Digital experience refers to an interaction between a user and an organization that is made possible because of digital technologies.
Websites, mobile apps, e-commerce sites, social media content, smart devices, and conversational artificial intelligence (AI) all provide a digital experience to the customer, partner, or employee that is interacting with an organization.
Optimizing digital touchpoints has become increasingly urgent as organizations complete digital transformations to gain competitive advantage in a digitized world.
As much of commerce and service happens in the digital realm, there are nearly as many types of digital experiences as there are individual business needs. Some examples of a digital experience are:
A customer browsing an e-commerce website and receiving an email from a digital marketing department reminding them to checkout.
A social media user receiving customer service from a brand online.
An employee interacting with a content management or point-of-sale (POS) system.
A user checking a bank account balance on a mobile app.
A news consumer customizing their delivery preferences on a webpage.
A patient using a telemedicine platform to see a doctor.
A customer receiving support or instructions from a chat interface.
A traveler booking a trip on a vacation-rental platform.
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A customer’s journey can begin and end digitally, so creating a cohesive, contextual digital customer experience that addresses customer needs is more pressing than ever. And the results of an improved customer experience (CX) are tangible: As the consultancy McKinsey has found, satisfied customers tend to spend more and remain loyal to an organization longer. They’ve also reported correlation, across sectors, between satisfied customers and lower costs along with higher levels of employee productivity.1
With an ever-expanding number of digital touchpoints, digital experience management has become a complex task, but one that can help engage new users, differentiate organizations from the competition, and inspire customer loyalty. A good digital experience is generally intuitive, customer-centric, and reduces or eliminates downtime. With the increased functionality of conversational artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbots, it’s also possible to reduce costs and create customized, scalable, and automated digital experiences in natural language.
No matter the particular channel, a superior digital interaction fosters good customer relationships and encourages retention. And, conversely, a poor digital experience or bad functionality can have a negative impact on an organization’s reputation and profitability. This is particularly true in a digital-first world where customers are likely to defect to a competitor or take business elsewhere should their experience with a digital touchpoint leave them unsatisfied.
Digital experiences shouldn’t exist in a vacuum, but rather as an intentional and holistic part of an organization’s overarching strategy. It is important to think of digital experience as a complimentary part of the overall customer experience and user experience (UX). Understanding digital experience allows organizations to be more proactive when it comes to creating streamlined processes that better engage prospective customers, satisfy current users, and enhance employee experiences. With a thoughtful and well-crafted digital experience strategy, organizations and service providers can facilitate a seamless experience that informs and delights users.
A digital experience platform (DXP) is an integrated and cohesive suite of tools designed to enable the composition, management, delivery and optimization of digital experiences across multichannel customer journeys. These tools offer a meaningful way to both speak to users through created content and listen to their needs through collected data. They also assist in digital asset management for complex organizations, ensuring all systems work in harmony.
Digital experience platforms help disseminate content across a variety of digital channels including websites, email, mobile apps, social platforms, e-commerce sites, IoT devices, digital signage, POS systems, chat interfaces, and more.
Beyond simply delivering content for each of these channels, digital experience platforms help enable marketing automation and develop a consistent digital experience, leading users towards a clearly defined outcome. And with the use of conversational AI platforms, it's possible to engage customers with custom automated content, enabling faster response times as well as advanced data collection and analysis.
There are a number of tools that can be used to create digital experiences. These mechanisms manage a variety of digital assets and can help gather metrics to help an organization effectively plan customer journeys.
AI is unleashing a new approach for customer experience (CX) and digital experience strategy, design, and development. Because AI systems can see, talk, hear, and learn from their interactions, teams are entering a new era: Creating AI-powered digital customer experiences that feel like natural human engagement. These tools also create the opportunity for conversational analytics, providing customer journey analysis and continuous performance monitoring.
ContentOps is an organization’s infrastructure. It includes the personnel, processes, and technology that make it possible to produce, deploy, and maintain cohesive content across multiple channels. Well-defined ContentOps strategies integrate with marketing automation and take into account authoring environments, inventory, asset management, project management, scheduling, publishing tools, analytics, reporting and more.
A digital twin is a virtual representation of an object or system that spans its lifecycle. It is updated from real-time data and uses simulation, machine learning and reasoning to help decision-making. Organizations can develop digital twins that replicate entire company environments, offering insights into all touchpoints of an organization. These digital replicas give an organization the potential to simulate, analyze, and optimize customer journeys and employee experiences, thus creating a more cohesive and personalized digital experience.
A customer data platform (CDP) is software that collects and unifies customer data from multiple sources to build a single, coherent, and complete view of each customer that is accessible to other systems. CDPs allow an organization to better understand its users, create complementary marketing strategies, automate processes, and develop personalized customer journeys.
A headless CMS delivers content to various channels using APIs. This allows content creators the tools to create content for websites, social media, digital signage, e-commerce, mobile apps, and smart devices. By managing content from a unified hub, organizations can centralize content creation. They can also track and measure customer engagement across various channels.
IBM iX® is one of the largest digital and design consultancies in the world, leveraging a network of strategists, designers, and developers.
IBM, Red Hat® and Adobe joined forces to further advance experience transformation across the customer journey within hybrid cloud environments.
The IBM® Maximo Application Suite is a set of applications for asset monitoring, management, predictive maintenance and reliability planning.
AI services from IBM can help you drive smarter reinvention of your workflows and technology and accelerate AI integration across your enterprise.
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Footnotes
- The CEO guide to customer experience (link resides outside ibm.com), McKinsey, 17 August 2016