Research from FullStory sheds light on the key challenges and contradictions in the world of website and mobile app optimisation. FullStory surveyed 700 digital customer experience professionals across the globe. The number one issue that CX professionals spend their time on is “reacting to emergencies and outages”. This was closely followed by “convincing stakeholders to sign things off”.
In contrast, nearly half (43%) want to spend their time making tangible improvements to their on-site and in-app experiences. 35% also want to spend more time getting to know their customers. Unfortunately, a combination of siloed data, disjointed teams and outdated technology is holding them back.
Commenting on these findings, Andrew Fairbank, FullStory’s Vice President of EMEA said, “While there will always be an element of firefighting in customer experience — especially during the Black Friday weekend — responding to emergencies shouldn’t be the bulk of the job. Clearly digital experience professionals have more ambitious plans, with many looking to build a better understanding of their customers.
“Four out of five digital CX professionals say these sorts of insights are ‘vital’ for driving revenue. During a busy sales season like Black Friday, this presents a clear opportunity for brands looking for a competitive edge. With the right tools and data strategy, businesses can change DX from a reactive function to a proactive revenue driver for the business.”
Most digital experiences under-deliver
Consumers expect businesses to understand and meet their needs. However, despite encroaching competition and the well-documented importance of a user-friendly digital experience, many online businesses still fail to meet their customers’ expectations.
With multiple retail and banking sites crashing this Black Friday, digital customer experience teams now spend the majority of their time ‘responding to emergencies and outages’.
Increasingly, new technologies emerge that help businesses understand consumer behaviour and needs better than ever before. Many businesses across industries and geographies are struggling under larger macroeconomic pressures, including softening demand and shrinking budgets. Unfortunately, constrained resources are not changing the level of expectation, with more consumers having higher expectations from their digital experiences over the years. At the end of the day, 72% of shoppers just want to “quickly accomplish what I came to do.”
Many businesses are still just guessing about the DX
The research suggests data should be the backbone behind brands’ decisions about their digital experiences. The vast majority of DX professionals acknowledge that data is a critical part of building successful digital experiences. However, many digital experience strategies and changes are still based on guesswork and anecdotes.
The vast majority of DX pros acknowledge that data is an irreplaceable part of building successful digital experiences. In the survey, 86% of respondents said DX insights are vital for improving customer loyalty. 84% said DX insights are vital for understanding customers as people, acquiring new users, converting customers, and growing revenue.
Enterprise Times: What this means for business.
Increasingly all businesses are well aware of the role digital experiences (DX) play in acquiring and retaining customers. With digital-driven revenue top of mind, the majority of companies have goals to measure and improve the online experiences they’re providing. However, there’s a substantial gap between the expectations and realities of how those plans are informed and, consequently, the benefits they actually drive for brands and their customers.
FullStory’s research of DX professionals sheds light on how companies are approaching digital experiences, analytics solutions, optimizations, and data.
Enterprises that want to keep pace with the market need to use digital experience analytics to understand their users’ behaviours and motives. This means going beyond monitoring what site and app visitors are doing to uncover why they’re doing it. This means seriously getting to grip understanding customer data to get a competitive advantage. Something enterprises find easier ‘said then done.’
