Digital Customer Experience Forum 2019: The Highlights

Today, the main driver behind digital transformations is customer-centricity. As customers continue to shift their activities online, they expect brands to be just as digitally savvy as they are.

We held our first ever Digital Customer Experience Forum in New York to bring together a dynamic community of senior leaders to look into the digital customer experience (DCX) holistically. We explored data and insights, digital innovation, design thinking, and people strategy through the lens of DCX.

Let’s dive into some of the insights and highlights from the event!

The Feedback Economy

Consumers today expect their voices to be heard, and as a result, expect brands to rapidly adapt and improve based on their feedback. These expectations inspire companies to go through digital transformations with their customers at the heart of their strategy and decisions. This is what we call the new Feedback Economy.

Stefanie Kreek, Product Marketing Manager and Usabilla veteran, discussed the importance of shifting your organizational culture to become customer-centric as a way to adapt to the Feedback Economy. We see this manifested in 2019 as 84 percent of Customer Experience (CX) professionals say their firm has placed Customer Experience as a higher priority than two years ago, and 76 percent of executives are prioritizing improving CX as part of their strategy.

The top challenge that organizations must overcome, however, is the lack of cross-department collaboration in implementing successful digital experience programs. Isolated DCX campaigns lead to siloed processes, data, and strategy, according to our 2019 report: Digital Transformations: Age of the Digital Customer.

Delivering Best-In-Class Experiences

More brands have understood the potential of digital, and are embracing the power of data to help them develop superior digital journeys for consumers. Today, UX is the brand – meaning, digital consumers associate a brand with the experience it provides.

Patricia Cesaire, Director of Strategic Partnerships from our partners at Contentsquare, discussed how younger audiences have become more demanding as they are digital natives. This means consumers will increasingly expect seamless journeys across platforms, intuitive interfaces, and friction-free checkouts.

Mobile traffic dominates the share of digital traffic today, but conversions haven’t followed, therefore many users still switch to desktop when it comes to purchasing. It is essential to design and build your website beyond “responsive” and instead adopt a “mobile-first strategy.” A mobile-first strategy means that you create the mobile site first, then grow that content for bigger screens, and not the other way round.

Understanding what a successful digital journey looks like implies an in-depth understanding of your audience, and how it measures satisfaction against needs and goals.

Design Thinking: Solving Customer Problems

As organizations seek to design better products and experiences, they are facing common challenges which often include: decisions being made solely at the executive level, difficulty defining a problem statement to solve, siloed teams that lead to varying methodologies for solving problems, and prioritization issues.

Josh Gibbs, Platform Product Manager at Bandwidth, discussed how his team leverages feedback through Usabilla to drive decisions in the feature and product enhancement lifecycle. Usabilla enables teams like Josh’s to put customers at the core of their strategy with passive feedback, support, surveys, and other functions of customer interaction.

In order to create a design thinking mindset and focus on delivering superior experiences across products, the key is establishing empathy with your customers.

The Bandwidth product team did this by diving into their feedback data to define which pieces of feedback might have helped them win more business or upsell to existing customers. They went directly to customers during their year of discovery and design to discuss the challenges they face, redesign workflows and page designs, and test beta products.

For a Voice of Customer strategy to be successful in the product design and enhancement lifecycle, there has to be a holistic approach for risk analysis, interviews and surveys, and prototyping.

Continuous Experimentation & Conversion Optimization

What makes a great customer journey and buyer experience? It involves multiple factors, such as testing CTAs, product information, personalized promotion, ease of checkout, exit-intent surveys and discounts, just to name a few.

Lucas Stewart, Sr. Product Marketing Manager with our partners at AB Tasty, emphasized the importance of focusing on holistic conversion rate optimization (CRO), which is more than the last step of conversion. It must include experimentation, personalization, customized content, user feedback, and user insights.

Jennifer Tattenbaum, Director of Interactive at Telecharge, did exactly this sort of experimentation when her team released a new Search by Price feature. They were able to capture feedback and pair it with analytics data to develop insights into why certain functionalities were leading users to only the most expensive tickets, decreasing overall conversion. This workflow enables them to improve features on a consistent basis.

The idea is building a continuous optimization strategy by helping you better understand your visitors, define the most profitable audiences to target, let you lean into the actions, and analyze the impact.

Speakers

Usabilla CEO, Marc Van Agteren

Stefanie Kreek, Product Marketing Manager, Usabilla

Patricia Cesaire, Director of Strategic Partnerships, Contentsquare

Jennifer Tattenbaum, Senior Director of Interactive, Shubert Ticketing (Telecharge.com)

Josh Gibbs, Platform Product Manager, Bandwidth

Lucas Stewart, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, AB Tasty

Nicholas Coulson, Head of Business Development, Americas, Usabilla

Networking

After a day of insights, we went up to the lovely rooftop terrace at The Maxwell Hotel in Midtown, Manhattan for an afternoon of networking and cocktails. Some photo highlights:

Final Thoughts

At Usabilla, we’re continuing to envision the future of digital customer experience as it develops. A crucial part of this future is putting people at the heart of digital innovation. Together with SurveyMonkey, our ambition is to empower curious individuals and organizations to measure, benchmark, and act on the feedback and opinions that drive success.

Our Digital Customer Experience Forum created a platform for sharing insights into how organizations can excel in the digital space, sparking innovative ideas, networking through collaboration, and establishing Voice of Customer as an essential part of building future-proof experiences.

If you would like more info, please contact marketing@usabilla.com. We also look forward to meeting and welcoming digital and CX leaders at our Usabilla Global Exchange this September in Amsterdam!