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gitThi e The digitd laal eeencxpi erxperiencee aplplakooybybookA 3-phase approach to delivering digital experiences that drive business impact

© 2020 Qualtrics LLC

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Introduction IT'S TIME DIGITAL CX BECAME A TOP BUSINESS PRIORITY

In recent months, global pandemic and economic stress have forced every business to undergo a rapid and forced organizational transformation. Digital commerce, content, account management, self-service and customer experience are being tested against rising consumer expectations. If brands weren't focused on digital before, they must make it a top priority today to minimize business disruption.

The brands that will survive and thrive in this new era will be those who have invested in digital transformation and more importantly, understand digital experience management.

Given the significant increase in the number of customers who are interacting with

companies through digital channels, companies can no longer afford to deliver substandard

digital interactions. The result of a poor digital experience will directly impact the bottom line. Digital has become the backbone of customer loyalty. So if you want to remain competitive,

you need to be thoughtful and deliberate about how you’re designing and managing

customer experiences through these channels.

In this guide, we’ll provide the 3 key ingredients to a world-class digital experience to help

you design and deliver experiences that drive customer spend, satisfaction, and loyalty during this unprecedented time.

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What’s in this guide?

The key ingredients to digital experience

It’s time digital got emotional

A 3-phased approach to digital experience

Track & Diagnose

Optimize through Journey deep dives

Activate & Transform

Assess your digital XM program

The key ingredients of digital experience

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While the shift to digital does offer numerous benefits to organizations – reduced

contact care costs, streamlined processes, etc. – it also presents them with a unique

customer experience challenge. Customers judge their experiences with a company

along 3 dimensions:

+ success were they able to achieve their goals?

+ effort how easy or difficult was it to achieve those goals?

+ emotion — how did the interaction make them feel?

Although all 3 of these dimensions are important, it’s been shown that the emotional

component has the biggest impact on customer loyalty behaviors, including their likelihood

to rebuy from, recommend, or trust the company (XM Institute Report, ROI of CX, 2018).

The key ingredients of digital experience

of people who gave a high score for ‘emotion’ said they were more likely to purchase more from that company.92%

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The outsized impact of emotions on customer experience is particularly problematic in

digital. First, digital channels are inherently cold. People are naturally social, and interacting

with other people is more emotionally stimulating than interacting with a digital interface

(XM Institute, Humanizing Digital Interactions).

Second, most organizations design digital experiences to communicate information as

quickly and efficiently as possible, appealing to customers’ rational thinking rather than to

their emotions. While delivering “effortless” experiences can be good to an extent, as digital

channels increasingly become the main or primary method by which customers interact with

an organization, overemphasizing ‘effortlessness’ is likely to leave customers without any

emotional attachments to the company.

It’s time digital got emotional

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While customer loyalty increasingly depends on your ability to design emotionally

engaging digital interactions, most organizations today still deliver subpar experiences

through these channels.

So how can you start improving your digital experiences? And how can you get the most

out of your digital transformation efforts? The best place to begin is by building and honing

your Experience Management capabilities.

Strengthening these capabilities will help you to continually collect and analyze customer

feedback and behavioral signals through digital channels, share those insights with the

appropriate people across the business, and then take meaningful action to improve the

experience both in digital, and the overall brand experience.

Luckily, the front end of this cycle – the ability to continuously collect and analyze feedback

and behavioral signals – is an inherent part of a digital interaction. Not only do digital

channels automatically generate operational data (O-data) about what customers are

doing, they also provide a platform that’s more conducive to asking customers about their

perceptions, motivations, feelings, and attitudes about their experience — a vital source of

experience data (X-data).

It’s time digital got emotional

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To optimize the digital experience, you need to be able to hear the voice of your customers

in a consistent and meaningful way, asking questions like:

+ Why is the person behaving this way?

+ What was the purpose of their visit to the site? Were they successful?

+ How easy (or difficult) was it for the customer to complete his/her task?

+ How satisfied was the customer?

+ How likely is the customer to return to the site?

+ Did the onsite experience create a loyal customer?

Bringing the O-data generated through background analytics together with the X-data

generated from onsite feedback helps to produce richer, more actionable insights, which

will ultimately enable you to design more emotionally engaging digital experiences.

A 3-phased approach to digital experience

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While many organizations look at the digital experience as a singular event, it usually

consists of multiple journeys, which combine to form an overall experience for a customer.

So understanding the digital experience means bringing together all the different digital

interactions your customers have in order to understand the holistic experience, making

real-time adjustments to deliver the kinds of experiences customers will want to return to

time and again.

Setting up a world-class digital experience program to do that is a 3-phased approach:

1 Track & Diagnose2 Optimize through Journey deep dives3 Activate & Transform

A 3-phased approach to digital experience

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Digital maturity model Diagnostic data from the on-going evaluation program inform what journeys need deep dives.

Digital maturity model Diagnostic data from the on-going evaluation program inform what journeys need deep dives.

Track & Diagnose01 02 03

+ System of action (alerts & smart routing)

+ System insight (fueled by IQ and dashboard visualizations)

+ System of action (alerts & smart routing)

+ System insight (fueled by IQ and dashboard visualizations)

+ System of action (alerts & smart routing)

+ System insight (fueled by IQ and dashboard visualizations)

+ Overall site/app experience

+ Persistent feedback

+ Contextual/ embedded data

+ Cart/buy/book

+ Support/get help

+ Manage account/ pay bill

+ Enjoy/learn

+ Connect with others/company

+ Provide content/feedback

+ Track & Diagnose

+ Contextual/ embedded data

+ Closed loop follow-up

+ Segmentation + personalization (XM directory)

+ O-data integrations

+ Journey deep dive

+ Track & Diagnose

+ Contextual/ embedded data

Journey deep dives

Activate & Transform

Phase 1: Track & Diagnose

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The first step to improving your digital experiences is to focus on building a ‘System of Insight’

that continuously collects and analyzes feedback and behavioral signals from visitors.

It’s best to start at the end, and reverse-engineer your system: start by thinking through your

organization’s goals and how you want to visualize the data, then ask the questions that will get

you there. That way, you can understand if the digital experience is enabling or preventing goal

attainment for your users.

You’ll also want to consider what metrics will move the needle within your organization and

how you’ll want to visualize this information. First, consider how you should visualize your

data with an emphasis on verbatim analysis of unstructured data and powerful predictions

about future behaviors.

And in order to create a ‘System of Action’, it’s essential to map out, at least at a high level, what

information should reside where — for example, you might have everything in your customer

experience platform, but may also want to pipe data into other tools used by your digital team

to ensure the right insights get to the right person in the organization.

At Qualtrics, we integrate with platforms such as SAP, Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics,

JIRA, Slack and more, to ensure that every person in the organization can incorporate CX into

their existing workflows. All of this feeds into key actions and alerts that facilitate a strong

closed-loop process.

Phase 1: Track & Diagnose

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The listening posts established during this phase set the baseline for all future Digital

Experience projects on your website or app. To better understand what needs to be

improved, you first need to understand the overall site or app experience.

In your interaction with customers, there are plenty of key insights to glean.

Several of these include:

+ Primary purpose of visit

+ Task completion

+ Ease of use

+ CSAT

+ Likelihood to return

+ Key drivers (Navigation, content effectiveness, speed, visual appeal)

The best way to understand what these metrics and key drivers are is to collect information

on a visitor’s overall experience, which you can do by deploying an active feedback request

(also known as an intercept) coupled with an “always on” persistent feedback channel that

is more passive in nature.

EXPERT TIP

Data coming in through your persistent feedback is likely to skew negative as people are going out of their way to tell you something, and it’s usually that something is wrong. So avoid questions around CSAT or Ease of Use here, keeping those questions to your active feedback requests.

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Persistent feedback offers a way for visitors to vent their frustrations, like if they’re

experiencing issues on the site or looking to engage with support. Ideally your persistent

feedback will include questions to distinguish the nature of the feedback being offered as

well as an open-ended text field for additional information sharing and/or clarification —

this helps you to uncover more meaningful analysis through text analytics to understand

trending topics and sentiment.

Depending on your closed-loop strategy, you may also include an option for

customers to request a follow-up and provide a form asking for contact information

if and when appropriate.

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COMBINE YOUR FEEDBACK WITH O-DATA

The X-Data you gather on your overall site/app experience is a perfect place to start — and

when you combine it with O-Data from your web analytics and/or session replay data to get

a more detailed understanding of their issue, it’s even more powerful.

While establishing these foundational listening posts, you should also be sure to leverage

contextual and embedded data wherever possible. Here’s a list to consider as you’re

getting started:

It can also be helpful to use this request for feedback to determine who is on

your digital property.

Demographic and customer information may reveal key trends between customer

segments. That said, many of your operational metrics can come into play here - you never

want to ask the customer for information that you already have access to.

+ Page views

+ Search terms

+ Basket/cart size

+ New/repeat visitor

+ Page URL

+ Cart add event

+ Cart remove

+ Cart views

+ Page name

+ Visitor Demographic data

+ Visitor ID

+ Site Referrer

+ Access Type (iOS, Android,

Desktop, etc.)

+ Time Spent (Focused) on

Site

+ Visitor specific tagging e.g.

high value visitor

Phase 2: Optimize through Journey deep dives

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Once you have a good understanding of the overall site or app experience, you need to build

on it with a deeper understanding of the fundamental journeys or common routes that

people take to complete tasks on your digital properties.

These key journeys should already be well known by way of your operational metrics;

however, the “visitor intent” or “primary purpose” question you asked in your overall site/

app experience touchpoint should confirm that list.

If there are question marks at all, you can always ask an open-ended question or give

visitors the opportunity to leave an “other” intention.

Each unique site requires some customization in regard to journey specific research, but

we have found the following to be fairly common:

+ Abandonment (Cart/Buy/Book)

+ Manage account

+ Pay bill

+ Get Support/Get Help

+ Learn or Browse

+ Provide feedback

Phase 2: Optimize through Journey deep dives

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To begin a deep dive into each journey, we recommend selecting one journey to focus on

alongside your Overall Site Experience and Persistent Feedback listening posts (See Track

& Diagnose). Diving deep into a specific journey provides actionable data, which can also

help demonstrate ROI to make the case for further investment in a digital CX initiative.

One example we can all relate to is an abandonment scenario. Perhaps someone starts with

a search, compares some different products, adds an item to the cart, starts the check-

out process, and then — for some unknown reason — abandons the site. It’s important to

think through the exact user flow and the associated emotions during each stage before

deploying a request for feedback about why the cart was abandoned. Other common

Journey deep dives include usability testing, post-transactions, and content effectiveness.

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Journey-focused feedback requests are typically active in nature, they should be short

and succinct, ideally 3-4 questions, and they should be very relevant to the experience the

visitor just had.

There are many templates that you can use to get started with Journey deep dives;

however, you may need to customize the templates to fit each unique journey within your

brand’s digital experience.

You should continue to keep the overall site/app experience touchpoint running alongside

the “always on” persistent feedback tab from the “Track & Diagnose” phase so as to

continue collecting foundational (and benchmarkable) metrics.

Phase 3: Activate & Transform

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The third, and final phase of our digital maturity model is around activating and

transforming the organization. It’s here that the listening posts, dashboards, contextual

embedded data, and smart-routing capabilities established in the earlier phases should

inform decision-making processes across the organization.

Once you have made it to this phase, digital CX should be a living, breathing part

of your business.

CLOSING THE LOOP IN DIGITAL

The most important element of an effective CX program is to close the loop and fix the

problem your customer is facing.

The best closed-loop programs include a range of solutions such as:

+ Smart routing, API integrations (Slack, Jira, etc.)

+ Alerts and triggers

+ Real-time dashboards

+ Ticket management solution

Phase 3: Activate & Transform

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In a digital setting, closing the loop happens on a macro- and micro-level.

On the macro level, that means using customer feedback to fix problematic journeys

through strategic change for the company or business. This might include identifying

systemic issues (consistent negative feedback across a large number of visitors) that

require broader initiative planning to properly address.

On the micro-level, closing the loop typically means personally reaching out in some

capacity to rectify a problem presented by an individual customer.

In some B2B settings, closing the loop with each customer is possible, but for B2C,

closing the loop on poor experiences through the digital channel is incredibly daunting,

if not impossible.

It’s likely that you are already getting feedback through your always-on, persistent feedback

channel, most likely more than you know what to do with. Few teams have the resources

to take on a real-time response to this volume of negative feedback, so you need to be

able to prioritize.

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WHEN, WHO + HOW

When it comes to prioritization, it’s worth considering the following data points:

+ average cart value

+ whether or not they are a repeat visitor

+ total spend per year

+ subscription status

First you should ask the following set of questions in order to define categories and

determine a specific list of priority customers.

+ Which customers should receive a follow-up?

+ Who should conduct the follow-up?

+ When should the follow-up happen?

+ How should the follow-up be handled?

+ What happens after the follow-up?

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And finally, here are some best practices to keep in mind regarding

closed-loop management:

+ Ensure those who are responsible for closing the loop are empowered to

delight the customer

+ Establish rules to prioritize high-value versus low-value visitors and

triage tickets appropriately

+ Use technology to improve experiences for low-value customers

+ Macro fixes will have the biggest impact. Focus here first, then follow through

on the micro level

+ Use the data to drive change, don’t just monitor metrics

+ Engage senior leadership

+ Spend the time to identify root cause issues

It’s important to remember that customer feedback is a means to an end, closing the loop

allows you to enable a system of insight and action that will create a loyal and committed

customer base.

Assess your digital XM program

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How does your digital experience program stack up?Take the XM Institute’s free 20-question Digital Competency and Maturity Assessment to assess your program and get your free, expert guidance on how to improve your digital XM program.

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