Forrester CX: Superior Digital CX Drives Revenue

We are live-blogging from Forrester’s CXNYC this week, the event for customer experience leaders, innovators, and practitioners.

Harley Manning and Andrew Hogan dove deeper into how CX can drive revenue.  They gave us some specific examples of what to do to help your experience give better $$ results.

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It’s not enough to be digital these days.  Digital experiences tend to be viewed as superior than physical experiences. Amazon vs Walmart. ETrade vs Charles Schwab (who has a good digital CX)  It’s also not a free ticket to revenue growth.

Starbucks

The app knows what you buy. It uses geolocation to the closest store. They made the core use work pretty well. You can do mobile orders with it. They tell you how long it will take.

Results: “Mobile order and pay is enabling us to serve more customers more quickly and efficiently and to significantly reduce attrition off the line.”  It’s 20% of transactions at the busiest stores and the busiest times.

What’s happening most of the time?

• Sluggish responses on mobile apps
• Impenetrable jargon in an app or web site. (financial site example…… oh boy. Even retail has problems.)
• Taunting error messages.  The error message is hard to find and you have no idea what went wrong
• Unnecessary steps. You need to design for probability thinking

The Digital User Experience Review

Forrester developed a new methodology to review these sites.  It’s an expert review with the attempt to achieve user goals. They evaluate the experience based on a specific set of criteria.

1. Search and navigation
2. Content
3. Progress and workflow
4. Error avoidance and recovery
5. Privacy and trust

Each of the items above is reviewed across three levels: presentation, interactions, value.

Four basics that elevate digital experience and drive revenue

1. Deliver with speed
   1. This has the clearest impact to revenue
   2. There is a direct relationship between conversion rate and load time. Walmart had big results for every 100 ms of improvement, incremental revenue went up by 1%.  That also led to 12% growth in e-commerce sales.
   3. Financial times did a study. 1 second delay = 5% fewer articles read
2. Provide clarity
   1. “Lots of things that we sell are complicated and scary…. reviews videos, images makes sure investor buy with confidence.” Kevin Hoffman CMO Home Depot
3. Guide users
   1. Provide specific and timely error messages.
   2. Confirm when actions seem incorrect.
   3. Suggest what to do next. Give the user an idea of what can be done. Make the next action easy
4. Simplify tasks

What to do next

1. Define your users and scenarios
2. Assign stakeholders to conduct and document detailed reviews
3. Discuss and prioritze potential fixes
4. Test your improvements