How to Improve Your CX With Digital Customer Engagement

Today, many companies are trying to keep up with modern service demands by offering customer support on multiple different channels.

While that’s great in theory, many companies struggle with broken or unresponsive digital channels, which can ultimately frustrate clients and cost them valuable customer relationships.

The answer isn’t just to scale down the channels you offer, but to leverage digital customer engagement platforms and customer experience (CX) tools to help.

What Happens When Your Digital CX Suffers?

Customer experience should be a primary business goal for every organization. Without a strong CX, you’ll struggle to retain customers, uphold a strong brand image, and maximize profitability.

Customer frustration

Unresponsive digital channels create a frustrating CX, leading to high abandonment rates and dissatisfaction.

If customers are reaching out, the question or concern feels important to them, even if they just want a tracking update on a package that shipped that morning or help with a question that your FAQ section could answer.

They may be desperately hoping that packages arrive on time to deliver a gift or might not be computer-savvy to the point where they even realize that the FAQ section is there. If they never receive a response to the message they sent on a social media platform, they’ll feel like your business is impossible to get hold of — even if your track record on other platforms is stellar.

As customer frustration increases, both customer loyalty and retention fall. And this can happen quickly; a PWC study found that customers would stop doing business with brands they loved after a single bad experience.

Brand damage

Inconsistent or poor digital interactions can quickly damage your brand’s reputation, especially as customers share negative experiences on social media or review platforms.

This damage can be difficult to recover from — especially with customer service being a primary factor impacting purchasing decisions for many customers today. Consistent online reviews saying that your brand is unresponsive or takes too long to get in touch can actively turn new potential customers away.

You work hard to build brand awareness and loyalty, and customer engagement strategies are vital to protecting both.

Lost revenue opportunities

Overlooked or mishandled interactions often result in lost sales opportunities. Potential customers can become frustrated quickly and will likely turn to one of your competitors with stronger digital engagement.

Customer loyalty is difficult to obtain and costly to lose. If you lose a revenue opportunity once, you may not get a chance to get it back.

Inefficient operations

Disjointed digital channels can quickly lead to operational inefficiencies. Customer queries can easily be handled multiple times by different agents or can become lost in the process altogether.

Failing to implement customer engagement platforms and strategies can lead to unmet customer needs and burned-out agents who feel overwhelmed with the disorganized system and poor subsequent customer satisfaction metrics.

Digital Customer Engagement Strategies for Improving Digital CX

To improve every touchpoint across the customer journey — and successfully improve your customer experience — let’s discuss eight of the best digital customer engagement strategies that you can implement right now.

1. Unify digital channels for a seamless experience

An omnichannel approach is vital to delivering a strong CX, ensuring all your digital channels are integrated into a single platform for unified customer experience management (CXM). This approach allows customers to switch seamlessly back and forth between channels while maintaining the context of their interaction. It enables customer support agents to offer personalized service when conversations pick up again on different platforms.

A unified customer experience also helps create consistent branding and messaging. You can align the look, feel, and tone of your digital channels to create a cohesive brand experience across all touchpoints.

2. Leverage real-time engagement tools

Modern customer engagement platforms may offer extensive functionality to help you respond to customers faster and more efficiently.

Live chat and chatbots are excellent examples. You can implement AI-driven chatbots to handle routine inquiries, leveraging AI and machine learning to answer basic customer questions instantly. For complex issues, the chatbot can route customers to human service agents in real time.

This process can reduce wait times and improve customer satisfaction.

You can also leverage tools to proactively engage customers based on their on-site behavior. This may include a chat message to offer assistance when they linger on a product page or aren’t progressing through the checkout process.

3. Personalize the CX

Personalization is essential to creating a stronger CX, making it a core feature of many CX platforms.

CX platforms should help you leverage data-driven insights to create personalized experiences. Use individual customer data to drive personalized interactions, including making product recommendations based on purchase history or tailoring communication styles to the client’s preferences. Integrations with CRMs like Salesforce or HubSpot can be key to tracking these interactions effectively.

According to Nextiva’s State of CX 2024 report, 53% of businesses are now adapting their strategies to consider different generations or demographics across all channels. Gen Z users may have different expectations for brand communications, and adapting by personalizing your approach can be key.

You can segment your audience based on behavior, preferences, and past interactions to deliver targeted content and offers that resonate more with individual customers. This is true for both your customer service and marketing strategies and can help you create loyal customers.

4. Ensure mobile-first optimization

It’s important to consider customer behavior when determining how best to improve CX, and the reality is that we’re living in an increasingly mobile-first world. A strong user experience now requires a strong mobile experience.

Leverage responsive designs on your websites and digital content, ensuring both are optimized for mobile devices. This move will ensure a positive CX, as so many digital interactions now occur on smartphones and tablets.

To enhance engagement, you should also implement mobile-friendly features like one-click payments, location-based services, SMS communication, and push notifications.

5. Implement robust feedback mechanisms

Understanding your current CX is critical, and customer feedback is essential.

Leverage in-app surveys and feedback forms to collect customer feedback. Regularly solicit feedback from customers directly within digital channels to understand their pain points and identify potential areas for improvement.

You can also gain valuable insights from social listening. Monitor social media and online reviews to gauge customer sentiment and respond promptly to any negative feedback or issues. It’s important to remember that some customers will share complaints about you online but not directly with you, making both social listening and feedback collection critical in gaining real insight into the CX.

6. Invest in AI and automation

AI has come a long way in recent years and will play an important part in the future of customer service.

Utilize AI to analyze customer interactions and predict their needs. AI-powered customer support can help facilitate proactive engagement and lead to more efficient handling of queries in small businesses and large contact centers alike. In some cases, virtual assistants can even offer nearly self-service options for simple customer inquiries.

Nextiva’s State of CX Report found that AI is increasingly used to enhance personalization, with 57% of customers preferring AI-generated responses over human-written ones.

You can also automate workflows, streamlining processes like order tracking, appointment scheduling, and issue resolution. This approach can significantly reduce the burden on human agents and improve response times.

7. Enhance security and privacy

Never overlook privacy and digital security, as protecting sensitive customer data is key to establishing trust.

Prioritize secure data handling, ensuring that all customer data is processed securely. Implement clear privacy policies and compliance with regulations like GDPR. Ensure that you also abide by industry-specific regulations, like HIPAA in healthcare.

Be transparent about how you use customer data, and provide easy options for customers to control their data and privacy settings.

8. Continuously monitor and improve

Regularly track key metrics like response times, customer satisfaction scores, net promoter scores, and conversion rates to assess the effectiveness of your digital engagement strategies. CX platforms should include analytics and reporting features to help you track these KPIs.

Use these insights to continuously refine and optimize your digital channels, ensuring they evolve with customer expectations and technological advancements.

Nextiva: Your Digital Customer Engagement Solution

Maintaining your digital CX is vital for customer retention, loyalty, and business growth.

Successfully engaging customers requires you to meet them where they’re at, adapting to new technologies, and investing more in a consistent, personalized, and responsive CX. In an increasingly digital world, doing so requires agility, dedicated strategies, and the right tools to help you stay connected with your customer base.

One of the most important customer experience best practices is starting with a unified experience. Unified CXM tools like Nextiva are essential and allow you to make exceptional omnichannel service a reality for businesses of all sizes. Your agents can easily and efficiently respond to customers on any platform they use to get in touch, all from a single dashboard that includes task management, AI suggestion support, and smart conversation routing.

Ready to deliver one-of-a-kind customer support every time? Discover how Nextiva’s unified CXM software can help. 👇