Symptoms You Need a New Digital Strategy
When you’ve been the owner of your company’s digital customer experiences for a while, it can be hard to get a clear, unbiased, high-level view of how they’re performing and what you can do to reduce friction, increase adoption, utilization, and ultimately, sentiment & advocacy in a way that complements your high-touch offline experiences.
Sometimes, it’s hard to validate if there even is a problem, much less gain consensus on what the problem is, because that clarity requires analysis of qualitative and quantitative data, gained from multiple sources, perspectives, and compared against changing users, environments, conditions, and points in time. Because there are so many variables, including external political and socioeconomic conditions, a digital strategy built on research from even a year ago may be outdated and need revisiting.
Some of the more obvious signs that your digital experience (DX) strategy needs a refresh are low engagement rates, high abandonment rates, and consistently lower customer sentiment across online experiences as compared to offline experiences. But, there are so many more less obvious symptoms that it’s time to have a closer look at your digital strategy.
New digital interactions, online content and tools that you release have limited adoption, engagement, and utilization. Conversion of new and support of new and existing customers continues to happen in historically successful offline channels (brick-and mortar and phone), regardless of the investments you’ve made in online experiences.
You aren’t sure of how to go-to-market and what part technology plays in new products and services. You want to continue growing your customers and the products and services your existing customers buy from you, but when it comes to releasing new products and services, you aren’t sure of what’s the best path and why.
Your customers gravitate to offline, high-touch and high-cost interactions. Customer feedback indicates different perceptions about the quality of experience they have when they interact with your company online versus offline, and, although you’ve invested in digital experiences, those aren’t the ones that are used most often or result in highest customer satisfaction.
You aren’t seeing the cost efficiencies or conversion rates you expected to see from investment in digital marketing technology. Your marketing programs may be one-for-all generic campaigns shared with all customers, or they’re so highly specialized and localized that they’re not scalable.
You don’t know the attributes of your current best customers, much less those of your near future and farther future customers: What makes them best for your business, why they uniquely value you, and how you can attract and retain more customers like them—right now.
These are some of the less obvious symptoms that it’s time to take a closer look at your digital strategy. If you’d like to schedule a consultation to define DX challenges specific to your company, contact us.
If you’d like to learn more about what new understanding and deliverables you can expect to receive from working with a digital strategy consultancy, see our post, “What You Get Out of Digital Experience Research & Strategy Consulting.”