On the way to Experience Driven Business?

Today, there is not an event, not a con­fer­ence, not a pre­sen­ta­tion, where no one speaks about cus­tomer expe­ri­ence. This is due to the clear pre­dom­i­nance of dig­i­tal, but also to the increas­ing will to break down silos: thus “Nav­i­gat­ing the new dig­i­tal divide”, the recent Deloitte study, showed that if, in the Unit­ed States, the dig­i­tal impacts 64% of in-store sales, only 4% of total Retail sales takes place online. In oth­er words, the dig­i­tal is a ful­ly fledged sales chan­nel, but it is espe­cial­ly a cru­cial chan­nel for the over­all growth of the com­pa­ny, both through dig­i­tal and phys­i­cal channels.

There­fore, it is impor­tant to offer con­sumers a uni­fied expe­ri­ence across all chan­nels. The more qual­i­ty is offered through this expe­ri­ence, the more impact it will have on the busi­ness. The study “The Val­ue of Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence, Quan­ti­fied” con­duct­ed by Gart­ner Medal­lia shows that when we ask cus­tomers to rate their expe­ri­ence on a scale up to 10, an increase in this rat­ing from 1 to 10 is equiv­a­lent to an increase in sales by 2.4! This impact of the expe­ri­ence is even more obvi­ous on sub­scrip­tions, with an increase in sales of up to 6.2 for an extreme­ly pos­i­tive experience.

How to deal with these data as a mar­keter? Often, e‑commerce is more or less akin to a prod­uct cat­a­log, with­out offer­ing a tru­ly engag­ing expe­ri­ence to its Inter­net users. It’s a real prob­lem because it is the build­ing of a rich and con­sis­tent cus­tomer expe­ri­ence that will make the difference.

To achieve this, it is nec­es­sary to rely on four foundations:

1. Cre­ate rich con­tent, par­tic­u­lar­ly by using videos, whose con­sump­tion is explod­ing. Some stud­ies show that the pres­ence of videos increas­es con­ver­sion by 65%!
2. Link this expe­ri­ence with prod­ucts: too many com­pa­nies sep­a­rate the prod­uct cat­a­log and the con­tent cre­at­ed around such prod­ucts. The con­tent should be con­sid­ered as a con­ver­sion aim, and as a dis­cov­ery tool for the prod­uct. This means that the cat­a­log must be above all experiential.
3. Deliv­er this expe­ri­ence on the right device at the right time, to the right per­son. The notion of con­text is essen­tial: we must, of course, opti­mize con­tent based on devices, but also push a per­son­al­ized expe­ri­ence, con­tex­tu­al­ized, in real-time, oth­er­wise the con­ver­sion chances are minimal.
4. Final­ly, mea­sure­ment and opti­miza­tion. It remains essen­tial to con­tin­u­ous­ly mea­sure the results of all these actions to obtain the key to under­stand and opti­mize, in order to ral­ly customers.

To achieve all this opti­mal­ly, brands need to be guid­ed by an agency, but the expe­ri­ence plat­form dimen­sion inte­grat­ing the dif­fer­ent e‑commerce plat­forms (Hybris, IBM, Demand­ware …) like Adobe offers, is also essen­tial. Indeed, what real­ly makes the dif­fer­ence is the abil­i­ty to offer a rich and cre­ative expe­ri­ence, capa­ble of gen­er­at­ing ROI but also ROA (Return on Atten­tion): you have to get the atten­tion and curios­i­ty of your audi­ence, before being able to turn it into customers.

What about you, how impor­tant do you see the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence in dig­i­tal today? Feel free to share your views in the comments.