Driving Digital Experience – where to start

Driving digital experience and where to start is so much more than the bland descriptions of customer journey or worse still, user experience (UX).

User experience as a phrase is so wrong. Our valued and loyal customers and indeed those prospects who we’d eventually love to become loyal advocates aren’t users they are one of the most important reasons why we are in business. So let’s respect them by understanding them more personally and at a deeper level than just calling them users.

Rant over, let’s see where we can start with our goal to drive amazing and engaging digital experience.

What is an experience? It is an interaction with something. By definition it is changeable and has boundaries; we might see it, feel it, hear it, touch it, sense it… this is experience. And of course it is not a single thing. Because each and every one of us can experience the experience in a different way, due to our previous experiences, memories, expectations, knowledge and human nature, every experience should be considered as on a spectrum rather than a single, simply defined interaction with something.

For marketing this gives us a great starting point because it reminds us that an experience is something that our customers perceive and that it’s not something we provide. We can help to shape their experience but the experience is theirs, not ours.

So experience gives us and the customer a benchmark. It can frame expectations. It stays with us and gives us a context, positive, neutral or negative.

If we as marketers position the experience correctly it may inspire an emotion, make the customer feel something, help them to understand the relevance of it to themselves. It should inspire and create a response.

A response; this is the key to driving digital experience and in fact all points of engagement and interaction between the marketer, their brand, and the customer. A response is something that can be shared, it’s something that comes with judgement and further potential. Importantly the response that comes from great experience impacts directly on transactional value and return on investment of our time and resources.

Driving Digital Experience begins and ends in the heart. It’s about understanding, perceptions and feelings and much less about logical thinking. So begin today by thinking about the emotion you are enticing from your customer as they experience the journey you have created for them. If it’s simply practical and all about your product or service, embrace the opportunity to go deeper.