execution leads to experiences that satisfy users while helping your company set clear KPIs, know which metrics to focus on and measure ROI.
A great digital experience is:
Innovative: uses an existing platform to do something new.
Dynamic: uses digital media (videos, images, gamification, graphics, animation, illustration etc.) or specific digital mechanisms to heighten its message.
Adaptable: doesn’t rest on its laurels, anticipates where digital is going and has a solution.
Scalable: changes to match device or platform without losing its core essence.
Intuitive: feels natural to the user, like a logical next step towards reaching a goal.
Let’s use these features as the foundation to look at some digital experience examples.
15 digital experience examples
15. NatWest Mobile Banking – Face ID Login
An important objective in marketing in general, talk less of digital marketing, is surpassing competitors. Being innovative should be a top priority in the digital space.
As technology improves, so should the experience a brand provides the user on digital platforms.
I bank with a certain company that shall remain nameless.
For a few years now the brand has had a fingerprint login feature enabled on its mobile banking app, which is pretty good.
But unless your finger is unblemished by moisture, dirt or dust, this digital experience will not work – and it is quite annoying having to take off my gloves in the freezing cold to be able to use this function.
Picture my envy then, when a work colleague told me she could use face ID to log in to her NatWest mobile app.
Aside from feeling pangs of envy, my next reaction was to wonder how my bank hasn’t got this feature on its mobile app yet.
This bit of innovation has now sown a seed in my mind that perhaps I’m missing a trick by not banking with natty NatWest.
Were I to decide to open a new bank account or apply for a credit card, NatWest has jumped right ahead of its competitors because of this piece of digital experience.
I’d wager that banks whose mobile apps allow logging in with facial ID have higher user session rates and engagement levels than those who don’t have this option available.
As a brand, imagine how much more you could make your products and/or services visible to consumers by incorporating new technology into a digital experience that allows swift access and interaction with you (IoT technology, for example).
Think about how you could win over your competitors’ customers by providing digital features that make their experiences easier.
It’s over to you, Bank That Shall Remain Nameless. As the old adage goes: adapt or die.
14. Just Eat – Quality Free Delivery Button
If there was ever a year for food delivery companies to dominate revenue charts, it was 2020.
With the option to dine out being restricted across the UK due to COVID-19, more than ever, people were ordering food from their favourite restaurants to be delivered at home instead.
Just Eat – aware that the app offered a large smorgasbord of restaurants and that people were trying to watch how much they spend – provided an option on its mobile app’s landing page that allowed you to see which restaurants were offering free delivery.
This was a great piece of digital experience optimisation because it eased what could be an overwhelming experience and showed that the company was in touch with its customers’ needs while streamlining the process of finding and ordering food.
What this digital experience also did was motivate a browsing user or an unsure user to consider a purchase or to proceed with a purchase respectively.
What I mean by this is that often people either find themselves randomly browsing an app on their devices to pass the time, with no real intent of using whatever service it offers, or they go on an app while still in the consideration stage of the purchase funnel.
What Just Eat did in this digital experience example was to add a digital function to its app that motivated the former group (the browsers) to move to the consideration stage, and “pushed” the latter group (the considerers) further towards a purchase.
13. Amazon – assistant browser extension
How can a retail business make product price comparison easier?
It can do what Amazon did in 2020 which was to launch a browser extension/add-on that allowed users to compare product prices as they browsed the internet.
Furthermore, this digital experience allowed users to find personalised product recommendations and discover Amazon products while browsing the internet.
Product reviews, offers and ratings were also displayed.
What makes this a great example of a digital experience is how Amazon has taken an existing platform – the internet browser – and leveraged its digital capability and functionality to provide solutions for users.
While providing this solution, the company is able to keep its brand at the top of the user’s awareness as they search the internet.
It’s worth mentioning the purchase funnel and customer journey again here because this digital experience covers several stages of both sales processes including research, awareness, comparison, opinion and interest.
It’s fair to say many proverbial birds are being killed by this one digital experience stone.
Black Tower, Germany’s number one wine brand, wanted to showcase their wine portfolio after a rebrand and reached out to SMACK to turn it into a memorable digital experience. They were looking to bring the brand to life through content and an experience that captured the attention of their newly acquired younger audience, without neglecting the company’s usual older demographic.
It was important to the brand that the experience helped customers reappraise their wines.
When it comes to creating a great digital experience, it is essential that the platform it’s presented on functions properly and provides a good user experience as a default.
Not doing so would be like building a house on water-logged land.
This outlook is what made SMACK and Black Tower agree that it was vital first and foremost to fix the brand’s broken website since that was the platform on which the digital experience would take place.
What followed was the launch of a brand new dynamic website that incorporated Black Tower’s new brand look and feel as well as features like micro-animation and sharp imagery.
Once this foundation was complete, the digital experience itself was built, allowing users to: see the latest updates and virtual events in a news section; click on individual bottles or boxes of wine to discover more about them through video guides from experts and animated information bars; follow the brand’s Instagram posts; browse through Black Tower’s range of wines; and also discover tasting notes and cocktail recipes.
11. Gmail – Predictive Text
Predictive text is nothing new in the space of email writing. Google has incorporated the feature into its email service for some years now.
But there’s predictive text and there is predictive text. It’s one thing for email AI to predict two or three vague words after a user begins typing general email speak, but it’s another thing for it to be able to suggest four, five-worded sentences that pretty much capture and complete what a user is trying to convey.
The latter is what Google has been able to achieve with its Gmail AI. It’s quite uncanny how good it is at capturing human speech patterns.
A little scary the AI may be, but it provides an excellent digital experience nonetheless.
In the current fast-paced world where emails are sent back and forth multiple times per day, anything that makes the process quicker and allows communication to be more succinct is a huge help.
It’s also a wonderful digital experience for those of us who are a little dyslexic when it comes to spelling (thank you auto correct) and who sometimes type faster than we think: many a jumbled sentence has been saved from the jaws of a shark called Confusing Communication by Gmail’s predictive text AI.
Having said that, Google has a way to go yet with its grammar correction AI on Google Docs. Good to know the prom king has bad breath.
There are a few reasons why Amazon is the biggest online company in the world, and one of those reasons is why the multinational brand appears twice on this list.
Amazon’s digital marketing campaigns lean heavily towards providing digital experiences that have a long-lasting impact on customers.
For a company whose motto is “Earth’s most customer-centric company,” this makes perfect sense.
When Amazon’s yearly live in-person event for journalists had to be cancelled because of COVID-19, SMACK helped the brand create a digital experience that captured the essence of the physical event and sought to bring the festive spirit to the media.
SMACK was able to create an innovative Christmas story digital experience that involved following Alison, an Amazon delivery driver.
As we followed her on her journey and discovered top gifts for Christmas across a range of product categories, digital elements such as videos, animation (it’s truly stunning), interactive buttons, scroll navigation, images, live links and pop-up information boxes were incorporated to create an incredibly immersive, engaging experience.
All this was presented with beautiful illustrations done by Venus in Fur and curated by Jubba.
I have to tip my hat to SMACK’s creative team for coming up with the traditional children’s Christmas book concept. This particular element made the digital experience feel personal and warm and all Christmassy and was my favourite aspect of going on the journey with Alison.
Amazon didn’t shake its customer-focused outlook just because it was targeting journalists.
It incorporated this into a social-distancing solution for its usual in-person event to create a memorable digital experience.
Amazon (with the help of SMACK – we’re just so proud of this project) definitely gave the press something to write about with this one! Experience a piece of this digital experience yourself here.
9. Twinings – environmental impact
For any brand to be viewed as ethical by consumers in today’s world, it has to showcase how it’s doing its part in reducing the environmental impact the manufacturing of its products or creation of its services has on the planet, especially regarding pollution.
What better way to do this than by creating a digital experience that is accessible and contains information that is easily digestible?
That is exactly what SMACK did with beverage brand Twinings in this example of a digital experience.
Specifically, Twinings wanted to showcase how considerate towards the environment the company was being and planned to be going forward in the packaging of its tea products.
SMACK built a web page that contained statistics and packaging information presented in a clear, concise, digestible format that highlighted the brand’s efforts to make product packaging environmentally friendly.
To make this digital experience interactive and engaging, features such as animation and scroll functionality were incorporated.
Being a bit of an amateur psychologist myself, what I love about this digital experience example is the utilisation of earthly hues as a colour palette to present the environmental information.
Do not – I repeat – do not underestimate the impact colour has on a user’s digital experience and the message it communicates, especially on a subconscious level. It’s marketing 101, yet it is often overlooked in the digital space.
Shout out to Twinings who gave our creative digital agency freedom to break away from the mould of the brand’s usual imagery, providing SMACK with the opportunity to illustrate the products so the team could further incorporate a sustainable feel to the design of this digital experience.
8. Poundland – Basket Chase
Although it was launched in December 2019, this particular digital experience example is interesting as it highlights how it’s possible to create a digital experience that is reusable for future campaigns.
Poundland wanted to find a way to engage with its audience and create an interactive experience with the brand that would allow for data collection over the Christmas period.
The retailer also wanted this to be tied to a digital activation that would raise awareness of its Christmas range.
What this brief birthed was Basket Chase, a gamified digital experience SMACK created for Poundland.
The game involved catching as many Christmas items in a basket as possible. Bonus points were given for items over £1 (a clever way to raise awareness of the brands over £1 range, an objective that was a part of the brief), points were deducted for the collection of non-Christmas items, and game play sped up if you happened to collect a snowflake.
Check out how it played here.
This digital experience example tapped into our seemingly natural interest in game play by incorporating several elements of digital technology for a singular experience that helped a company achieve its marketing objectives.
7. Barclays – coronavirus help page
An image that banking institutions want to get away from is that of being these big monolithic entities that are all about the “dollar dollar bill y’all” come rain or shine.
The drive to humanise their brands has led to some huge digital marketing campaigns from banking organisations.
But sometimes a human touch is a simple touch.
With COVID-19 affecting most people financially, Barclays created a dedicated coronavirus page on its main website to help its customers with managing money, accounts and Barclays products.
What makes this digital experience worth mentioning is that the page was not static and was updated regularly with new information.
The page itself was structured in a way that made navigating to other parts of the website very simple and smooth, providing an excellent user experience.
One of the standout options accessible through this page was information on payment holidays for loans, mortgages and credit cards.
The content of this simple digital experience could go some way in showing a more human side of a banking organisation.
6. The Ben Kinsella Trust – Knife-Wise
From Scotland to England, knife crime has had a devastating impact on families and young people’s lives across the UK.
From Scotland to England, knife crime has had a devastating impact on families and young people’s lives across the UK.
So when The Ben Kinsella Trust approached our digital agency a few years ago with the objective of engaging their young audience on the dangers of knife crime, we enthusiastically got involved in helping them create digital experiences.
Since it was aimed at a young audience, it was important to the organisation that new interactive elements be incorporated so that the digital experiences were accessible as well as educational.
SMACK was able to build three touchscreen apps for the charity that were immersive, interactive and engaging, and used across the country to educate youngsters.
One of those applications was Knife-Wise, a knife crime quiz app.
In 2020, the charity tasked us with updating it so it could be used as an app that not only supported their exhibitions and workshops but was also available for users to engage with anywhere, not just where the charity organisation displayed it.
The app’s design and quiz questions were updated as well as being improved to fit mobile and tablet formats, providing a greater digital experience for young people.
The updated quiz app includes multiple choice and true or false questions with the user able to see their final score and share it with others and play again.
This digital experience example is more about bigging up the client, The Ben Kinsella Trust, not only for the wonderful work they do in educating young people, but for understanding that a specific digital approach was needed to target a young audience and for being proactive in wanting to improve an existing digital experience.
5. Gucci social media augmented reality filter
Being at the cutting edge of digital technology and finding ways to elevate existing experiences are fundamental to creating digital experiences that make an impact.
When Gucci’s Gucci Bloom Fragrance was chosen as one of the brands to launch on Camera Effects, Facebook’s augmented reality development studio, global media agency network Mediacom tasked SMACK with creating an interactive flower crown for social media users to “wear.”
Our approach was to use innovative digital technology (augmented reality and creative animation) and the leveraging of existing platforms (social media and digital devices) to create a digital experience that was an industry first.
Specifically, we built a hyper-real design filter using a 3D modelled crown made of genuine flowers that was brought to life by utilising an animated stop-motion frame to give a dreamy effect as the flowers bloomed and butterflies fluttered around them.
Rather than limit this digital experience only to the “selfie view” which bloomed a crown of flowers to wear, the tool’s design incorporated functionality that allowed users to use the filter for their outward-facing camera and experience lovely flowers blooming and butterflies flying around whatever environment they were in.
The result was an outstanding (if we do say so ourselves) AR digital experience that was shared over 500,000 times on social media. Watch the filter in use here . As is evident, an innovative digital experience can garner excellent results.
If you’re anything like me when it comes to shopping for clothes online, you’re probably never completely sure what size to go for, especially when it comes to tops.
ASOS has made solving this problem easier by including a feature on its apparel product pages that allows you to enter your height, weight, tummy shape, chest shape and age so that your “Fit Assistant” as it calls it, can recommend a size for you.
By adding an interactive feature that enhances and, in a way, provides a personalised experience on a platform (product page) that can often be bland and simple, ASOS has made this single digital interaction intuitive as it helps towards a logical next step in the user’s process of purchasing.
A limitation that is often a barrier for customers buying apparel online is not being able to physically try on an item to be sure its size is right.
Using a virtual fit assistant as a digital technology tool has led to a digital experience that helps to break that barrier down so that the customer can move on to the next digital experience in the purchase sequence.
Having already worked with SMACK to create a game raising awareness of the launch of a luxury fashion collection online and instore, Karl Lagerfeld once again sought our digital services. This time it was for the launch of the creative and colourful KARL X YOU holiday collection that would be available to purchase as the festive period began.
Besides raising awareness and getting eyes on the collection, the client set data acquisition as another objective of the digital marketing campaign.
Because the solution was so successful for the first campaign, SMACK and the Karl Lagerfeld team agreed that gamification was again the best option for this second digital campaign.
Our digital experience agency built a new game called Katch Karl that sat on the brand’s website.
The game featured many of the items that were a part of the new collection.
For users to be eligible to win a prize (the product they had to “Katch” in the game), they would have to enter their name, email address and store preference.
This is an example of a digital experience that really leverages the versatility and dynamism of digital technology by using a tool such as gamification to boost the interactivity and engagement of a singular digital interaction.
Also, with customers becoming more wary of cookies, online privacy and how their data is used, a digital experience has to be captivating and worth it for people to divulge their details to companies.
A dynamic digital experience that offers possible rewards is a great way to convince users your brand is worthy of their data.
Tie The Knot was a digital experience SMACK helped British luxury clothing retailer Ted Baker create, that allowed brides and grooms to book consultation appointments in a selection of the brand’s stores.
It was important to the team at Ted Baker that this digital experience be not only engaging but able to function across all digital platforms and devices.
It was crucial that be it booking a bride appointment on a smartphone or booking a groom appointment on an in-store tablet, the digital experience adapted to the functionalities of each device without losing the quality of the overall user experience.
SMACK was able to create a digital experience that was interactive and seamlessly adjusted to the unique interactive mechanisms of each device.
As an agency, when we work on digital marketing campaigns, we always bear in mind that where a user starts a digital interaction is not necessarily where they will complete it.
It’s therefore vital that, were a user to start an interaction on one device but go on to later finish it on another, this change of devices does not jar the experience of completing the digital interaction.
A good digital experience is scalable and able to take place smoothly across the multiple devices the modern consumer interacts with.
1. Tesco Clubcard
When I signed up for Tesco’s reward scheme (Clubcard) on the retailer’s website some years ago, I received a letter that contained a couple of cards and plastic keyrings with barcodes on them that I had to scan whenever I made purchases in- store in order to collect points I could use to get discounts off items or services.
Although I scanned them often, I rarely knew how many points I had built up and what I could specifically use them for. Why?
Well because, to be honest, I couldn’t be bothered or forgot to log back into my online account to check.
After a while, the Clubcard keyholder I was using got damaged and I didn’t bother to replace it.
On a recent trip to my local Tesco however, for the first time there were a bunch of products with signs saying customers could save money on them right there and then if they had a Clubcard to scan – including their virtual Clubcards on the dedicated app.
I quickly downloaded the app and logged in using the credentials of the original online account I had used to sign up for the physical Clubcards way back when.
And voila!
There on my smartphone was the barcode for my Clubcard ready to be scanned and below it how many points I had accumulated, how many more I’d need to get my next voucher, details on saving even more money by signing up to a service called Clubcard Plus, and more.
This example highlights how digital adaptability can have an impact on a user.
Tesco went from customers only being able to access their Clubcard information on the main website, to developing a dedicated app that provides an even better digital experience than the main site.
Because of this positive digital experience, I’m back to using my Clubcard every time I go to the store again.
In conclusion, the digital experience as a concept goes beyond simply existing on a digital platform: it’s about using digital technology to enhance the singular digital interactions a customer has with a company.
The goal is to address customer needs while fulfilling digital marketing objectives for the company.
A great group of singular digital experiences by a user leads to a great overall digital customer experience.
What is a digital customer experience?
A digital customer experience can be defined as a total of all the digital interactions a customer has with a company, made possible by digital technology.
It is the sum of digital interchanges between a user and a company that take place on digital interfaces like tablets, mobile phones and desktops via the internet, but also platforms like digital billboards.
This differs from a digital experience, which is a singular digital interaction between a user and a company.
Think of a digital experience as a quarter square of an artwork, whereas a digital customer experience is what you get when all the quarter pieces come together to form the whole masterpiece.
Here are the key components of a digital customer experience:
Customer engagement
Customer engagement in the digital realm involves fostering meaningful interactions and connections with customers.
It includes initiatives such as personalised messaging, social media engagement and interactive webinars to capture and maintain customer attention and participation.
Digital asset management
Digital assets, including images, videos and other multimedia elements, play a crucial role in enhancing the digital customer experience.
Effective digital asset management ensures that the right assets are available at the right time, optimising visual appeal and delivering engaging content.
Digital experience management
Digital experience management involves the strategic planning, design and optimisation of digital touchpoints to ensure a cohesive and enjoyable customer journey.
It encompasses aspects such as user interface design, intuitive navigation and seamless transitions between different digital channels.
Content management
Compelling and relevant content is a cornerstone of the digital customer experience.
Content management systems enable businesses to create, organise and deliver valuable content across various digital channels.
By tailoring content to customer preferences and needs, businesses can enhance engagement and build customer loyalty.
Customer expectations and feedback
Meeting and exceeding customer expectations is vital for a successful digital customer experience.
Understanding customer needs and desires through feedback channels such as surveys, reviews and social media interactions enables businesses to continuously refine their digital offerings.
Differentiation
In a crowded digital marketplace, differentiation is key to standing out.
A distinctive digital customer experience sets a brand apart by offering unique features, personalised recommendations and memorable interactions that differentiate it from competitors.
Employee experience
Employee satisfaction and engagement are closely intertwined with the digital customer experience.
By empowering employees with the right tools, training and support, businesses can ensure they deliver exceptional service and create positive customer interactions.
Self-service
Digital self-service options, such as FAQs, latest news sections, knowledge bases and chatbots, empower customers to find answers and resolve issues independently.
Providing seamless self-service experiences reduces support costs, enhances efficiency and ultimately improves customer satisfaction.
Incorporating these key components into the digital customer experience strategy allows businesses to create engaging, personalised and differentiated interactions with their customers.
By prioritising customer engagement, leveraging digital asset management, optimising digital touchpoints and actively seeking customer feedback, organisations can deliver outstanding digital customer experiences that foster loyalty and drive business success.
What is the difference between a digital
experience and a digital customer experience?
While a digital experience focuses on singular digital interactions between a user and a business, a digital customer experience encompasses all the digital interactions a user has with a business.
Adding an item to your favourites list on your smartphone is a singular digital experience.
When – later that day – you add that item to your basket and then go to a page where you make payment on your laptop, this and your previous action is a digital customer experience.
With a digital customer experience, a company leverages the functionalities and features of multiple digital platforms in order to provide the customer with an all- round beneficial experience.
Digital technology has seen an exponential growth in the number of touchpoints a user can go through along the customer journey.
What innovative brands are doing is making sure each and every digital touchpoint is optimised with the customer in mind in order to provide a streamlined experience for the user.
Why is the digital customer experience important?
The emergence of digital technology has really changed the game in terms of how commerce works and how marketing is done in the 21st century.
Any brand worth its salt has some sort of digital marketing strategy in place. It’s no exaggeration to say it would be business suicide for a company not to.
Digital as a concept does not exist in a vacuum: it was brought
into existence by certain technological breakthroughs (the internet, desktop computers, smartphones, tablets) and their advancements.
With these new marketing tools comes the evolution and increase of consumer expectation.
When television moved to colour, black and white adverts didn’t cut it anymore:consumers expected brands to shoot their commercials in colour.
“Go on, impress me,” they said.
Now times that by a hundred for the average 21st century digitally savvy, branded communication-flooded, low attention span user, and you have a situation where providing a great digital customer experience simply has to be a top priority for companies.
The digital customer experience can almost be used interchangeably with the customer experience in general, due to the impact digital has had on customer interactions. It’s customer service … but on steroids.
Think about a digital experience such as using a chatbot, for example.
Say user Lisa has had great individual interactions (digital experiences) with your brand thus far. She digs (might be showing my age here) your brand but has other options too.
Lisa is well along the way on her customer journey and just needs one more interaction to push her over the purchase line.
She needs a question answered quickly so she decides to use your websites chatbot.
Now, although Lisa is aware it’s artificial intelligence she’s interacting with, she still has the expectation that this “customer service representative” will do its job properly.
Given how digital technology has reduced the average consumer’s attention span, decreased room for error and increased exposure to alternative brands, the chatbot answering Lisa’s question straight away or taking a few seconds too long to respond can be the difference between Lisa going ahead with a purchase, or Lisa deciding to look elsewhere because of what she perceives to be a bad digital experience.
That’s how finicky (sorry Lisa, it applies to most of us too) digital technology has made consumers.
Which is why it’s a must that companies provide an overall digital customer experience that is exceptional.
One bad quarter square can ruin the masterpiece and put off potential purchasers.
What makes a great digital customer experience?
It solves the user’s problems – customer satisfaction over channels
As much as they are aware of the devices and platforms on which they have digital interactions, the concept of the digital experience is abstract to the average customer.
What this means is that customers don’t consciously think of their interactions on digital devices as “digital experiences.”
They simply want to interact or have access to a company, and the channels that happen to be the most convenient to use (because of modern day technological advancements) are digital devices.
Phrases and concepts like “digital customer experience” are marketing speak and back end stuff for companies and their marketing teams to worry over.
The user, to be blunt, doesn’t care about that; they just want to interact.
People don’t view or think about using a tap to access water as a “citizen experience” … but they still want a satisfactory experience accessing that water.
This final part is the point being made here (these paragraphs above will be important for contextualising a point further down this section).
At its core, a great digital customer experience focuses on interactions that satisfy user intent, solve a user’s problem, or help the user to progress along their customer journey. .
This should be prioritised over worrying about the labels given to such a process or focusing too much on the differences between digital and nondigital from a customer’s point of view.
A company’s website may look fantastic on the surface, but when the “Add to basket” button doesn’t work like it should or a page loads too slowly, beauty starts to look a lot like the beast to the user.
It focuses on the user – customer before technology
A level of reverse engineering has to be done to create a great customer experience.
The device a digital experience takes place on should not be what companies put all their energy into. The specific problem the customer needs solving should be the priority.
Once that is analysed in depth and a solution discovered, then the technology that best allows the application of the solution should be brought into the process.
That is to say, great digital customer experiences are driven by a customer-centric outlook, not necessarily a device-driven outlook.
It’s pointless adding a customer experience feature that no one will likely use, or which isn’t really fit for purpose just because the technology of a digital device allows it, or a digital platform accommodates it.
It prioritises the user – customer ahead of sales
This next bit might come across as the antithesis of what companies exist to do, but a great digital customer experience is not sales driven.
I know, I know, but hear me out.
It’s almost unfathomable now to think that both Facebook and Google were not monetised platforms from the get-go.
It’s not far-fetched to say that had they been, they might not be as huge as they are today.
Instead of focusing on raking in profits right away, both companies put all their efforts into providing the best possible digital experiences for their users.
For Facebook, it was ensuring that the process of building a social network and interacting with other members was unparalleled.
For Google, it was making sure it blew the competition out of the water by providing search results that met users’ intent, while ranking websites that adhered to its best practice directives higher than those that didn’t, which in turn provided users with access to the best sites.
In those early years of establishment, Google constantly (and still does) used emerging AI technology to improve the overall digital experience for customers before making a single penny.
This user-first viewpoint is what led to financial success when both platforms were eventually monetised.
Both Google and Facebook are still so customer-centric, the user barely notices the sales aspect of their interactions with them.
Great customer experience places customers above all else because doing so leads to sales as well as customer retention , loyalty and brand advocacy.
I can’t recall the entrepreneur who said something like the following, but the statement always stood out to me because it’s applicable to many aspects of life: “If you focus on being the best at what you do, be it a sport, a field of study, or providing solutions to customers, the money will eventually come. People know greatness when they see it (or experience it) and they will reward you for it.”
It was with this outlook that SMACK worked on improving one of our clients websites. Although increasing sales was the eventual goal, we made sure we created a digital experience that still put the customer’s needs first.
It integrates digital and nondigital – customer
service over everything
As crucial as digital has become to the customer experience, the non-digital customer experience or traditional customer service are not to be overlooked.
What a great digital customer experience does is complement these traditional interactions that are still a part of the wider customer journey, especially for brick-and-mortar businesses.
Remember when I said the first couple of paragraphs in this section will help contextualise a point to come further down?
Well, here is that point: Because customers themselves don’t view their digital interactions with companies as “digital experiences,” they don’t really consciously separate interactions into digital and non-digital.
That is to say, both digital and non-digital are viewed as one and the same in the overall experience a customer/user/consumer has with a company.
Therefore, a holistic approach must be taken to provide a great digital customer experience.
Isolating the digital customer experience strategy from the traditional customer experience will do nothing but lead to unsatisfactory digital interactions.
In fact, what has made some companies thrive online is their ability to recapture or replicate familiar non-digital experiences on digital platforms.
At SMACK, when we develop a digital customer solution for a client – no matter how specific or small the solution might be in the larger campaign they may have going on – our approach is to look at all aspects, both online and offline, of how customers interact with the client.
It allows us to have a greater understanding of what the customer expects and the overall relationship they have with the company.
This then allows us to create digital solutions that are streamlined and come across as intuitive, new yet familiar to the customer. Integrating digital and nondigital experiences leads to a great digital customer experience.
Now let’s take a look at two detailed examples of great digital customer experiences.
Examples of digital customer experiences
McDonald’s
It goes without saying that COVID-19 had a major impact on how brands approach the customer experience.
We were living in a time where it felt like we constantly had one foot in the door and the other outside and we weren’t sure which one to lift to cross which line because not even the government knew the best way to protect people from the virus without citizens feeling completely isolated and the economy hitting rock bottom.
For businesses operating in the food services industry, it was crucial that they help consumers navigate through this confusion, since travel and staff contact with food products was a part of their operation.
Restaurants and take-away businesses were looking to provide digital customer experiences that streamlined the process for customers to get information on how they could still have access to their services safely.
That’s exactly what McDonald’s did.
It started with television, radio and billboard adverts (and signs posted around its branches) informing customers they could still get McDonald’s foods by going to the company’s website.
Aside from being simple but beautifully designed, the site had excellent navigation and presentation.
Right from the top of the homepage, it offered COVID-19 information as it related to the company (branches still open, opening hours, precautions taken to ensure products were not contaminated with the virus etc).
A little further down there was a link to the brand’s app where users could place orders (a digital experience similar to the big touchscreen tablets they have in-branch, including the option of removing unwanted ingredients), choose how they’d like to collect (Drive Thru or in-restaurant), and the option to save their favourite meals for future orders.
There was also information on McDelivery, a partnership with Just Eat and Uber Eats that allowed users to order via those digital platforms.
Clicking on the McDelivery link took you to a page with simple, clear instructions on how to use this option for delivery.
If you chose to go in-person to order food in a branch that was open, there was a friendly staff member at the entrance who: limited the number of customers in the restaurant at any one time; ensured people were wearing masks; offered hand sanitiser and directed customers to which tablet was available for them to use to place an order.
Some branches made customers register their details through a McDonald’s portal so that NHS Test and Trace was possible.
This could be done on the customer’s own digital device or using a tablet provided by the branch.
This digital customer experience example is brilliant because it incorporated all facets of customer experience: physical and non-physical; digital and non-digital.
The brand communicated with customers through traditional means (print, radio and television) as well as on digital platforms.
Each interaction was a reflection of another (in-store tablet ordering and app ordering; practicing in the physical what was preached virtually online about safety).
Each experience was a link in a chain that led to providing an all-round great customer experience, which is what the digital customer experience is all about.
Cineworld
As a lover of film, I take delight in almost every aspect of visiting a movie theatre (almost because there’s always that one person who – never mind not having their phone on silent – answers their phone like Dom Joly in the quietest parts of Silence or A Quiet Place or Silence of the Lambs).
From watching or reading reviews to booking tickets and choosing my favourite seat to watching trailers before the main feature, I love it all.
Now, having a beautiful website design means nothing if it doesn’t satisfy user intent, and Cineworld’s website isn’t the greatest in the world (SMACK would love to help them improve this and their digital customer experience like we did for this client).
But in terms of providing a great customer experience as part of the whole package, it’s not too wide off the mark.
I usually purchase movie vouchers on a third-party digital platform where I’m given a code to use. From that platform I can follow a link to Cineworld’s site where I can view trailers for the latest films, read previews for those coming out soon, access a film blog and more.
The branch I usually attend offers up to six different screen types and movie-watching experiences and these are explained and showcased via entertaining videos and text.
On the occasions where I don’t book tickets for a showing right away, I sometimes search Google using the title of a movie I’m considering.
Because Cineworld has enabled certain digital technology features on the back end of its website and has worked on its SEO (search engine optimisation), these searches usually bring up results displayed right there on Google that include the showing times, rating, screening options and ticket prices extracted from Cineworld’s site. I can also begin my booking process from this platform.
The actual booking process itself is pretty straightforward. Choosing my preferred screen-type, showing time and seat, and applying my voucher code to the basket is a smooth process.
I’ve had times when I’ve had to cancel bookings for whatever reason.
This can be done on a digital device or over the phone. Having used both options, I can honestly say my experiences have been very positive, with the great customer service of the phone reps edging it.
When I do eventually end up going to a showing, I can either collect my ticket at a counter the old school way or by scanning a barcode at one of the branch’s digital touchscreen displays or – for special screens like IMAX – I can get my barcode scanned at the screen’s entrance and go right in.
Again, this digital customer experience example highlights how digital and nondigital should work as an ecosystem that provides a great, rounded experience for customers in their interactions with a brand.
Although it takes me much longer to reach the nearest branch, my positive online and offline interactions with Cineworld are why it’s my go-to cinema chain even though I have an Odeon just around the corner.
SMACK has helped clients across various industries provide wonderful digital customer experiences that lead to measurable results. Contact our creative digital agency today to discover how we can do the same for your brand.