According to the Cambridge Dictionary, customer experience is the way someone who does business with a company feels at each stage. Many of the positives a business gains – such as increased sales and greater numbers of customers – have been linked to a company’s great customer experience result. Yet, as much as companies all over the world aim to get such success, they don’t know what the process to achieve it is. For digital media brands already online, the primary focus needs to be on improving your business’ digital experiences.
When dealing with digital platforms, customers are far less likely to wait more than a few minutes before formulating an impression of the website. With how fast data travels across the Internet, and with so many options when it comes to obtaining information, there’s little reason for users to stick around on a platform that doesn’t offer a satisfactory experience.
A recent study has shown that more than 85% of consumers are ready to pay additional amounts if they can obtain an improved customer service experience. Additionally, over 50% of consumers across the globe believe that businesses should take action on consumer feedback provided by their clientele.
With customer experience playing a large role in whether or not a business succeeds, digital media brands that are taking off might wonder how to craft their own, and what specific aspects they’ll need to consider. Let’s go over some of the key considerations below.
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Understand Your Audience and Build a Consumer Persona
The first step towards success is understanding what type of people your customers are. In order to properly understand what they need and want from working with your business, you need to connect and understand what your customers do, first.
Consider your target audience’s demographics and separate them into groups to create profiles. What type of news does your digital media brand primarily focus on and who would likely go searching for that kind of news? For example, if your platform focuses on the local city news, your team can easily build a consumer persona based on the local demographic data.
Once you’ve created a persona, you can come up with a reasonable understanding of their values and priorities, allowing you to cater to them and establish a favorable relationship from the get-go.
Form a Positive Relationship with Your Audience
Though most of your interactions with customers are online through the Internet, forming a positive connection can easily increase your company’s retention and improve customer experience. Research has shown that more than half of an experience is influenced by the consumer’s experience with the platform. Whether it’s buying a subscription or clicking through the site before a user finally chooses to make an account, emotions are what guides people to make choices.
If you know how your consumers feel while browsing your platform, you can learn what can make them loyal. If a consumer enjoys a service your digital media brand provides, they are likely to become a loyal customer with a great customer experience.
Make it Easy for Your Audience to Offer Feedback
Once your company has created a fully functioning site for your digital media brand, it’s important to implement extensive methods through which they can provide their thoughts and opinions on your platform. Whether it’s through a customer support email, a feedback form, or live chat agents, your audience should be able to provide their opinions on which parts your website could use some work.
After determining this, the next step is to focus on determining the actionable steps you can take towards implementing changes. Most of the time, this will require data analysis tools to identify trends and popular requests, so you can outline which improvements to start with.
Keep Making Improvements Over Time
As the earlier section explains, one of the factors of maintaining a successful digital media brand with great customer experience is continual improvement of what your consumer base wants.
More often than not want to see that their feedback is being implemented and taken into consideration, whether it’s for the news content or a few suggestions to help improve the platform. Using the feedback your customer support receives as guidelines, digital media brands should continually adjust their platforms to integrate positive and intuitive changes that cater to user needs.
When these functional improvements are implemented across all your channels, your consumers can tell that you’re actively implementing changes to suit their needs, which contributes to a positive, memorable consumer experience.
Strive for Ingenuity and Responsiveness
One of the most important factors when creating an effective digital customer experience is to make the platform intuitive. Some companies tend to clutter their sites, adding a large number of features and options to make sure consumers have everything they might need. However, this can backfire and overwhelm the user, making it difficult to find what they actually want.
Instead, focus on making the layout simple. News publishing platforms should clearly highlight the most relevant headlines and engaging stories, and provide a top-level main menu with separate tabs based on genre and topic category. It’s also a good idea to separate your written and video content into separate sections.
Takeaway
These are some of the most important steps towards delivering an ideal customer experience. However, as is the case with many businesses and their customer bases, what you may need for your own digital media brand may vary from another’s.
It’s important to continue to research and analyze your existing audience to understand what they need and what they want out of your company. Work towards personalizing the platform to individual viewers while remaining appealing to your target demographic as a whole.
With careful research and active interactions with your audience, you can fine-tune and craft the ultimate digital customer experience that ties into your brand and its values.