A digital customer experience can be incredible or incredibly frustrating. Business leaders know this to be true, although they may not be sure what to do about it.

A survey of executives at director level or above found that 93% said their customers’ digital experience is important or very important to the success of their organizations, and 78% of those with C-level titles said they personally had switched brands “often or very often” because of a poor digital experience. In other words, they recognised the danger of customers leaving them because of a poor digital experience – although curiously only 56% reported their customers doing so. The question is whether they are mistaken in expecting their customers to be more forgiving than they themselves are.

A good digital experience is one that does what we expect it to – whether that is finding information we are seeking, viewing video and other multimedia, or transacting business as in an e-commerce or online banking scenario. A bad one is where a video buffers and stalls, the shopping cart won’t check out or the transaction fails. In other words, a bad digital experience makes big promises but fails to follow through on them.

The consequences reported by survey participants include:

• Customer churn – 56%
• Customer complaints – 43%
• Loss of revenue – 39%

One interesting finding of the survey was that C-level executives were more likely than other leaders to assign a high importance to digital experience quality within the overall customer experience. For example, 67% of C-level executives said they were concerned about customer churn related to digital experiences, compared with 56% of the overall sample. Another example: 79% of C-suite executives considered a consistent, high quality digital experience to be essential to the success of the business. Only 50% of the other managers surveyed agreed. If top leaders want to make quality digital experiences a higher priority, they need to communicate that more strongly.

Just 54% of those surveyed believe the digital experience their organisation offers today is excellent – although 76% said the digital customer experience is better than the experience their organizations offer in person.

As management disciplines such as Six Sigma teach us, consistency is one of the most important measures of quality. Only 22% of participants said they had achieved a consistent high level of digital quality, while 78% admitted to delivering some level of inconsistency.

One paradox in the findings is that 89% of participants said they were “satisfied or very satisfied” with the technology they use to analyze digital experiences. Even among those who rated their digital experience as less than excellent, 80% said they were satisfied with their digital analytics. Yet nearly a third (34%) said they don’t know enough about how their digital experiences are perceived from the perspective of the customer. And nearly half (49%) said the biggest barrier to improving quality was “identifying specific quality issues that need improving".

What all this suggests to me is that business leaders are still setting the bar too low – expecting their customers to tolerate what they would not and skimping on analytics that provide the all-important customer perspective. It doesn’t matter how many green lights the IT staff can point to in the data center that demonstrate the digital service is working, if the experience of the end user is a #fail. Business leaders know delivering digital experience quality to customers is important. Now, they need to get serious about making it happen.

 

By Rachel Fairley, CMO at Actual Experience

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