Top companies for digital customer experience strategy

Nine out of ten executives believe customer loyalty has grown in recent years, but only four in ten customers agree. This experience, uncovered in PwC's 2025 Customer Experience Survey, is not a coincidence. It is what happens when companies invest in the idea of a digital customer experience strategy without actually resolving customer frustrations.

The brands getting this right are not the ones with the biggest budgets or the most tools. They are the ones making it genuinely easier for customers to get help when they need it, and that often comes down to investing in the right cobrowsing software. Companies that prioritize customer experience generate 5.7 times more revenue, according to Forrester Research.

So what does a real digital customer experience strategy look like in practice? Here are the top companies, and what we can learn from them.

What is a digital customer experience strategy?
Why you need a digital customer experience strategy
Top companies for digital customer experience strategie
What these companies have in common
Where companies fall short in digital customer experience
Putting your digital customer experience strategy into practice

What is a digital customer experience strategy?

Simply put, a digital customer experience strategy is a plan for how a company shapes every interaction a customer has across its digital channels, from their very first website visit to the moment they need support. This includes websites, mobile apps, live chat, email, and self-service portals — every touchpoint a customer might use along the way.

When was the last time you had a genuinely smooth online customer experience? No hold music, no repeating yourself, no hunting through a help page that did not actually help. This experience is not an accident. It is the result of a deliberate and thoughtful digital customer experience strategy.

A successful strategy often answers three questions:

Where do customers run into friction, and how do we remove it?
How do we create an omnichannel experience?
How can we use data to improve customer experience over time, not just measure it?

When your digital customer experience strategy answers these questions, your customers notice.

Why you need a digital customer experience strategy

Most companies don’t have a digital customer experience strategy and that is exactly why you need one. Most companies have a collection of tools. A chatbot here, a helpdesk there, maybe a customer portal that was built five years ago. As customers move between these tools, they feel the gap, every time.

That gap cost is real, with 63% of people switching to a competitor after just one bad customer experience. That is not a small number. It means every high friction point along your digital journey is a potential exit point for a customer who might otherwise have stayed.

What a structured digital strategy gives you is:

A shared view of every customer. When sales, support, and marketing all work from the same data, a support agent can see past purchases, an account manager can see open tickets, and no one is asking the customer to explain themselves again. Customers stop falling through the cracks between teams because the cracks no longer exist.
The ability to spot a problem before your customers complains. Session analytics and drop-off tracking show exactly where customers are getting confused or abandoning a process. A digital customer experience strategy built around this data lets teams fix problems before they become a pattern of lost customers.
Consistency across every channel. A customer who contacts you by email and then follows up on live chat should feel like they are talking to the same company, not starting over.

Without a strategic foundation, every new tool you add creates another gap for customers to fall through.

Top companies for digital customer experience strategies

These are not the only companies worth learning from, but they represent four genuinely different approaches to getting the digital customer experience right.

Zendesk: Making context the foundation of every customer interaction

Zendesk is built around a principle that sounds simple but is harder to execute than most companies realize, customers should never have to repeat themselves. The platform brings email, messaging, chat, voice, and help center into one workspace so agents always have full context, regardless of which channel a customer reaches out through.

Every interaction feeds into a unified customer profile, so the next agent who picks up a conversation already knows the history. This removes one of the most common problems in digital support, the customer who has explained their issue twice and is now explaining it a third time to someone new. Treating that as a structural problem, and solving it at a structural level, is what separates a deliberate strategy from a collection of tools.

The lesson is simple: context is not a nice-to-have. It is what makes support feel effortless.

Intercom: Treating digital support as a conversation, not a queue

Intercom's approach is grounded in the idea that support should feel more like a conversation than a process. Rather than routing customers into ticket queues, Intercom built a platform that keeps interactions personal and continuous, with customer history, past conversations, and behavioral context all surfaced in one place.

What sets this apart is how Intercom approaches proactive engagement. Support does not start when a customer submits a problem. It starts the moment the platform detects that a customer might be stuck. Product tours, in-app messages, and targeted outreach are all part of how.

Intercom helps companies reach customers before frustration builds. Moving from reactive to proactive means fewer complaints, faster resolutions, and customers who feel like the company actually anticipated their needs.

Salesforce: Giving every team the same picture

Salesforce is built around one ambition, making sure that every person who touches a customer, in sales, marketing, or support, is working from the same real-time data. A support agent can see a customer's purchase history, a salesperson can see open support tickets, and a marketer can see recent interactions, all without switching tools or chasing down context from another team.

The result is a customer experience that feels connected, because behind the scenes it actually is. When the full customer picture is available everywhere, teams stop working in silos and customers stop feeling like they are dealing with three different companies under one brand name.

ActiveCampaign: Personalizing the experience through automation

ActiveCampaign tracks customer behaviour across email, chat, and web interactions and uses that data to trigger the right message at the right moment, without requiring a team member to monitor every touchpoint manually. That is what makes personalization at scale actually possible, not hiring more people, but building smarter connections between the data you already have.

A customer who views a specific product page, contacts support two days later, and then receives a relevant follow-up email is having three interactions that feel connected. That continuity is what builds trust. And trust, more than any individual touchpoint, is what keeps customers coming back.

The digital customer experience strategy that ties it all together

The tools are different. The industries are different. The customer bases are different. But the same principles show up every time a company builds a digital customer experience strategy that actually works.

They treat experience as a strategy, not a project. There is no CX initiative with a start and end date. The work of improving the customer experience is ongoing and cross-functional.
They use data to get better, not just to report. Customer behaviour feeds back into product decisions, support workflows, and personalization in ways that customers can actually feel, not just into a dashboard that someone reviews once a quarter.
They connect digital and human touchpoints. The best digital customer experience strategies know when a customer needs a person rather than another automated response, and make that transition feel effortless rather than like starting over.

Where companies fall short in digital customer experience

Most companies that struggle with customer experience are not short on tools. They have ticketing systems, live chat, email platforms, and automation. What they are missing is visibility: the ability to actually see what a customer is experiencing when something goes wrong.

When a customer hits a problem inside a web application and contacts support, the agent is working blind. They hear a description of the problem, try to recreate it, send instructions, and hope. This back-and-forth is one of the most avoidable sources of friction in any digital customer experience strategy, and it has nothing to do with how good the agent is. The agent simply cannot see what the customer is looking at.

88% of customers expect faster response times than they did just a year ago. Speed alone is not the answer, but resolving a problem in a single interaction is. And that only becomes possible when the agent has the same view of the problem that the customer does.

Putting your digital customer experience strategy into practice

The lack of agent visibility is not filled by adding another platform to the stack. It is filled by giving support teams the ability to view the customer’s screen. When an agent has that kind of visibility, the entire dynamic of a support interaction changes. Descriptions become unnecessary. The agent sees the problem and solves it.

That is what cobrowsing makes possible. Rather than asking a customer to describe what they are seeing, the agent joins their live browser session and sees it directly. No downloads for the customer, no screen-share links, no scheduling. The session starts in seconds from inside the support tools your team already uses, with sensitive fields masked automatically so customer data stays protected throughout.

Beyond faster resolutions, cobrowsing also gives support teams the ability to guide customers through complex workflows step by step, in real time. Whether a customer is stuck on an onboarding flow, a payment process, or a form they cannot complete, the agent can navigate alongside them rather than talking them through it blind.

When support teams can see and solve problems in real time, they stop being a friction point in the customer journey. That is what separates a digital customer experience strategy that looks good on paper from one that customers can actually feel.

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