Why brands that don’t prioritise their Digital Experiences risk losing customers

It's safe to say consumers expect seamless digital experiences, and their patience with poor digital experiences is low. Add to that expectation that brands are balancing budget constraints and siloed teams, brands would be forgiven for saying innovation is the last thing on their minds. But it would be a mistake. For consumers, the ability to purchase products and services online, often in new and interesting ways that capture their attention, is growing increasingly important in current market conditions. Goldman Sachs places UK recession conditions only marginally ahead of Russia’s, with things like the energy crisis and rising household energy bills pushing inflation higher than other markets. Not that the rest of Europe is off the hook by any means.?

As a result, organisations are catching a wave of online versus in-person activity from consumers. It makes sense; in online environments, consumers can more easily compare products and services to get a good deal. They can save on petrol by researching and transacting in a virtual world. This means businesses must perform digitally because long-term viability comes down to happy customers, and those customers are now online.

50% of consumers say they are not happy with their digital experiences

FullStory’s 2023 Global Consumer Survey suggests customers are not as happy as online providers of products and services would like to think. One in two consumers being dissatisfied is shocking, and it’s even higher in the UK, at 56%. Slow web page loading times and loading errors are genuine points of frustration.?

More worryingly, 57% of consumers indicate that when something goes wrong online, they won’t tell you they are dissatisfied. Instead, they’ll move on, and you will be none the wiser. Alarmingly the number of users who abandon a website or app without providing feedback is even higher in The Netherlands (66%) and in Germany (67%).

Time to stop tracking and start hearing customers

Top of mind for most businesses finding a foothold in this competitive digital world are:

1. How can we reduce costs?
2. How can we increase revenue?
3. How can we lower risk?

The answer's the same for all three: listen to your customers, learn how they engage with your brand online, and understand why they act the way they do. Get so good at understanding them that you can almost preempt their needs. Genuinely hear them without waiting for them to reach such a point of frustration that they come to you via support or complaint channels. And as our survey suggests, the greater risk is that you might never see them again.?

Listening helps you save money on creating experiences your customers don't like and enables you to deliver what they do, removing a degree of risk from your business. But it's incredibly difficult to listen at scale across your full digital experience. As consumers, our interactions with bank or transport services span multiple channels, including website, mobile app, and maybe even a kiosk when buying train tickets. As an organisation, you may be capable of interacting directly with hundreds of your customers, and yet still be ignoring the millions.?

For example, Rank Group runs the largest chain of casino and bingo venues in the UK. It introduced FullStory to solve the siloed views of customers’ experiences on its website and mobile apps. Now it knows that 70% of its users come via their mobile devices, 50% were affected by an addressable browser issue, and 90% had a confusing landing page experience, all now resolved. Imagine having the ability to take away customers' frustrations you might otherwise never have discovered.

Listening when customers are not talking

The answer to listening at scale is, again, simple. It’s digital experience intelligence or DXI.?

DXI is the technology that lets you build exciting, highly personalised, seamless digital customer experiences in a secure, privacy-first environment. As a DXI platform, FullStory gives you a complete set of digital data without collecting personally identifiable or sensitive information that can put you at risk.?

And the privacy part of listening is important because the privacy landscape has significantly changed recently, with Apple updating iOS privacy to an opt-in model and Google phasing out third-party cookies. 70% of online customers have become “invisible” due to the changes in privacy regulations, making it challenging for businesses to deliver a perfect digital experience.

A recent data summit hosted by The Drum says the way to reach the "Invisible 70%" is by investing in first-party data, as FullStory does within a Private by Default model. Digital perfection gets especially difficult when you consider how traditional analytics tools were not built for today’s multi channel, privacy-centric world.

The solution? Investing in first-party data that is captured while automatically excluding personally identifiable or sensitive information. Only then can you truly listen to your customers and deeply understand them.

“I’m already listening with my current CX tools,” you might say. Well, DXI goes way beyond traditional CX and legacy analytics tools. Some of the analytics tools businesses are still using to figure out what their customers want were not built for today’s multi-channel world of apps and super apps. They were designed to plot the journey you think your customers will take on your website (usually parking mobile in the “too hard” basket) and then fall back on assumptions and guesswork when they don’t.?

By contrast, today's organisations can tap into their customers' behaviours using DXI, leveraging customers' quantitative and qualitative data to drive continual improvement. This is a breakthrough in delivering customer happiness in digital environments by putting customers at the heart of everything we do.

We must redefine customer centricity

The problem with customer centricity is that everyone claims it, with sometimes little more basis than service with a smile. Ambiguity around the term is causing some digital businesses to rest on their laurels, settling for knowing less about their customers' experiences and consequently delivering less value to them in digital interactions.

Delighting customers is the simplest blueprint for success. Infallible, in fact. The key to delighting customers is never to assume you’re already doing it. Be curious! There’s always more to learn from your customers to improvise your interactions with them.

One of the things that most attracted me to my role with FullStory was that this platform exists almost exclusively to make customers happy. It anchors on customer delight as the single most powerful driver of business success. It functions on the premise that all data matters and unless you can intelligently capture, filter and surface that data in meaningful ways to everyone in the organisation (not just the analytics mega minds), there will always be a divide between you and your customers.?

In short, organisations hoping to increase their share of online business to thrive (dare I say grow) during a recession could find themselves pushing a cart uphill without the ability to see things clearly and act quickly.

Tata Digital has a single point of reporting truth across products?

Tata Digital is a great example of a company that’s been able to do just that. The Indian communications giant created a super app that allows customers to shop across multiple products and services with a single login. Tata uses FullStory to stitch together customer journeys across portfolios and gain a single reporting source to understand complex customer interactions across products, channels and regions. This makes it easier to go to market with multiple products.?

Tata makes full use of its ability to identify rage clicks, dead clicks and other frustration signals that indicate a required effort to improve the customer experience. It also leverages behavioural insights to improve conversions, ramping its revenues. Essentially Tata is paving the way for complex super app environments to guarantee excellent digital experiences., which I find inspirational. You can watch Tata’s story at Spark 2022 here.

Culturally customer-centric

While FullStory’s DXI is empowering the likes of? L'Occitane, loveholidays, LexisNexis, Ocado Group, Mammut and SoundCloud to elevate online customer experiences and maximise online revenues, there’s another important factor to consider for those ready to listen at scale. No technology solution is a silver bullet, and you could still trip up without investing in a culture of customer-centricity.

I'm passionate about culture, and the FullStory culture is a huge reason for my being here. When you deliver solutions that put the customer at the heart of everything via teams that do the same, it's energising! The people I work with daily challenge, motivate and inspire me. Their enthusiasm comes through in every single customer interaction. When our customers see that we will stop at nothing to help them achieve their goals, they trust us with their most serious business challenges, and we solve them together. I like the consistency of being a company that prizes excellent customer experiences above all else and can give that ability to others through the FullStory platform.

3 pieces of advice for building intelligent digital experiences

If there were three pieces of advice I could give to those looking to build intelligent digital experiences that put the customer at the heart of everything they do, it would be these:

Be curious. Cultivate a passion for learning from your customers’ interactions with you.

Be continuous. In today’s fast-moving digital arena, things change on a dime. Empower your teams to use insights from digital experiences to make data-driven decisions.

Be passionate. Create a culture of customer obsession, with teams inspired by and celebrating your customers' successes.

I will leave you with a question: If you could discover one new thing about your customers this year, what would it be??