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It’s hard to imagine that any marketer today isn’t aware of the importance of “digital experience” (DX). No longer a nice-to-have, DX has become a pivotal differentiator for organizations in almost any sector, ahead of even price and the product itself because of the power experience has to drive customer loyalty and recurring revenue.

But despite its importance and increasing investment, DX, in the grand scheme of things, is still very much in its infancy. For every Amazon and Spotify that’s providing a slick, simple and truly personalized DX, there are a thousand other organizations struggling to get the basics right with their websites and apps.

Now, those that are behind the curve are racing to build experiences that their customers love while those who are ahead of the game are looking to enhance their experience to ensure their customers remain happy and loyal.

So how do you actually go about building a digital experience capability in your organization? Here are three key steps to get started:

1.   Build a Dedicated DX Team

If you want to take DX seriously, I’d advise building a dedicated team whose job it is to help shape the customer experience and journeys across digital channels. This doesn’t have to mean hiring a whole new department but is instead about creating some form of cross-department ownership to ensure that no element of the digital experience is being siloed or forgotten about entirely.

If you build a dedicated team, you’ll already be ahead of the curve. Clicktale research recently found that only 48% of brands have introduced a dedicated DX team. For the rest, it’s still very much a shared affair, with the sub-disciplines of digital analytics and insight (40%), design and UX (32%) and data science (29%) still being merged with other departments.

2.   Focus on the Right Kind of Data

Most organizations collect data about their customers and process that information to gain customer insights. That much is not new. But the kind of data that organizations collect and analyze has been fairly stagnant for years. Information like a customer’s age, name, location and purchase history has helped brands begin the journey of understanding who their customers are, but it doesn’t help the brand understand true customer behavior. Why? Because customer behavior varies significantly even within age ranges, locations and purchase histories.

Currently, more than half (54%) of our respondents in Clicktale’s research don’t believe that they have a strong understanding of their customers’ behavior across their digital channels. Moreover, while 53% claim they can never have ‘too much’ data, they also admit they have little idea what they should and shouldn’t be paying attention to — even if they are collecting the right kind of data. And worst of all, 40% don’t feel that they are able to turn their data into actionable insights. Clearly, brands are holding themselves back from realizing their own digital experience dream.

The key to building a strong digital experience, though, is to collect and analyze behavioral data — things like mouse movements, clicks, scrolls, zooms and app taps across digital properties. Once you have access to these kinds of insights, you can make better, more informed and more confident decisions around optimizing the experience according to those behaviors, which will help lead to more sales and happier customers.

3.   Unite Data to Create Seamless Experiences

Collecting the right kind of data is one aspect of the solution to creating great digital experiences. The other aspect is uniting the data to create seamless, joined-up experiences across digital assets. Currently, though, 73% are struggling to create a consistent experience.

Part of the problem is mobile — 34% feel they’re not effective at uniting data from their websites with data from their mobile sites, and 39% are struggling to unite data from websites and mobile apps. This is having a real impact on brands’ abilities to meet customer expectations quickly, with 71% of marketing and CX professionals saying that they can’t action customer insights in real time.

Uniting data is unfortunately virtually impossible if the tools and technologies you have in place cannot integrate with each other. It’s becoming more and more important for brands, therefore, to invest in technologies that add value to each other, and centralize data and insights for the DX team, who can then feed the insights into various business units within the organization.

Getting Ahead with DX

I’m sure there is not a marketer in the world that doesn’t want to improve the way they service their customers. And while digital has placed a technological barrier to seeing customers face to face, it has also provided an opportunity to measure behavior much more intricately than ever before. The marketers that will succeed in the DX space will be the ones that ultimately use this behavioral data and insights to better inform their strategy to make better smarter marketing decisions.

Download Digital Experience Management Through Marketing: Orchestrating Omni-Channel Conversations to learn about the three steps to achieving success in our omni-channel worked and about the business value marketers derive by mastering orchestration of omni-channel marketing campaigns.