How to Create the Perfect Digital Experience with Cloud?

A digital experience cloud stems from the concept of digital experience platforms-ones that empower brands to provide an integrated, personalized, consistent, and seamless user experience. Whether you're looking to deliver an integrated user experience or manage your brand's user experience across digital touchpoints, investing in a cloud-powered digital experience platform is key.

What are Cloud-based Digital Experience Platforms? 

Quite simply, a cloud-based digital experience platform helps manage the entire user experience across digital touchpoints in the customer journey. Think of it as a fully managed platform that empowers brands to run digital experiences at the click of a button. You can also: 

• Connect digital experiences powered by data from your CRM across the customer journey 
• Build a more flexible and scalable strategy that effectively addresses customer needs in real-time 
• Leverage content management and platform services from a centralized place 
• Build, scale, and deliver digital experiences across channels and touchpoints within the user journey 
• Deliver personalized and actionable user interactions boosting customer loyalty 

Also Read: How to Create a Customer-Centric Experience that Drives Loyalty

A Useful Example of Experience Cloud in Action 

The Experience Cloud in Salesforce is a digital experience platform that enables businesses to digitize their services, platforms, and channels and engage better with customers. 

Case Study: How Xcel Energy Created a Seamless Journey to Retain Loyal Customers 

The problem: Xcel Energy, a U.S.-based utilities company, required: 

• A seamless way to manage all its digital assets such as website, microsites, partner sites, and mobile applications 

• A single digital experience platform from the front-end to the backend agent experience 

The solution:  

• Seamless alignment: Xcel’s digital assets were created on separate systems. This kind of disjointed product experience needed diverse skill sets and multiple partner teams to manage. Ultimately, the system became inefficient. In order to get a single view of the customer, the brand leveraged Salesforce and paved the way for a hyper-connected experience across their website, portals, registration sites, and so on. 
• Reduced effort: Hustling between native mobile apps, unauthenticated web CMS platforms, and in-house systems, Xcel's team is required to conduct smaller updates three times or more to maintain consistency across channels. Naturally, this led to the greater investment of time and resources, further delaying the time-to-market. The Experience Cloud is Salesforce-provided configurable, out-of-the-box experiences, instead of expending resources for something completely custom. 
• Lowered load: The new sites, built on Experience Cloud, came power-packed with a Service Cloud-connected customer support site, a building and remodeling site for B2B distributors, and a site for users to easily enroll products and purchase warranties. Plus, it offered a plethora of self-service tools, lowering the load on service agents and sales representatives significantly. 

The results: 

Since implementing Experience Cloud, the brand has witnessed: 

• 70% digital adoption within their service application experience 
• A 14-point increase in customer satisfaction 

Top Tips to Remember When Delivering a Digital Cloud Experience 

• User expectations: Start by understanding the standard of customer experience your brand wishes to deliver instead of treating digitally-powered user experience as an after-thought. 

• Standard multichannel experience: Ensure that your customer experience is consistent, trusted, integrated, immersive, and personalized. Whether it's mobile, voice, AR, or VR; every user experience should be contextual and compatible across channels and platforms. Starbucks is an excellent example of a seamless and consistent digital experience for end-users: 

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• Data safety is paramount: The user experience should be able to demonstrate how the user data will stay secure and protected, and of course, be used responsibly. 
• Integration of legacy systems and new applications is critical: Remember that your legacy systems and new applications are able to co-exist, without one eating into the other's productivity (or profitability). You should be able to tap into the legacy data sets and use it to your advantage on your cloud-based digital experience platform. According to research, companies that invest in cloud transitioning can enjoy 50% or more revenue growth boost over their peers. 

The Bottom Line 

Typically, users looking to deliver powerful digital experiences have three primary requirements. The ability to: 

1. Adapt to the changing market trends and business needs with greater agility 
2. Deliver a connected and customized customer interaction experience 
3. Drive a multichannel customer journey with consistency across touchpoints 

This is where digital experience platforms come into the big picture and can empower organizations to be digital-first and future-ready.