The guide to digital customer experience in 2025

What is the digital customer experience?

The digital customer experience (DCX) refers to how customers engage with your business online, and how they perceive those interactions.

It encompasses every touchpoint a customer encounters in the digital space, including your website, mobile app, social media, email, or chatbots.

From a business perspective, the digital customer experience adds a dizzying array of new channels. Meanwhile, the customer journey gets more complex, with customers switching between channels multiple times as they move down the marketing funnel.

For customers, however, there’s no difference between the online and offline channels. They’re simply looking for solutions, and following the journey where it takes them.

For this reason, the digital customer experience is often the gateway to an omnichannel experience—which involves being on every channel and platform your customers are (digital and analog).

Fortunately, the payoff is huge for delivering a seamless experience across many online touchpoints: your customers will be more valuable, engaged, and loyal.

6 best practices for digital CX success

80% of consumers say that efficiency, convenience, and friendliness are the essential elements of a positive customer experience. So how do you map these attributes onto your digital CX?

Prioritize user-centric design

Design your digital interfaces to be intuitive, user-friendly, and accessible to all customers. Focus on simplicity, ease of use, and fast navigation. 88% of consumers say they're less likely to return to a website with poor UX.

Example: Amazon exemplifies user-centered design, and constantly optimizes its website to create more convenient, personalized interactions. The prominently placed search bar is the website’s engine, offering predictive text and suggested queries to make it faster and easier for users to get what they want. Amazon's checkout process is equally efficient with 1-click ordering that streamlines purchasing.

Personalize where possible

Leverage your customer data to create personalized experiences, from content recommendations to product suggestions. This will enhance engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty among the 87% of online shoppers who are more likely to shop on a platform with a personalized experience.

Example: Netflix tailors its recommendation to users based on their viewing history, preferences, and its AI-powered data analytics. This allows Netflix to provide personalized suggestions that are consistently relevant, keeping users engaged and returning to the platform.

Aim for omnichannel

Creating an omnichannel customer journey involves being everywhere your customers are with a unified, seamless digital experience. This allows customers to switch between platforms without friction, and see the same messaging and brand aesthetic wherever they go. Omnichannel also integrates customer data into a unified view of all interactions, providing a 360 customer view with data-driven decisions and insights.

Example: Starbucks is an omnichannel leader, bridging the gap between its physical stores and digital presence with its mobile app. Users can place orders via the app to pick up in-store, while the app instantly integrates users' rewards points across all channels—driving engagement and repeat purchasing ​however is most convenient for customers.

Offer accessible customer service

Offer a variety of digital customer support options that allow for fast resolution of customer issues, such as self-serve FAQs, in-app support chat, or AI chatbots. Though 55% of customers prefer self-service options online, human agents should always be a click away to help resolve complex issues.

Example: Virgin Mobile is a telecommunications brand with a fully digital customer support experience and a 96% customer satisfaction score (CSAT). Rather than rely on email and phone calls, Virgin Mobile prioritizes live in-app support chat that delivers an efficient, data-rich support experience for both customers and human agents.

Invest in data security and privacy

Users expect companies to safeguard their personal information online, so prioritize user privacy by implementing strong security measures and transparent data practices.

Example: Apple stands out for its commitment to privacy, and even makes it a selling point. They provide users with privacy options to control their data, and emphasize user security like end-to-end encryption for iMessages and FaceTime.

Optimize with data

Digital analytics allow you to identify friction points, track channel performance, and optimize the digital customer experience across platforms with data-driven insights into customer preferences and behavior.

Example: Spotify uses first-party user data to refine its playlists, provide tailored recommendations, and refine its recommendation algorithm.

Provide a consistent brand experience

9 in 10 customers say they expect a consistent experience from a business, so try to standardize your branding and messaging across digital touchpoints. The more consistent your visuals, tone, and messaging, the more reliable and trustworthy your digital customer experience will appear—which directly translates into higher conversion and retention. 

Example: Sephora has seamlessly integrated its website, mobile app, social media, in-app loyalty program, and physical stores into one cohesive, consistent experience that keeps customers coming back for more. Customers can shop and browse from anywhere and enjoy the same promotions, perks, and level of service. This helps the beauty brand to maintain its brand recognition and exceptional loyalty among customers.

In the next section, we'll explore how to create a digital customer experience strategy using a proven framework from Harvard that doesn't silo the digital customer experience—but instead approaches it as any other new business problem to be solved.

Harvard’s 3 core principles of digital customer experience

It's tempting to think of your digital customer experience as separate from the rest of your business. After all, don't these new technology, processes, and touchpoints warrant their own siloed approach?

According to Harvard Business Review, because the digital experience is intertwined with all aspects of your business, it cannot be assessed or optimized on its own.

Certainly, individual elements of digital experience can be improved—better navigation, faster loading—but these upgrades often miss the big-picture opportunity.

This HBR article lays out three core principles with examples to help you create an effective digital customer experience strategy:

1. Put the digital experience in context of your business

Try to understand how the digital customer experience drives profit—and solve it like any other business problem.

Rather than focusing on metrics like conversion rates as a proxy for success, zoom out. Most DCX issues come back to your core business proposition instead of, say, choosing the right button color for a product listing.

Example: A fashion retailer optimizes its product page for conversions, only to find conversion rates are largely determined by the product's quality and availability. The best-performing products, when in stock and priced right, had a 10x higher conversion rate than the average product.

2. Customer are not created equal

Personalizing the digital experience is key, and A/B testing enables you to gain a deep understanding of your audience, experiences, and better serve your high-value customers.

However, it's critical to go beyond the obvious in your analysis, attending to granular digital factors that may not be on your radar yet. Testing isn't as easy as it seems.

Example: A hotel chain identified high bounce rates from Google search traffic as an issue, so set about A/B testing its landing pages. Following a lackluster improvement, further analysis showed that bounce rate was driven by the user's device.

Specifically, desktop users in search of "hotels near Dublin airport" preferred a large map and default radius around the airport. Mobile users, though, preferred a much smaller radius around the airport, given their screen size.

Ultimately, landing pages weren't the issue—the real opportunity was to personalize the default map radius based on the customer's search and device characteristics, which had a sizable impact on bounce rate.

3. Make zero-based decisions

Zero-based thinking puts your previous decisions on trial, and asks: "Knowing what I know now, would I still make the same decision?"

Though it's common to have teams focused on improving the digital experience—it can be better to have teams looking at problems with fresh eyes. By challenging the digital-led priorities based on first principles, teams can better serve your larger business goals.

Example: A retailer developed a product recommendation engine for its website, and was initially pleased by its results with upselling and cross-selling. However, wanting to challenge their assumptions of success, deeper analysis revealed that only 12% of the inventory was getting recommended—the bestsellers that would have sold anyway.

Instead, the retailer needed it to recommend hard-to-sell items like overstocks and new products. Though the initial metric showed success, it was ultimately shown to be misaligned with the larger business objectives of driving sell through, gross margin, and inventory efficiency.

Takeaways:

• The digital transformation brings with it a significant analytical challenge, but data-driven is the best way forward.

• Identifying the top ideas is hard—What to measure to get the right diagnosis? What digital objectives to optimize for?

• Just because an issue is manifesting in the digital customer experience doesn’t mean it’s really a digital problem.

How to craft a digital customer experience strategy

A great digital customer experience strategy will align with your brand’s larger goals, enhance customer satisfaction, and drive long-term engagement for key digital channels. Here’s how to create a DCX strategy that fits within your existing business strategy:

1. Understand your customers

The first step is to build detailed customer personas that help you understand the pain points and needs of your customers in the digital landscape. These customer profiles can include information like:

• Demographics: Who are your customers? (Age, location, job title, etc.)

• Psychographics: What are their beliefs and lifestyles?

• Behavior: How do they engage with digital experiences? (Social media follows, purchase history, preferences, etc.)

To collect these data and insights, you can refer to your product analytics, website analytics, or support channel logs. You can also solicit direct customer feedback with surveys sent through channels like AI chatbots, in-app support chat, or omnichannel business messaging.

This will allow you to understand how users interact with digital platforms, tailor the digital experience to different audience segments, and identify ways to improve the DCX across the board.

2. Map the customer journey

Next, you can map the digital (and analog) customer journey to identify all the online touchpoints where they interact with (or want to interact with) your business. This can include your website, mobile app, social media, email, chatbots, and others.

Assess where customers encounter friction or dead ends, and where you can improve the journey.

Are there gaps in your digital customer experience? Where are customers getting stuck? What channels, content, or experiences are already working?

Product analytics like Amplitude or Posthog can show you a full map of your customer journey, plus user behaviors and preferences in granular detail, so you can work toward a more seamless digital customer experience with data.

3. Identify new digital touchpoints

Once you have your digital experience mapped out, ask yourself—where can you add touchpoints in the digital landscape to better serve your customers? These new channels should align with customer preferences, digital gaps, and your larger business goals. 

For example, a B2B company would be well served to get on a social network like LinkedIn, but perhaps less so by being on TikTok with its younger crowd. Or, an ecommerce retailer might implement an AI chatbot on its website, offering 24/7 support and product recommendations, driving sales and customer satisfaction at once. 

Many businesses also create a mobile app to digitize their customer experience. This allows them to reach customers directly with in-app communications—delivering a seamless experience for transactional, operational, marketing, and support use cases within a secure, spam-free, data-rich, and high-ROI channel.

4. Set clear business objectives

It’s important to set clear goals for your digital customer experience, and measure them with key performance indicators (KPIs) that indicate success. For example, you might want to increase website engagement, improve customer satisfaction, or boost conversion rates.

We’ll cover all the key KPIs for digital customer experience in a later section, but whatever you measure—ensure your digital objectives support your broader business goals, like revenue growth, customer retention, or market expansion.

It’s also important to foster collaboration between teams—marketing, sales, product, operations, customer support—to ensure your goals are aligned and sustainable while delivering a cohesive digital experience.

5. Consider your tools

Once your goals are set, it’s time to empower your teams with the right tools to engage customers, manage data, and ensure a seamless digital experience.

Depending on your specific business or industry, there are various integrated platforms you can use for digital customer experience management, including:

• Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms: Allow you to manage customer data, interactions, and relationships

• Marketing automation platforms: Orchestrate, personalize, and automate marketing outreach 

• Content management systems: Manage and deliver content across digital channels 

• Analytics platforms: Gather and analyze customer feedback, insights, and behavior to improve the digital customer experience

• Ecommerce platforms: Manage online sales, product catalogs, and process transactions 

• Social media platforms: Track follower engagement, brand mentions, and manage social content 

• AI chatbots: Engage website and mobile customers 24/7 to enhance customer service, lead generation, scheduling, and more

• In-app communications platforms: Streamline in-app omnichannel business messaging for support, transactional, operation, and marketing use cases

Keep an eye out for omnichannel platforms with APIs that simplify integration with the rest of your tech stack, plus easy-to-use software for teams. This way, you can connect all tools and experiences, and teams can start quickly with full autonomy.

6. Monitor and optimize

Lastly, you’ll want to continuously refine your digital customer experience strategy with data-driven insights. You can track customer behavior and interactions using external platforms or built-in analytics, looking for any friction, behavioral trends, or preferences that can help you elevate the digital experience with first-party customer data.

For example, you might create new features, fix bugs, or adopt more effective channels that are popular with customers, like WhatsApp, in-app messaging, or in-app support chat. As you iterate, always look for ways to better meet customer expectations.

4 challenges of digital customer experience

While the customer digital experience offers a wealth of opportunities for customer engagement and growth, it also presents new challenges that must be addressed. For example:

Fragmented customer journeys

As you add digital channels to your mix, managing and unifying these interactions to deliver a consistent customer experience can be difficult. Without a unified approach to the entire digital customer experience, you run the risk of creating a customer journey that’s fragmented and unsatisfying.

Implementing an omnichannel strategy vs multichannel strategy, will help you to deliver a unified, seamless experience that customers enjoy. Integrated platforms and tools—including a CRM, marketing automation, in-app communications, and others—are essential to orchestrating this holistic, big-picture strategy to good effect.

Data privacy

Privacy is a paramount in the digital age because it directly affects how customers perceive and trust your brand. The solution is to be transparent about your data usage. More than half of people believe data sharing is necessary to get a personalized experience—they just want the option to give their consent first.

Communicating your privacy policy is also key to ensuring compliance with data privacy laws, such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), or Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). 

The leading platforms for digital customer experience, such as Sendbird’s in-app communications platform, all include features to help you automatically ensure compliance without steps.

Data security

Data security is a key component of a successful digital customer experience because it ensures that customers' personal information is protected from breaches, unauthorized access, and misuse.

Customers expect their digital information to be handled securely by their go-to brands or they’ll lose trust. Meanwhile, compliance helps a business to mitigate legal risk, financial loss, and reputational damage.

Key aspects of digital data security include:

• Regular security audits

• Educate employees about security best practices

• Multi-factor authentication

• Secure payment gateways

• Encryption

To tackle this, businesses should invest in robust cybersecurity measures for their websites, apps, and other digital properties.

Technical performance

An effective DCX requires deploying and maintaining high-performing technology that supports:

• Fast page load times

• Mobile-responsive design

• Real-time personalization

• Low latency

• Scalability

This is because technical issues such as website downtime, app glitches, or slow loading times can significantly degrade the digital customer experience.

To help with these issues, you can prioritize cloud-based infrastructure, technical optimizations, and easy-to-integrate solutions that use APIs to connect to your tech stack. While you can build and maintain these solutions yourself, plenty of integrated, low-maintenance, scalable solutions exist to help you ensure technical performance without the heavy lifting.

For example, Sendbird offers unified APIs for mobile-responsive omnichannel in-app communications, in-app chat, and AI chatbots. The APIs ensure low latency and real-time data and personalization at any scale, plus no-code or low-code implementation and minimal maintenance.

Key KPIs for digital customer experience success

How exactly should you measure your efforts and optimize the performance of your digital customer experience? Let’s cover some helpful metrics you can rely on to benchmark and guide your success:

• Touchpoint “conversion” rate: You can monitor the effectiveness of different digital experiences by how often a user converts, or takes the next action you want them to at a touchpoint. Conversions may include a signup, a click, a chat started, a content download, a purchase, etc.

• Customer satisfaction score (CSAT): CSAT helps quantify customer satisfaction. It's typically obtained through a survey and is considered an indicator of customer approval.

• Net promoter score (NPS): This metric gauges the strength of a company's customer relationships and is correlated with loyalty and business growth.

• Customer lifetime value (CLV): CLV reflects the financial value of each customer, helping you track increases and make decisions about how much to invest in acquisition.

• Retention rate: A high retention rate indicates that your experience is successfully keeping customers engaged, contributing to sustained revenue.

• Churn rate: High churn points to turnover due to customer dissatisfaction. Lowering this metric via an improved experience is crucial for maintaining a solid customer base.

• Referral rate: You want to see your referral rate grow, as it suggests satisfaction and is one of the best paths to growing user numbers, and by extension, revenue.

Read more: Learn about the key 22 mobile app KPIs and ecommerce KPIs for your digital customer experience.