The move to interacting with your customers through digital touchpoints has been picking up pace for some time. It took off during the pandemic when the share of digital customer interactions grew from 20% in 2017 to 60% in 2020, and 65% in North America. With this significant change, your company should ask itself if the digital experience (DX) you offer your customers is a competitive advantage or a disadvantage. This is where digital experience management (DXM or DEM) comes into play. DXM is a process that companies use to measure and then optimize how customers and employees interact with a company’s digital tools.
Here’s how to get started on your DXM journey.
What Is Digital Experience Management?
An excellent place to start when diving deep into DXM is to start with a good definition of digital experience. DX is the user journey of customers and employees when they interact across your digital channels.
These include:
- Web apps
- Websites
- Mobile apps
- SaaS products you offer or use
- Social media
- Chatbots
- Automated phone menus
- Customer support platforms
- Intranets
- E-commerce platforms
The digital experience is an important and growing part of the overall customer experience and employee experience.
Digital experience management, as the name implies, is the process of monitoring, managing, and improving the user experience within your digital assets.
Monitoring
Digital experience management starts with gathering metrics on each digital touchpoint through digital experience monitoring. This includes end-user data on:
- Who they are
- What content they interacted with
- What actions they took
- If they were satisfied
- If their interaction converted into a transaction
Gathering the employee and customer data is only the starting point. Under DXM, the data you gather must be converted into a useful form that gives actionable insights to the decision-makers in your company. That includes linking functionality changes to changes in user behavior, and capturing the customer journey in a way that can be understood by all your stakeholders, including marketing, sales, IT, and your software development team.
Managing
A well-done digital experience management process also includes workflows and tools your team can use to manage the digital customer experience. This includes your asset management strategy, including content management systems (CMS). It also involves your digital marketing automation platforms and creating and maintaining connections to the application programming interfaces (APIs) in all of your software tools.
One area of managing the digital experience that is often overlooked is input to your software development process and development operations team. Capturing data that shows some of your customers’ struggle with your mobile app is not useful or actionable if your processes don’t feed that information to the development team.
Many companies offer digital experience platforms to help with this part of the process, or you can develop your own custom application to tie everything together.
Improving
The most significant advantage of having a DXM process in place is using the actionable information you gather and the efficiency of your DX platform to provide a positive, consistent, and ever-improving experience for the digital journey of your customers and employees.
What Makes a Good Digital Experience?
Another great way to improve employee and customer engagement across their digital journey is to look at the components of an excellent digital experience. Every industry is different, and user behavior and expectations will vary significantly across your digital landscape.
Still, experience has shown us that some key aspects show up again and again in outstanding experience strategies such as:
- Consistency: Users expect consistent messaging and user experience whenever they interact with your brand.
- Seamless experience: Every interaction must seem effortless to the user, with an intuitive user interface that doesn’t interfere with what the user is trying to achieve.
- Fast response: Performance issues resulting in long load times can frustrate users in ways that can give a negative impression of your brand. Some users may simply give up and try someone else.
- Personalization: Over time, users have come to expect personalized experiences that use past activities to make their interactions more effective and to offer them discounts or opportunities that are unique to them. Loyalty apps are a great example of personalization that can drive repeat business through a user’s digital experience.
- Perceived value: It is important to know customer needs and ensure that the content users consume and activities they conduct deliver value.
- Omnichannel interaction: Users now expect to interact with a company using multiple channels. Your digital experience must include systems that meet users where they want to interact.
- Robust backends: All of the positive aspects of a good digital experience require a robust and well-designed backend that is easy to maintain and grow.
Why Is Digital Experience Management Important?
Creating a compelling digital experience requires a comprehensive approach to digital experience management. Even if your existing solutions are close to your goals, needs and expectations will change. A DXM strategy can increase the impact of your digital assets and deliver significant business benefits.
When DSCM is done correctly, your business can expect:
- Increased customer loyalty: You can use the data, often in real-time, from your DXM system to know what customers find valuable individually and across your customer types. This builds loyalty, especially when that data is used to create a personalized experience.
- Stronger customer relationships through improved customer satisfaction: A comprehensive DXM system can deliver the omnichannel experience that customers are looking for with consistent access across digital touchpoints.
- Stronger conversion rates: If your goal is to convert interest into actions, including sales, a managed digital experience can put customers on a path that leads them from information gathering to transactions.
- Improved operational efficiency: Everyone in your organization involved in gathering information, creating content, and interacting with customers through your digital tools will be able to do their jobs with less effort and more impact when a DXM strategy is in place — automating key processes, delivering actionable insights, and giving them the tools they need to streamline operations.
Suggestions for a Successful DXM Implementation
Every touchpoint in your customer’s digital journey is a piece of software that must be created, maintained, modified, or connected. And the quality of the user experience you offer is a direct result of the quality and consistency of that software. So, your digital experience management strategy must start with software that supports your digital experience goals.
Ending up with the right digital assets doesn’t happen automatically. Based on our experience, we recommend the following:
- Establish a written DXM strategy and share it with all stakeholders, including those responsible for software development, operation, and support.
- Document your customer journey and ensure that your digital touchpoints meet your customers where they want to interact with personalized, value-added experiences.
- Choose a DXM platform and understand all the different ways the platform gathers data from your software, social media, and e-commerce platforms.
- Identify integration issues in your legacy systems and implement an integration strategy.
- Consistently monitor the data your DXM systems produce and iterate as needed to provide better results.
- Partner with a software development team that understands digital experience, will take the time to support your team, and also knows how to craft and connect software.
DXM Starts With the Right Digital Tools and Partners
At Focused, our software development process is ideal for maximizing the digital experience our customers offer. We establish a continuous, focused feedback loop that integrates DXM insights. We understand how important it is to monitor and listen to the end user while also educating and empowering your marketing, software, and support teams.
Whether you are automating workflows, connecting APIs, implementing a new AI-powered chatbot for customer support, or creating custom applications from scratch, our enthusiastic and thoughtful team of experts at Focused is here to help. Our team is unintimidating and unintimidated. And instead of chasing trends, we partner with our clients to solve the toughest software challenges together.
Reach out, and let’s get started on building or improving your digital experience management strategy.
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