Brought on by sharply heightened customer expectations and the rapid growth of digital channels and touchpoints, digital customer experience (CX) is exponentially shaping the strategy of many businesses today. According to Walker Information, ‘by 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator’. This means that to remain competitive both now and in the future, businesses (if they haven’t already) need to start laying down a foundation for this change.
Whether you’re just getting started with your ‘foundation’ or already have a digital customer experience programme in place (but you’re looking to boost your efforts), we’ve got a great set of resources that will help you move forward.
In this blog, we will take a look at some of the most valuable and informative resources out there including beginner’s guides, reports and white papers. These materials touch on different elements within the digital customer experience space including (among others), Voice of the Customer, the digital transformation, customer journey mapping, and the mobile customer experience.
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1. A Beginner’s Guide to Digital Experience
Are you completely new to the world of digital experience and customer engagement? Then its probably best if you ease your way into things. Start by checking out CMSWire’s Beginner’s Guide. This guide identifies all of the different aspects of digital experience, including how it ‘meshes’ with customer experience. It also identifies the shift from focusing solely on web content to a more intuitive and customer-specific approach.
Read the Beginner’s Guide to Digital Experience here.
2. Three-step Guide to Improving Digital Customer Experience
An alternative resource for beginners, this three step guide takes a close look at segmentation strategies, the identification of different digital touchpoints within the customer journey and of course, how your customers experience or perceive each of these touchpoints. What’s great about this guide is that eConsultancy includes case studies to give you a better idea of companies approach these different steps.
Read the Three-step Guide to Improving Digital Customer Experience here.
3. Report: Six Stages of Digital Transformation
Another important aspect to be aware of in terms of achieving a good digital experience is the digital transformation movement. This is a movement that affects many businesses as it does not only involve advanced technology, but also advanced thinking and planning.
Altimeter’s report on the Six Stages of Digital Transformation is based on years of interviewing professionals who ‘drive digital transformation’. Using these interviews, they’ve come up with six stages that ‘form a strong foundation for change’. In identifying these stages, they also include common milestones as well as best practices.
Download the Six Stages of Digital Transformation Report here.
4. Customer Journey Mapping Guide
Now we all know that there is no real ‘vanilla version’ of the customer journey that can be used across industries much less among customers, but this guide by Conduit does a great job of explaining the different phases in an objective manner. It also outlines the importance of identifying personas and setting up a good contact strategy as well as which ‘pitfalls’ businesses should avoid.
Download the Complete Guide to Customer Journey Mapping here.
5. White paper: Enabling Voice of the Customer Excellence
The Voice of the Customer (VoC) is another critical element in providing a good digital customer experience, because without their input, how will you ever know what they think about your product, service or website for that matter?
In this white paper, Nunwood starts out by outlining the importance of having a VoC programme in place as well as four key questions many businesses have about these programmes. There are also several great tips on how to collect VoC data in practice.
Download the white paper: Enabling Voice of the Customer Excellence here.
6. White paper: The Future of Online Customer Feedback
And while we’re on the topic of VoC, here’s another interesting white paper that is more focused on online customer feedback. In this white paper, Mopinion illustrates the four different phases of customer feedback: from basic (businesses just starting out) to strategic (businesses who already monitor and analyse online feedback. It also has many great tips on how to collect, analyse and act on feedback, using various strategies.
Download the white paper: The Future of Online Customer Feedback here.
7. E-Book: The Ultimate Guide to Digital Experience Marketing
This e-book by Catchpoint takes things one step further, looking at the impact of digital experiences (including the cost of poor mobile performance, not meeting customer expectations, etc). It also outlines the top Digital Experience Marketing (DEM) strategies used to optimise digital interactions.
Download the Ultimate Guide to Digital Experience Marketing here.
8. Benchmark Study: Digital Customer Experience
Using benchmark surveys to understand where your competitors are in terms of digital customer experience can also be a useful resource. On an annual basis, Mopinion releases a Digital Customer Experience (CX) Benchmark Study, which analyses how companies are doing in terms of their efforts to improve the digital customer experience. Breaking the process down into three different stages: Measure, Manage and Master, businesses can identify where they stand among their competitors in terms of digital CX.
Download the Digital Customer Experience Benchmark here.
9. How to Improve Your Digital Customer Experience: 4 Optimization Tips
Under a time crunch? Here’s a quick read by Growth Freaks with some good tips on how to optimise digital customer experience. It not only stresses the importance of balancing multiple digital touchpoints and bringing these together, but it also talks about how you can use customer feedback to optimise the digital experience.
Read the article, ‘How to Improve Your Digital Customer Experience: 4 Optimisation Tips’ here.
10. White paper: Digital Customer Experience for Today’s Mobile Consumer
Don’t forget about one of the most up-and-coming ways in which companies are now interacting with their customers: mobile. That’s right, the number of mobile consumers out there is on the rise, which means companies are shifting more of their focus on the digital experience towards mobile apps and mobile responsive websites.
This white paper by Mitel describes four key elements needed for a strong digital customer experience strategy (for mobile) as well as seven steps for creating a successful digital customer experience.
Download the white paper: Digital Customer Experience for Today’s Mobile Consumer here.
Did you find this round-up useful?
We hope you enjoyed our list of digital customer experience resources – if you did – we’d be really happy if you shared it. Also, feel free to let us know (in the comments section) if there are any other nice guides or white papers that we’re missing!
