How to build a digital customer experience strategy powered by AI

A strong user experience goes beyond site navigation. It considers the whole journey of a customer. Creating a compelling journey starts before they even get on your site. Your website should be easy to find through search engines and simple to navigate through search. The digital experience also continues long after they make a purchase or acquire a service. It might include a customer's experience returning or exchanging an item or a follow-up email from a business asking for customer feedback or a review. 

In-person interactions may also be part of the digital customer experience, like when a customer uses a digital loyalty program in a store or when a store employee orders a customer a garment in a size only available online. 

Digital customer experiences significantly impact customers’ opinions of and satisfaction with a business.

A digital customer experience incorporates three key elements: customer journey mapping, digital touchpoints, and experience measurement.

Consider all the ways customers interact with your business. Then, determine how to measure and analyze each element based on business needs and customer satisfaction. AI tools can simplify this process to help wrangle and refine customer data, personalize communications, and improve search.

The digital customer journey starts even before a user reaches your brand’s website or app and it doesn’t end once a customer purchases an item or service and leaves the site. Mapping that experience is an important part of creating a successful digital customer experience strategy.

How your customers get to you is the first part of their digital experience. SEO, email, and social media can influence customers to visit your site. And once they’re on your site or app, search plays a huge role in the customer journey. 

How your brand communicates and keeps customers informed is a crucial part of their digital experience. Part of mapping your customer journey involves identifying opportunities to use the insights gathered from their time on your site to follow up with personalized, relevant recommendations.

Digital touchpoints are interactions consumers have with your brand in the digital space. These moments influence their overall experience, perception, and decision-making process. Each touchpoint plays a role in shaping the consumer journey, from awareness to conversion and loyalty. 

Make every digital touch point matter — websites, apps, social media, ecommerce marketplaces, search tools, and chatbots. Impactful connection at every touchpoint delivers a cohesive and seamless customer experience. Optimized search and AI tools can help tailor the experience to their needs.

Experience measurement tracks and analyzes how customers interact with your brand across digital touchpoints. The effectiveness of a digital experience can be measured using metrics like sales, customer satisfaction, and engagement rates.

Measuring how the customer journey flows and how well each digital touchpoint works helps create an effective and positive digital customer experience. By measuring impact, you can keep improving the experience for customers and the outcome for businesses.

Customers experience a digital journey with any online business, whether that business has consciously created a digital customer experience or not. In the assessment phase, you must map your current customer journey.

Assess and understand where that journey starts and begins, as well as where it leads to and ends. Are there areas of your website that lead to customer complaints? Are there elements of checkout that lead customers to abandoned carts?

Evaluate what needs improvement — and what’s working, too. It’s just as important to assess what customers love so you can keep those elements of the digital customer experience.

To craft an effective digital customer experience strategy, you must first ask: What does my business aim to achieve? Whether it's boosting sales, fostering loyalty, increasing profits, or driving signups, defining these goals is an essential step.

Your business objectives, both qualitative and quantitative, will help determine which solutions you choose to enhance the digital customer experience and reach these goals. Make a plan for reporting and measurements to ensure your organization’s data provides useful information that aligns with your overall business goals.

Based on the assessment and planning phases, the next step is to deploy technology solutions that improve customer-facing processes. This is where AI comes in, enabling automation, personalization, and data-driven decision-making to enhance efficiency, engagement, and overall customer satisfaction.

Need to enhance customer service availability or ensure your team focuses on high-priority tickets? AI chatbots tailored to your brand voice provide 24/7 support, guiding customers through FAQs, resolving common inquiries, and intelligently routing complex issues to service representatives.

When customers shop, they search. AI-powered search optimizes product discovery by delivering a more intuitive, relevant, and personalized search experience. Generative AI, which enables conversational interactions between your users and your search feature, understands customer intent, making it easier for customers to find exactly what they need — boosting conversions and customer satisfaction.

Did the implementation work as expected? Find out by measuring the outcomes. Perhaps customers found it easier to search for items, but the search results weren’t seasonally relevant. It could be time to implement a tweaked strategy and “test and learn” to further iterate the processes based on how they perform against goals and key performance indicators (KPIs).

A successful digital customer experience strategy relies on analytics and optimization — which is why tracking must be in place before implementation. 

AI tools play a crucial role in measuring and refining a digital customer experience strategy by providing real-time insights, automating analysis, and enabling data-driven optimizations. You can use AI analytics to identify friction points in the user journey and monitor customer interactions, session durations, and drop-off points. 

Ultimately, a digital customer experience strategy is an ongoing process that requires continuous analysis and optimization to remain effective. Customers' behaviors, preferences, and expectations evolve, and businesses and organizations must adapt to deliver seamless, personalized, and efficient digital experiences.

Shine a light on your users' digital experience with Elastic Observability.

An optimized digital customer experience strategy has both short- and long-term benefits for your organization and customers. When powered by AI, it enhances personalization, automates support, and optimizes engagement in real time — setting your business apart from the competition and driving revenue. But even with a great product, a poor experience costs customers.

The opposite is also true: A well-crafted, AI-driven strategy transforms passive users into loyal advocates through seamless and meaningful customer interactions. Improving retention and conversion directly strengthens your competitive advantage and long-term growth in a digital-first marketplace. 

An AI-powered digital customer experience strategy also furthers your digital transformation by infusing AI into your existing architecture. However, to avoid technical debt as you build out your AI strategy, you need a solution that can not only scale as your data grows, but also adapt to data from any environment as your needs evolve. A flexible, AI-powered framework ensures seamless integration with hybrid systems, cloud platforms, and emerging technologies, enabling real-time insights and automation without costly reconfigurations. By prioritizing interoperability and scalability, your business can future-proof its AI investments while maintaining agility in an ever-changing digital landscape.

Search is a foundational element in any digital customer experience. Elastic’s Search AI Platform can help customers find information quickly and easily with modern, powerful search.

Show customers that you speak their language with accurate and personalized question-answering powered by generative AI. Resolve customer issues in record time, and see satisfaction skyrocket while support costs plummet.

With advanced search, boost sales and delight customers. Tailor product offerings to their needs, upsell with smart recommendations, and highlight glowing reviews to drive conversions. Give customers exactly what they’re looking for — faster than ever.