Published 29 Aug, 2022 4 minutes of reading
If you want to be successful in the digital world, it isn't enough to simply undertake a transformation process, migrate your systems to the cloud, or digitize your processes to make them more efficient. First, you have to start with the core reason your business exists, the customer. It is essential to know your customer, to understand their behaviors, to understand what motivates them and what creates friction. This is the only way you can design and deliver positive experiences that build customer loyalty and turn them into advocates for your company. As Philip Kotler said "the best advertising is done by satisfied customers."
Digital channels are the main point of contact between many companies and their customers. This is even more true today as a result of the pandemic, and highlights the importance of self-managing any interaction that the customer requires. For example, onboarding or product sales, after-sales service, and the processes of addressing complaints and requests. All of this means it's necessary to design experiences that exceed the expectations of our customers and users without losing sight of our business objectives.
4 High-Level Digital Experience Factors
In general, high-level digital experiences are the result of a combination of several factors. Here are some of the most relevant factors from our extensive experience in the financial sector:
Customer Mindset
The customer should be the center of any company. However, in many cases, teams or product areas are immersed in delivering digital solutions that incorporate the latest technological trends or focus on meeting the particular requirements of a key stakeholder or a group of stakeholders that fail to consolidate the needs of customers or recurring users within the solution. What happens then, is the solution goes unused, and hinders the potential revenue of your business for as long as the real needs of your customers continue to be neglected.
Another mistake that often happens with a lack of customer focus is instead a focus on only one part of the process, leaving aside the entire customer journey within the product. For this reason, the opportunity cost of identifying the digital interactions that add the most value is high. A common example is product acquisition, where the focus is on onboarding, and subsequently, proper digital after-sales service is neglected.
We recommend you avoid this situation by performing a Discovery process, using prototypes, and testing with customers and users so that they can help detect any non-conformity or absence of relevant and essential processes of the product.
Alignment with business objectives
From the outset, it's important to establish what you want to achieve with any given experience and how to leverage your business goals. To do this, company leadership must evangelize and align the entire organization around a strategy and the joint goals to be achieved. In this way, teams are able to internalize and learn about the status of the company and the environment in which they operate.
It's also essential to understand the value that your team can bring to your organization and establish what's expected of them. This prevents teams from developing experiences that are not viable, either because of your own business restrictions or because they don't have a relevant impact on overall goals.
Empowered Multidisciplinary Teams
With the advent of agile frameworks, the idea of having the development team as a simple "order taker" from product areas has been disproven. The experience of countless agile teams shows that it's the mix of skills and diverse team knowledge that allows innovative ideas to be generated and developed.
For these ideas to see the light of day, it's critical that company leadership allow the teams to explore freely, iterate, and when errors occur, identify and correct them quickly. This requires trust and fluid two-way communication because no matter how much value the team wants to deliver, the objective will not be achieved if these ideas are not validated with customers. These ideas must be realistic, aligned with the company's objectives, and take into account business constraints.
Iteration and Continuous Improvement
To know if the result of your experiences is as expected, you and your team need to establish some base metrics from the perspectives of the business, the customer and the end user. In addition, you need to establish the required information and frequency, in order to facilitate how you monitor customer behavior with each experience. This way you can see immediately, anticipate and correct any failures if the results aren't as expected.
A digital experience is something that will continue to change over time, either because the needs or frictions of your users evolve, the conditions of the environment or the company vary, or because there are new technologies that improve the experience. Because of this, your teams must create habits to continuously listen to customers and monitor for changes in experience metrics, as this allows them to detect and act early, and saves a lot of headaches and sunk costs for the organization.
Conclusion
For teams that work on developing digital experiences, the best reward is to see a positive impact on the lives of those who use our solutions. At Modyo, we know that trust in the digital world is built day by day and increases with every interaction that customers create through our digital channels, and thanks to many of them, customers come to recommend us when their need has been satisfied.
If you're interested in building experiences with a composable frontend platform, reach out and talk to us.
