Why having a Great Digital Customer Experience (CX) within the Product is critical?

Vishalini Paliwal

What is customer experience?

Customer Experience, also known as CX, is the overall customer’s perception of the company and product as the customer goes through the complete journey from awareness of a product, to evaluation, to purchase, to post purchase support. This is the sum of all experiences via the touchpoint in the customer’s journey.

The image below shows the three stages of customer experience that are most critical. For a digital product the pre purchase would include the users interaction with the website, demo and pricing page. The purchase stage would be a more involved interaction during sign up, trial, documentation and support. The post purchase stage is where it is more dependent on the overall product experience and customer support.

What is Digital Customer Experience?

Any product or company that uses digital technologies for their business, would build websites, or software applications which solve a given business need. Most of the customer’s experience happens through the engagement of people via these digital interfaces. As a result of this the customer’s journey is closely tied to the digital experience on the platform which could either be a website or application.

Here’s an example of a Customer Experience Journey when interacting with a sample digital product.

Phase 1 : Customer’s Experience during Pre Purchase/Awareness Stage

This is the stage where the buyer understands the need, and is exploring the market. They know their pain points and somewhat understand what they are looking for. They will consider the features, pricing, and brand and compare the offerings available in the market.

Now let’s understand the customer journey in this phase with an example of SaaS CRM platform:

• The potential user searches for “the best CRM platform for startups” on Google. and get a few google search results.
• They will then visit the websites of the discovered platforms, looking for relevant features, easy signup, and within range pricing.
• The website which allows them to experience the SaaS CRM platform easily will be equally important.
• Testimonials and other good feedback on trusted review sites would also add to customer experience.

Phase 2 : Customer’s Experience during Purchase Stage

This stage is all about decision making. By now the buyer has shortlisted the products they would like to explore, and are ready to dive in.

Continuing the above above example, this is how their customer experience would look like:

• The prospect will now try to use the shortlisted products and evaluate hem on the basis of ease of use, pricing, and the use cases they have.
• At this point product quality, product support responsiveness is super critical. If the product experience is broken or the reactive support takes time to solve customers problems during evaluation, the purchase may get blocked. If product experience includes seamless interaction and proactive customer support then there is high likelihood of purchase.

Phase 3: Customer Experience during Post Purchase Stage

Now the purchase is done, and the customer should start seeing the value on their investment. In this phase they will include the required team members, and set up the project. Most successful brands provide the best post purchase customer experience.

If a company has purchased the subscription for a CRM, they customer experience now would depend on:

• The help they need to set up the platform, and to resolve any issue they are facing. Support teams normally use chats, emails, and even video calls as channels to assist customers.
• Sticking with the promised SLA (Service-Level Agreement) is also important.
• For digital products this becomes all the more important as a continuous product improvement and great support is a default expectation.
• It’s crucial to keep a tab on customer satisfaction, and Digital companies implement systems to get the Net Promoter Score (NPS) for it.

Here is where you can find top 10 SaaS products which give the best Customer Experience and why?

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Why is Digital Customer experience important?

Customer is the king, so when building and selling a product, it is the customer who decides whether the product/service is worth a purchase. A great digital customer experience results in gaining customer trust and loyalty. It’s the main ingredient for building your brand and to multifold the value of your product.. Revenue is also a function of customer experience and we have tons of examples like Amazon, Hubspot, Zoom, ClickUp, DropBox which are renowned for their phenomenal digital customer experience.

Digital customer experience is primarily about the following entities:

• People: Customer and business teams
• Products: The software with which the customer interacts

How easily people engage with the product and what kind of support is provided within the product and by the people involved in building the product is the key differentiation for any digital product company.

If the digital experience of your product or service is broken be it because of user experience issues or product issues like javascript errors, customers are likely to churn.

Making it imperative for digital businesses to craft a seamless customer journey map and experience to increase adoption, growth and hence revenue.

An ecommerce business, SaaS platform, fintech company or any other digital platform would not survive if their customer experiences continuous glitches. Forget building a solid conversion funnel, even retaining users would be a challenge.

Who should care about Customer Experience in a company?

If you are asking yourself who is responsible for customer experience, we can map that again with the phase the user is in. In the earlier section we shared with you how a customer moves from phase to another, from pre purchase, to purchase, and then post purchase. Across all these phases, different teams are responsible for the conversion of the user.

Why is customer experience important for founders?

Founders know that customer centricity is most essential when it comes to building the company, so by default great customer experience is one of the most important outcomes for them. Founders or any C-suite member would closely follow website analytics and product analytics to understand what is working and what’s not. They even keep an on the qualitative vs quantitative data.

Why is customer experience important for marketing and growth teams?

Marketing and growth teams are responsible for all engagement and interactions during awareness campaigns and pre sales engagement. Website interactions and pilot success is important for these teams and customer experience is critical in both areas. Both these teams use website tracking tools and qualitative data analysis tools to study user behaviour and come up with hacks to acquire more users.

Why is customer experience important for product managers?

Both product and the customers are main focus areas for every product manager. Customer’s love for a product is completely dependent on how good your product is at solving their problems. . For this product managers and owners need to stay on top of the product adoption and engagement metrics.. Both product adoption and user engagement is a reflection of customer experience.

Product managers also work on bug tracking and performance monitoring along with the engineering team. After all, customer experience is not just about building great features, but also ensuring that the product is working as expected.

Today product-led growth has become significant in many self-serve platforms and we see this in companies like Canva and Figma, where customer experience is so good that it itself leads to amazing growth.

Why is customer experience important for customer support teams?

Support teams are the ones responsible for all post sales experience problems a customer faces. Their main KPI is Time to Resolution (TTR) of reported issues and hence customer experience becomes their key success metrics.

Why is customer experience important for customer success teams?

Just like their name, customer success teams are responsible for customer’s success. Churn and expansions are their main KPI’s. Both churn and expansions are tied to customer experience again. By consistently providing the best customer experience, success teams can ensure they stay on top of their revenue numbers.

What is great digital customer experience within the product?

Customers are used to better products being launched every day. Their loyalty to products remains as long as there is no better or cheaper product out there. Also in most cases quality of the product is as important as the price point. Great product at a reasonable cost is the preferred way to go for most business owners. However one thing that can make a big difference for users is the customer experience.

Now what does great customer experience (CX) in a product really mean?

For digital products experience at various stages can be broken as follows:

Phase 1 :

• Website Experience
• Sign Up Experience

Phase 2 :

• Activation Experience
• Purchase Experience

Phase 3 :

• Product Experience
• Support Experience

Let’s take an example — if you face issues making a purchase online, you would either switch the ecommerce site or the payment gateway. Either ecommerce or fintech solutions lose their business.

How do you measure customer experience?

Measuring digital customer experience would mean measuring each and every touchpoint of the customer engagement throughout your product. This would mean evaluating the pre purchase, purchase, and post purchase customer journey. Creating a customer journey map is most crucial for measuring customer experience. For which you can also use customer journey map tools.

For digital products specifically, the customer’s journey can be easily mapped if the interaction with the product is captured completely. Customer experience metrics include website engagement, signup, first activation, point to purchase, and even support tickets. If customer journey can be completely captured and measured, that would be the right way to solve for the customer experience.

Customer journey issues can be effectively captured via different methods. These could be via event tracking, clickstream tracking, session recording, screen recording, web tracking, heatmaps, and even performance monitoring.

While tracking customer journeys is one part of it, one crucial part is capturing the customer experience problem. There are tools that support quantitative and qualitative data analysis separately. But only a few customer experience tools like Zipy, support product analytics by combining data with user behaviour.

Popular tools to deliver great customer experience.

Earlier in this blog we discussed how different teams play a role in delivering a seamless customer experience at different stages of the purchase cycle. These teams use different customer experience tools to ensure the users are engaged, their issues are being resolved, and to capture their feedback. Not just this, they even employ tools to capture both qualitative and quantitative data.

Customer experience metrics for different stages

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“You cant improve what you cant measure”, and hence measuring DCX is very important to understand how customers interact with your digital products and services. Here is a list of metrics that would help us measure DCX

Website traffic metrics:

• Website visitors: The total number of unique visitors on your website.
• Page views: The total number of pages viewed on your website.
• Bounce rate: The percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing only one page.
• Average session duration: The average time users spend on your website.

Conversion metrics:

• Conversion rate: The percentage of visitors who take a desired action (e.g., make a purchase, sign up for a newsletter, fill out a contact form).
• Abandonment rate: The percentage of users who abandon a process or transaction without completing it (e.g., cart abandonment rate for e-commerce).
• Click-through rate (CTR): The percentage of users who click on a specific call-to-action (CTA) or link.

‍ User engagement metrics:

• Time on page: The average amount of time users spend on a specific webpage.
• Scroll depth: How far users scroll down on a page, indicating engagement with content.
• Interaction rate: The percentage of users who engage with interactive elements (e.g., videos, quizzes) on your digital platforms.

User behavior metrics:

• User flow: Analyze how users navigate through your digital platforms and identify drop-off points in the user journey.
• Exit pages: Identify which pages users most commonly exit from, which can indicate problem areas.
• Heatmaps: Visualize where users click, move the cursor, or spend the most time on your website to understand user behavior.

Customer satisfaction and feedback metrics:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS): Measure overall customer loyalty and willingness to recommend your digital platforms.
• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): Assess user satisfaction with specific digital interactions or experiences.
• Online reviews and ratings: Monitor online reviews and ratings on platforms like Google, Yelp, and social media to gauge user sentiment.

Technical performance metrics:

• Page load time: Measure how quickly webpages load, as slow loading times can lead to a poor user experience.
• Error rate: Track the frequency of technical errors (e.g., 404 errors, server errors).
• Uptime/downtime: Ensure your digital platforms are consistently available and minimize downtime.

User authentication and security metrics:

• Security incidents: Monitor and respond to security incidents or data breaches that could impact user trust.
• Authentication success rate: Measure the success rate of user logins and account access.

Customer support and self-service metrics:

• Self-service utilization: Track how often users utilize self-service options (e.g., FAQs, knowledge base).
• Customer support response time: Measure the time it takes to respond to user inquiries and support tickets.

Understanding Customer experience metrics

Website Traffic Metrics:

• Bounce rate: Helps you understand how many users left the website.
• Average session duration: time spent by users on the website.

What is missing? User information, user intent and their qualitative engagement with the website to understand why they spent less time and bounced back. While numbers are great, we cannot get the reason for bounce rate and low engagement.

Conversion metrics:

• Conversion rate: How many users clicked on a CTA and moved to the next step and how many didn’t move to the next step.
• Abandonment rate: The percentage of users who abandon a process or transaction without completing it (e.g., cart abandonment rate for e-commerce).

What is missing? What did the users who didn’t convert in the funnel do on the platform, whether there was an issue in the form submission or sign up flow or the transaction which was abandoned etc. Failures go undetected in the website conversion funnel. Website monitoring and behavioral analytics can fill this gap.

User engagement metrics:

• Time on page: What is the engagement of the user?.
• Scroll depth: What is the engagement with the content?
• Interaction rate: What is the engagement with the content?

What is missing? In user engagement metrics, usually quantitative data is there, qualitative is missing i.e. why the user was engaged or not engaged? Are most users scrolling through or interacting with the content or is there a pattern of drop offs, because of which engagement is less? Are there UI issues or slowness which could be causing engagement to be low? Such insights are usually missing in tools which throw only numbers. If you too are struggling with these questions, you might want to consider qualitative data analysis tools.

User behavior metrics:

• User flow: Analyze user flows and journey to understand user behavior.
• Exit pages: Where people exit mostly?
• Heatmaps: Visualise user behavior based on interaction.

What is missing? This data is very useful to understand user behavior but what is missing is why users exited or why a certain workflow is working while others are not. Is there a correlation between usage and bugs or usage and design? Such insights can be understood via qualitative data analysis and error monitoring combined with product analytics.

Customer satisfaction and feedback metrics:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS): Measure customer satisfaction.
• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): Measure customer satisfaction.
• Online reviews and ratings: Measure customer satisfaction and sentiment.

What is missing? Here again the data is very quantitative but there is no insight into why the customer gave a given review or NPS/CSAT score. The correlation insight is missing.

Technical performance metrics:

• Page load time: Measure slowness of the app as viewed by the customer.
• Error rate: Problems seen by users or found in code.
• Uptime/downtime: Measure availability of the platform

What is missing? This data is very useful to understand user problems, but when available as a standalone information, it does not give complete insight into what caused this problem. What was the user doing or in which environment this occurred is a very important piece of information if this has to be solved for customer experience. API monitoring is another area teams should pay attention to.

User authentication and security metrics:

• Security incidents: Monitor and fix security problems.
• Authentication success rate: Measure problems in authentication.

What is missing? Just like error data this is very critical information but without context it does not help you solve the problems completely. Context is super important, and for this you can try a session replay tool. Website monitoring tools can also help you get a better picture of what’s happening in your web app.

Customer support and self-service metrics:

• Self-service utilization: Tracking users adoption of self-serve tool.
• Customer support response time: Measuring support SLA.

What is missing? To support this fully, one needs to have qualitative tracking and not just quantitative tracking. Customer’s self-serve experience can be well understood if the customer journey map data is made visible to support teams. Most support teams don’t have access to this data, they are mostly focussed on solving tickets via limited chat and screen sharing support while they could easily use the power of session replay and real time user monitoring.

What is broken in measuring Digital Customer Experience (DCX) today?

Inspite of many metrics that we measure or want to measure, the biggest problem is that the world of customer experience is broken and exists in silos across teams. While DCX is a combined responsibility of teams in any business, it is usually addressed without any collaboration across teams, with limited data and usually reactively.

As the user navigates through your website, and product, teams at different stages also experience different challenges.

1. Pre purchase stage: In this stage the challenge is to understand the intent of the buyer through engagement on the website. Unless a call is made, the user intent is only guess work.
2. Purchase: During evaluation, one of the critical requirements is to stay on top of customer experience during the evaluation and solve any problems faced by the customer proactively and quickly. Pilots are very critical and bad experiences can make or break for business. It’s difficult for sales, solutions, product teams to stay on top of the issues unless these are reported by the customer.
3. Post purchase: Most customer support today is reactive i.e. when customers report a problem it gets addressed. Statistically 96% of people never report problems and churn quietly.

In the previous section we discussed what each metric means and what’s missing in them, now let’s take it a step further and also look at possible solutions.

Why businesses lose because of bad customer experience

1. Not knowing the visitor intent or not aware of poor website experience of the visitor — e.g. a form submission may be continuously failing on the website.
2. Not knowing what problems the customer is facing during the evaluation stage — e.g. during evaluation, a user may be having problems signing up or adding team members.
3. Not knowing what problems customers are facing post purchase unless reported — e.g. a slow page experience or server error may be continuously causing disruption for the customer but they don’t report it

The keyword here is “Not knowing ”. One cannot fix what one doesn’t know. We don’t know what we don’t know.

Deliver great customer experience with Zipy

Zipy is a unified dIgital customer experience platform that helps you understand your website visitors and app users, and fix any problems they are facing proactively, intelligently, and quickly.

Zipy solves exactly these “Not Knowing” issues and helps you go that extra mile with your customer experience.

• It can be used by Marketing and Sales teams to proactively understand and target the website visitors.
• It can be used by the Product Teams to analyse customer adoption, drop offs and bad experiences in the platform proactively.
• It can help CS and Support teams understand and solve any customer issue proactively
• It can help Engineering teams solve any critical customer issues very quickly and intelligently.

Conclusion

To sum it up, great customer experience is the key to business growth, customer loyalty and brand creation. While customer experience covers all touch points of a customer’s journey from pre purchase, to purchase to post purchase support. The key to digital product success is the product journey itself. Measuring customer journey map details, detecting all problem areas in customer experience proactively, fixing these customer experience issues are critical to business success.

Product adoption, churn, NPS/CSAT, response time can all be greatly impacted if the business teams stay on top of customer experience problems. There are multiple customer experience tools in the market today which allow you to measure the customer journeys and solve for customer journey problems reactively.

Zipy helps to not just monitor users in real time , but detects the customer experience problems proactively to alert teams, detect exact problem areas, help with debugging and significantly add to customer delight. With out of box usage and error analytics and proactive alerting Zipy also helps understand customer journey problems and escalate relevant issues.

More resources on Customer Experience Journey

• Top 10customer experience software in 2024
• Improve Your In-App Experience with Zipy’sDigital Experience Platform
• How to build adigital customer experience strategy in 2024?
• 10 KeyCustomer Experience Metrics for SaaS
• Redefining Retail: ElevatingEcommerce Customer Experience‍
• 10 ways to create an impressiveSaaS Customer Experience Management