More than ever, your organization’s digital experience matters. (As revealed in a recent survey report—maybe even more than a physical experience.)
A customer’s ability to navigate your website or mobile app to find what they need is essential, and companies that get this right are quickly excelling.
That fact may seem obvious, but is worth reaffirming.
What’s not obvious, however, is what happens behind the scenes that results in effective, powerful, and profit-driving websites and mobile apps. Which leads to the question: What’s the hold up? If it’s widely agreed upon that impressive digital experiences are vital to growth, why aren’t they the expectation, not the outlier?
The truth is that not all organizations have the right internal mechanisms to make digital experience improvements really adhere to organizational processes.
Keep reading to learn the three characteristics of companies that are truly ready to accelerate the digital experience.
Making Digital Experience Intelligence stick
At Fullstory, we get the chance to work with some of the leading companies in the world who focus on improving digital experience for their customers. And I’ve noticed some commonalities between companies who thrive with digital experience.
In sum, those who are truly breaking new ground are organized to make decisions differently based on facts that matter to their success.
Leading companies are not only able to keep up with changing consumer demands but also to shape expectations—as compared to traditional, siloed organizations who benchmark success with outdated KPIs and make decisions at a glacial pace.
Does your company have the right characteristics to make DXI work?
1. Organization: Cross-functional teams are essential
Many large organizations today are still structured as they have been for decades—where IT, UX, and revenue departments may as well be on separate planets. Each team’s executives might understand how their work progresses the company’s goals, but individual contributors are likely to feel that their daily tasks are disconnected from those metrics that really matter to company growth. When priorities aren’t challenged, company growth stagnates.
The opposite of that traditional model is companies who excel with Digital Experience Intelligence tools. When product, design, engineering, UX, data, analytics, and other functions can access and look at the same dashboards, goals and metrics are clear and up-to-the-second.
For instance, impressive dashboard functionality curates the relevant information that your team is looking for into an at-a-glance update alongside deeper insight. Rather than each team performing their own calculations and analyses, Fullstory can bring all relevant DX data together to create a single source-of-truth for cross-functional teams.
2. Decision-making: Driven by customers
Data-driven decision-making is critical to business success. However, there is one major drawback to be wary of: data can be manipulated to say just about anything someone wants it to.
And—especially for a large single-function team—what feels like your north star could be leading you further astray from decisions that drive growth for your company.
However, when teams base decisions on what the customer data is telling them, they can solve the data-deluge paradox— and the ability to do that is a sign that your team is ready for DXI.
Asking simple questions of DXI data can yield incredible results: Where are our customers frustrated? Where are they confused? Where is our site not working as designed?
With DXI, empathy and data go hand in hand to improve customers’ experience, ensure purchases today, and build long-term brand loyalty.
3. Metrics: Emphasis on what’s effective
It’s the oldest trope in business: “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”
Which is a nice idiom on its face, but falls apart when you consider that you can’t realistically measure everything. Nor is every measurement worth the effort.
The third essential trait of a company that’s ready for DXI is being laser focused on the metrics that matter most to company objectives.
Even cross-functional teams that are focused on customer needs can get lost in the weeds when they are unsure what they are tracking and why. Looking for errors and exception messages or shaving time off performance may or may not matter.
What matters? Put bluntly, the money trail.
Imagine being a product manager at an ecommerce company, and you’re giving a talk about shopping cart conversion rate to an executive. Here are two things you could say:
“After changing our checkout flow, our conversion rate is down 2%.”
“We’ve failed to convert $5 million in transactions since changing our checkout flow.”
The second option would be much more likely to catch executives’ attention. And, it can help you get the buy-in and resources to make necessary changes happen.
If you’re already making a case for substantive changes on your website or mobile app using impactful data, DXI offers the next level of qualitative data to back up and accelerate your claim. One example of how companies emphasize critical metrics is by using Revenue events within Fullstory, which helps teams prioritize their efforts by revealing lost conversions associated with an issue and potential revenue gain from addressing the issue.
Anyone can make digital experience change
Regardless of your level, seniority, or role in an organization, you can make a positive difference in your customers’ experience and your company’s long-term revenue with your digital properties.
If you’re sizing up digital experience at your organization, download our DXI buyer’s guide, and consider the following:
Who you work with and consult—are they all clustered within one function or diversified across technology, business, and analytics?
How you’re making decisions—are decisions based on data for data’s sake, or driven by objective quantification of the customers’ experience?
What you’re basing decisions on—is it a metric with no clear connection to your company’s core strategy, or is it explicitly tied to company revenue and growth?
Putting these elements together will drive meaningful change in your customers’ journeys and their likelihood to return, with payoffs that go beyond today’s revenue and into tomorrow’s growth.
