Digital disappointment – why some customers aren’t fans

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Last month IBM Institute for Business Value released our 4^th report on ‘The Experience Revolution’

Through interviews with more than 600 mainly CMOs and CSOs in B2C companies globally and surveying almost 6.000 consumers, we have tried to establish, why adoption by consumers of new digital experiences, often disappoints the companies.

They have engineered new ways for their consumers of interacting with the company applying state-of-art-technologies such as mobile apps, loyalty programs, connected appliances, voice command, augmented reality, to name a few examples. But – alas! –  customers don’t use them. Why?

Are customers even aware that companies are launching these digital initiatives?

Are all consumers digital enthusiasts?

In fact, we discovered that reaping the benefits companies seek may be more difficult than many executives realize.

There are three serious misconceptions and disconnects between companies and consumers:

• Companies are launching digital CX initiatives without fully understanding what would motivate their customers to try them.
• Executives have miscalculated the extent to which generational differences can affect consumers’ interest in digital CX.
• For many consumers, their initial experiences using digital CX have been disappointing.

The big disconnect is that companies and consumers are seriously misaligned, as this figure summarizes:

While customers are looking for time savings, convenience and faster, better results, companies think they want new digital experiences and always self-service.  And they also vastly under estimate the importance of age to consumers preferences.

Recommendations:  Turn digital disenchantment in delight:

As we do with every IBV study, the report includes some practical recommendations that can help companies avoid these types of traps in your CX strategy:

1. Design digital experiences to meet customer expectations, not your own
2. Analyze customers’ root motivations, desires and pain points
3. Make customer utility and simplicity the core values of your digital CX transformation
4. Design marketing strategies for digital CX aligned to the specific needs of your customer base

In the report we detail our recommendations, but let me just touch on the second point, which I think is key:

Assuming that you instinctively know what drives customers to change their behavior can lead to misconceptions and misdirected initiatives. Millennials, Gen Xers and Baby Boomers, generally speaking, have different levels of interest in digital CX. Recognizing that not all customers may be eager to adopt any digital CX is an important step. But, your customer base will always include people within each generation who defy the norm.

This is why having a detailed, multidimensional understanding of your customers, including their propensity to use digital, is essential. By applying advanced analytics and cognitive technologies to synthesize both structured and unstructured customer data from a variety of sources, you can build a nuanced profile of your customers that will help you determine the right digital CX initiatives to invest in and the best approach for customer adoption.

Here’s an example – When a telecommunications company wanted to reduce operational costs, they decided to invest in online customer service capabilities that would make it easier for customers to get the information they needed. To promote adoption, they took an analytical approach. The company combined unstructured data gleaned from recordings of customer service calls with structured data from traditional telecom sources like billing records to develop an online service propensity score.

Based on this analysis, the company determined that this propensity score could be used to indicate which customers would need an incentive to use the new online tools.

Click here, to download the full report from IBM Institute for Business Value.

For any further questions, do not hesitate to contact me at: andersq@dk.ibm.com