What is digital customer experience? A comprehensive guide.

Customers have high expectations when engaging with a brand online. They expect a cohesive customer journey and have little patience for disjointed interfaces and interactions. Most business leaders know how important it is to deliver a high-quality customer experience, but that can look a little different when your company operates digitally.

In this guide:

• What is digital customer experience?
• Digital customer experience vs. customer experience
• Why is digital customer experience important?
• Digital customer experience journey stages
• How to manage your digital customer experience
• Digital customer experience examples
• Getting started with digital customer experience

What is digital customer experience?

Digital customer experience is how customers perceive your brand based on every interaction they have across digital platforms. It includes everything from your website and mobile app to social media, email, and even AI-powered chatbots.

Why does this matter? Because customers don’t just browse online — they shop, engage, and build relationships with brands digitally. Around 75% use multiple channels for a single transaction, and more than half expect a personalized experience throughout. That means a clunky, inconsistent digital experience isn’t just frustrating — it’s a lost opportunity.

To compete, your digital experience must be:

• Seamless: Every touchpoint should feel connected, from first visit to purchase.
• Personalized: Customers expect tailored experiences, not generic messaging.
• Frictionless: Navigation, checkout, and customer support should be effortless.

To meet customer expectations and drive loyalty, invest in these digital channels:

• Brand website
• Mobile app
• Live chat
• Email marketing
• Social media
• Chatbots
• Personalized accounts
• Push notifications
• eLearning portals
• Online reviews

Customers don’t just compare your digital experience to competitors — they compare it to the best experiences they’ve ever had online. If you’re not meeting that standard, you’re losing ground.

Digital customer experience vs. customer experience.

Digital customer experience is a subset of the broader customer experience. While customer experience covers every touchpoint — online and offline — digital customer experience focuses exclusively on digital interactions, from your website to social media to mobile apps.

But customers don’t consciously differentiate between the two. They expect the same level of service, whether they’re engaging with your brand in-store, on your website, or through a chatbot. That means any gap between digital and traditional experiences feels like friction.

To create a seamless experience:

• Ensure consistency in messaging, branding, and service across all channels.
• Align digital and offline teams so customers don’t feel a disconnect.
• Use technology (like omnichannel customer support and AI-driven personalisation) to bridge the gap.

Your digital experience isn’t just an add-on — it’s a direct extension of your overall brand perception.

Why is digital customer experience important?

Customers don’t just judge your brand by your product — they judge it by their experience interacting with you online. A seamless digital experience builds trust, strengthens connections, and ultimately drives sales.

Consider this: 66% of consumers say they’ll stop buying from a brand if their experience isn’t personalized. Customers expect more than just a functional website or an automated email — they want interactions that feel tailored to them.

But the stakes are just as high on the flip side. A slow, frustrating, or impersonal digital experience doesn’t just hurt conversions — it sends potential buyers straight to your competitors. In a digital-first world where every alternative is just a few clicks away, your customer experience is a make-or-break factor.

What happens when your digital CX is seamless?

• Customers are more likely to buy — faster and with fewer objections.
• They stick around longer, increasing lifetime value.
• They refer others, growing your brand organically.

Your digital experience isn’t just a nice-to-have — it’s a sales engine. If it’s not frictionless, fast, and personalized, you’re leaving money on the table.

Here are some more reasons not to neglect digital customer experience:

• More and more customers are online: Customers constantly compare your company with ecommerce competitors. Purchases are no longer being made predominantly on desktop computers but on the fly, often with a single click, on a mobile device.
• Customers’ expectations are higher: Ignoring these trends towards online and mobile buying, and failing to prioritize your digital customer experience, means you’re missing revenue opportunities.
• Digital insights: There may be no face-to-face interaction with digital customer experience, but there are still plenty of chances to get to know your customers better by studying the metrics — traffic, page views, and conversion rates — to understand customer behavior and gain insight into your strategy.
• Tailored to you: The data collection mentioned above can also help you knock off the rough edges of your digital customer experience, allowing highly personalized interactions with customers and potential customers. Emotional connections count.
• The quality –of service matters to customers: Your digital customer experience should offer personalized recommendations, virtual customer assistants, and an optimized experience. Just because a customer is not dealing with a human being face-to-face does not mean they accept lower standards of service.

Digital customer experience journey stages.

There are five stages of the digital customer experience: awareness, evaluation, purchase, return, and advocacy. Each stage gives businesses the chance to deliver outstanding digital experiences, cultivate customer loyalty, and improve growth.

This is how each of the stages interact with the wider digital customer experience.

How to manage your digital customer experience.

Tactics for managing your digital customer experience hinge on consistency, credibility, and reliability. Consumers expect digital channels and technology to be maintained and accessible around the clock, with little or no interruption in services and support. Monitoring and managing your digital CX isn’t easy, but here are some tips for doing it more effectively.

Know your customers.

First, marketers need to thoroughly understand their target audience and what they might want from a digital experience. Knowing your customer has never been more important — it dictates everything from personalization campaigns to how involved you should be on social media.

In some cases, customers expect brands to be an active and common presence in their digital lives — sending out frequent emails and social posts, perhaps weighing in on news, pop culture, or political issues. Others may prefer minimal interaction or more casual communication. The core of your digital CX depends on which customers you’re servicing.

Ask for customer feedback.

You can’t know if your digital customer experience is working unless you ask the customers. This could involve using a survey, a simple rating box to judge overall customer satisfaction, or something more in depth. The goal is to gather detailed information from your customers to help you improve their overall digital experience.

Data is crucial to managing your digital CX. It can be used to boost campaigns that resonate most with your target market or assess those that aren’t performing well. Ensure that, as part of your digital CX management, you’re consistently asking for feedback either directly from customers or using web analytics tools to see how they are reacting throughout their journeys.

Try to personalize.

Today’s customers don’t just want personalization — they expect it. People love to feel like they’re important and being catered to directly. With relevant customer data, you can tailor your campaigns, demonstrate your brand is interested on an individual level, and deliver a personalized digital CX.

But keep in mind there are consequences to getting personalized customer interactions wrong. Incorrectly identifying an individual or an interest can alienate a person and disrupt their customer experience, causing them to form a bad impression of your brand and look to others instead.

Constantly optimize.

Digital technologies and platforms are continuously evolving, so even those marketing teams that already have a digital customer experience strategy should not sit back. It’s important to constantly evaluate your digital CX and look for ways to achieve your goals, either by bolstering existing campaigns or trying new channels.

Customer feedback is a valuable resource for optimization, as are the data trends that emerge from platforms such as your CRM, website analytics, and marketing automation programs. You can always improve your digital CX. Keep experimenting and optimizing.

Digital customer experience examples.

1. Amazon.

Amazon offers a hyper-personalized digital customer experience that most of us are familiar with, even though most of us have never interacted with a single human working for the company — apart from a delivery person.

It can seem uncanny how the site has gotten to know us, predicting products we want to buy or making recommendations.

Think personal, not personalized.

2. Netflix.

Whether you love or loathe its recommendations for what you want to watch next, Netflix is constantly changing in an incredibly competitive market. Its digital customer experience marketers are obsessed with its customers, not just thinking, “Who are our customers?” but also “Who is this particular customer, and how can we keep them from being swept away by the other entertainment platforms?”

What the streaming service calls “consumer science” is employed to drive an ultra-personalized, always-shifting experience that puts customer delight at the top of their objectives.

3. Apple.

The computer and smartphone giant offers an interesting example in that it mixes a digital customer experience with an offline customer experience in its brick-and-mortar stores. That started with the removal of the word “store” from the buildings themselves and thinking of the outlets not as places to buy an iPhone or a computer but more like “town squares”— an experience where everyone is welcome and where people can be shown how to use their tech better, practice their coding, or hang out in comfort. It’s not about the products — it’s about the personal experience.

Getting started with digital customer experience.

Digital CX is critical to any modern marketing strategy. By leveraging web and mobile channels to connect and create relationships with customers, you can improve their perception of your brand and lead them to convert. While delivering a cutting-edge digital CX might seem difficult, many companies already have a foundation in place — in the form of customer management tools and data. Adding a platform that is designed specifically for digital customer experience can be the missing puzzle piece you need to succeed.

Adobe Experience Platform makes personalized digital CX possible. Experience Platform is an open system that stitches together customer data from every interaction through every channel in real time, resulting in truly comprehensive customer profiles that drive relevant experiences. It gives you the ability to analyze the data that really matters for digital customer experience, train artificial intelligence and machine learning models that put your customers first and connect all your CX technology to a single source of truth.