What is digital customer experience (DCX)?
The best digital customer experiences stir up powerful emotions and form relationships that last.
4 minute read
What is digital customer experience?
Digital customer experience (DCX) is the impression customers form of your brand through every digital interaction, from your website and mobile app to email, ecommerce, search, and customer portals. Each interaction shapes how customers see your brand and whether they choose to keep engaging.
For enterprise brands, delivering a great digital customer experience gets harder as your business grows. More websites, brands, regions, languages, and customer needs create more experiences to manage. A strong DCX strategy helps you connect those experiences around the customer, using content, data, and technology to make every interaction more relevant and useful. From the shopping cart to the ‘contact us’ form, every customer interaction adds up to an overall feeling about your brand. What story do you want these moments to tell? What story do you want those who experience them to share?
What makes a great digital customer experience?
A great digital customer experience makes it easy for customers to get what they need from your brand. While every customer journey is different, the best digital experiences have a few things in common.
Start with the customer
Good experiences begin with understanding what your customers came to do. Where are they trying to go? What questions do they have? Where are they getting stuck? Those needs should shape the journey you create, from the first interaction through conversion and beyond.
Make content useful
Content powers every digital experience. Give customers information that helps them make decisions and take the next step, wherever they encounter your brand. As their needs change, your content should be able to change with them.
Make it personal
Customers give you signals about what they need through the way they interact with your brand. Put that insight to work. Personalization can help you serve more relevant content and experiences based on where someone is in their journey, what they have shown interest in, and what they may need next.
Keep learning
A digital customer experience is never finished. Pay attention to what customers do, where they struggle, and what helps them move forward. Test what works, learn from the results, and use those insights to make the next experience better.
Start with the customer
Good experiences begin with understanding what your customers came to do. Where are they trying to go? What questions do they have? Where are they getting stuck? Those needs should shape the journey you create, from the first interaction through conversion and beyond.
Make content useful
Content powers every digital experience. Give customers information that helps them make decisions and take the next step, wherever they encounter your brand. As their needs change, your content should be able to change with them.
Make it personal
Customers give you signals about what they need through the way they interact with your brand. Put that insight to work. Personalization can help you serve more relevant content and experiences based on where someone is in their journey, what they have shown interest in, and what they may need next.
Keep learning
A digital customer experience is never finished. Pay attention to what customers do, where they struggle, and what helps them move forward. Test what works, learn from the results, and use those insights to make the next experience better.
Why digital customer experience matters for enterprise brands
Customers expect more from every digital interaction. They want to find what they need quickly, get relevant information, and move easily from one interaction to the next. When that happens, the experience feels simple. When it doesn't, the gaps show. For larger organizations, there are more of those gaps to manage. You may have multiple websites, brands, markets, languages, and channels, often supported by different teams and technologies. A customer doesn't see any of that. They see one brand and expect the experience to feel connected. Consider these statistics:
67% of customers will pay more for a great experience.
Brands that provide a high degree of personalization gain customer loyalty, which is 1.5 times higher than brands that struggle with personalization.
That's why digital customer experience matters. Each interaction is a chance to make it easier for someone to choose your brand, buy from you, get help, or come back. Understanding those interactions and improving them over time can help you build stronger customer relationships and better business results.
Digital experience vs. digital customer experience vs. customer experience
These terms are easy to confuse because they all describe how people interact with your brand. The difference comes down to what part of the experience you're looking at.
A digital experience happens through a digital touchpoint, such as visiting a product page, using an app, searching for support, or making a purchase online.
Digital customer experience looks at how those digital interactions come together across the customer journey. Each one contributes to the impression a customer forms of your brand over time.
Customer experience goes wider, covering every interaction with your brand. That includes digital experiences alongside conversations with sales, visits to a store, calls with customer service, and other offline interactions.
Understanding the difference helps you see the experience from the customer's point of view. A website can be easy to use while the wider journey still feels disjointed. Someone might find the right product, for example, then struggle to get help or continue their journey somewhere else.
How to manage digital customer experience at scale
As the number of digital experiences you manage grows, so does the work behind them. Content needs to reach more places. Teams need to work from the same information. Customer data needs to be useful across the journey. And each new site, market, or channel adds another experience to manage.
A few practices can help you keep that complexity under control.
Build content to go further
Creating content separately for every site and channel quickly becomes difficult to manage. Give teams a way to create, reuse, adapt, and deliver content wherever customers need it. This makes it easier to move faster while keeping the experience true to your brand.
Bring customer data into the experience
Customer interactions tell you what people are interested in and what they may need next. Make that information available when and where you can act on it, so teams can create experiences based on a clearer understanding of the customer.
Give teams room to move
The people closest to a market or customer often know what will work best. Give teams the tools and flexibility to respond to those needs while maintaining the standards your brand depends on.
Connect the technology behind the journey
Your customers move across channels, and the technology supporting those experiences needs to keep up. Connecting content, data, commerce, search, and other services makes it easier to build experiences that work together and evolve as your needs change.
How does a DXP help deliver better digital customer experiences?
A digital experience platform (DXP) brings together the tools you use to create, manage, deliver, and improve digital experiences. It connects content, customer data, and other systems so teams can understand what customers need and put that insight to work across the journey. For brands managing many websites, brands, regions, or languages, a DXP also makes it easier to work at scale. Teams can create and reuse content, adapt it for different markets, and manage experiences from one place while giving local teams the flexibility to meet their customers' needs. A DXP can connect with the technology you already use, including commerce, search, customer data, and other business systems. Instead of rebuilding the experience around each new tool or channel, you can bring the pieces together in a way that works for your business and change them as your needs evolve. AI is expanding what DXPs can do. It can help teams find and create content, understand customer needs, personalize experiences, and spot opportunities to improve. For brands managing a growing number of experiences, that can mean less time spent on repetitive work and more time creating experiences that move customers forward.Business benefits of a great digital customer experience
When customers can find what they need and move easily through their journey, everyone benefits. Customers get a better experience, while your business has more opportunities to build relationships, increase conversions, and work more efficiently.
More engagement and conversions
Useful experiences help customers take the next step. That might mean exploring another product, signing up, getting in touch, or making a purchase.
Stronger customer relationships
When you understand what customers need and make it easier for them to get it, they're more likely to come back. Co-operators saw returning visitors increase by more than 13% after improving its content, personalization, and navigation.
Lower costs and more efficient teams
A better digital customer experience can make things easier for the teams behind it too. Customers can find answers and complete more tasks online, while teams can spend less time on repetitive work. L'Oréal saved 120,000 hours of web-mastering as it found new ways to manage and optimize content across hundreds of websites.
Digital customer experience examples
There's no single formula for a great digital customer experience. What matters is understanding where you can make the journey more useful for your customers. Here are a few ways brands are putting that into practice.
- NHP serves a wide range of customers with different needs. By using online behavior to better understand what customers are interested in, NHP can tailor content and run targeted campaigns for different audiences. New tools also help customers find products, check availability, and track made-to-order items.
- United Airlines uses digital signage to give travelers timely information at the airport, from departure and standby information to boarding support. Personalized and translated content helps more passengers get the information they need, while increased self-service can make delays and cancellations easier to navigate.
- Thule delivers digital experiences across 80 markets and 22 languages, with direct-to-consumer ecommerce available in 11 markets. Its approach helps the company create consistent experiences across touchpoints while tailoring content to where customers are in their journey.
- The Tile Shop: Choosing tile often starts online, even when customers want to see and touch the product before they buy. The Tile Shop lets customers explore thousands of designs online before visiting one of its stores, bringing its digital and in-store experiences closer together.
How to measure and improve digital customer experience
Start with what you want customers to accomplish. Then look at what happens along the way. Where do people spend time? What are they searching for? Where do they move forward, leave, or get stuck? Pair what you see in the data with customer feedback to understand where the experience could be better.Choose measures that match what you're trying to improve. Conversion rates can show whether customers are completing important actions. Engagement and return visits can help you understand whether they're finding value in the experience. Search data can also reveal what customers need and where your content may be falling short. Use those insights to decide what to change. Make content easier to find, remove an unnecessary step, test a different approach, or make an experience more relevant to the customer. Measure the result, learn from it, and use what you learn to guide the next improvement.
The goal isn't to optimize every interaction at once. Focus on the moments that matter most to your customers and your business, then build from there.
Start improving your digital customer experience
Great digital customer experiences are built around what customers need. Start by finding the places where you can make their experience easier or more useful. Use what you learn to improve your content, personalize the experience, and remove friction from the journey. You don't need to change everything at once. Start with a clear customer need, learn what works, and build from there.
Ready to go further?
Explore how a DXP can help you manage and improve digital experiences at scale.