3 Considerations to Improve Your Digital Customer Experience (CX)

If you’ve ever read any published content from the ClientSuccess team before, you know that we take the concept of customer success as an entire company goal very seriously. After all, your customers aren’t the responsibility of one department – they’re the reason your entire company is in business. This being said, customer sentiment and satisfaction are notoriously hard to measure across different departments and touch points in an organization. 

Customer sentiment and satisfaction with the different touch points and engagements with a vendor is called the Customer Experience, aka CX, and it’s one of the main pillars of customer success for any SaaS organization. Because so many companies have multiple customer touchpoints across multiple teams – think CSM check-in calls, chatbot-powered support conversations, marketing requests for case studies, etc. – it can be hard to quantify and improve CX over time. 

This is especially important for digital CX, or any engagements that take place between a company and its customers that isn’t face-to-face or in the same room. While digital technology has revolutionized the way internal teams work together and communicate, it can hinder customer interactions because, even in the SaaS era, customers still prefer to work with vendors face-to-face. This makes them feel important, heard, and seen. 

Just because your team is working with customers virtually doesn’t mean that attention to CX has to go out the window. Here are three considerations to take into account to help improve your digital CX:

1. Have the right technology in place that’s easy for customers to use. 

One of the most frustrating things for customers about working with SaaS vendors might not even have to do with the vendors themselves but with the technology they use to communicate. There is nothing worse than having to wait on hold for ‘technical difficulties’ or to have to download five different plugins just to join a call. Customers should be able to quickly click and join calls or video chats with their CSMs or other touch points. Trust us – having a streamlined communication system can go a long way in improving the customer experience. 

2. Make sure your internal team is on the same page about customer communication. 

If you’ve ever been in the passenger seat of a SaaS vendor relationship, you know how confusing things can get when multiple people are asking for different things. Questions could be coming in from accounting, marketing, and your CSM that all require different resources and different points of contact. 

As customers, this can quickly get overwhelming and frustrating because, as we all know, email is hardly the best place to carry out critical conversations. As your planning customer touch points, gather input from all of your team members to see what topics need to be discussed. Bring these issues up in a single conversation, or schedule calls for more critical action items to ensure they’re discussed. 

3. Don’t forget about human (or at least face-to-face) interactions. 

Even though most customer communication is done virtually or digitally today, that doesn’t mean that human engagement has to fall by the wayside. Customer success teams should still make it a priority to establish personal relationships with all customer contacts and to nurture these relationships throughout the contract lifetime. 

Think about video chatting with customers whenever possible or setting up in-person meetings if schedules allow for it. Work with your marketing team to create gift baskets as a ‘thank you’ for being such great customers. Establish a repartee with customers that, even when they’re engaging with your team digitally or over email, will remind them why they like working with you in the first place.

The overall customer experience is one of the most important factors in determining critical customer success metrics like customer health scores. You can learn more about focusing on and improving customer experiences here.