Building the Best Digital Experiences
With the rapid move online for businesses and consumers over the past 18+ months of the pandemic, "digital experience" has surfaced as one of the most critical factors for business success. Digital experience (DX) is a broad term and can apply to many aspects of managing a business' online presence. In the broadest sense DX encompasses employee or workforce experience (EX), customer experience (CX) and depending on the business, partner experience as well as any other stakeholder interactions. You could also package all that up as user experience (UX), which covers all online business interactions. Cloud communications platforms, automation, intelligent virtual assistants, and any systems that deliver end-to-end business processes are all a part of delivering the desired UX.
There are two areas of the DX, product experience and digital adoption, that can be enhanced through deeper analysis of user behavior. Product experience is mostly customer focused and extends to any interaction channel (website, SaaS product, etc.). Product experience can also apply to EX, but often as a part of analyzing user adoption. The product experience is often directly associated with adoption and use.
Building the desired experience requires the ongoing understanding of what the experience is, how and when it's delivered and the ability to understand user behavior throughout the interaction. You also need the ability to iterate and experiment with the experience, refining it over time through direct and indirect feedback. From a process perspective you need to collect data; have some way to manage, clean, update and merge the data from various sources; then make use of the data to iterate on the UX and personalize the interactions in the future. Tools to execute and manage the process are sometimes called product intelligence or conversion optimization. The following chart represents the elements to enable building the best digital experiences:
DX Solutions
Data Foundation
With most solution discussions there's a need to understand, process and consolidate the necessary data to support the business, and product intelligence is no exception. The data necessary to support the DX process comes from existing customer, employee and product data, plus behavioral data developed by directly monitoring online activities and listening to social channels. Data silos are the biggest risk, but inaccurate or missing data can also be an issue, particularly if a part of the solution relies on training AI for automated actions. The data should be consolidated to present a complete customer profile, but needs to be processed and cleaned as a routine part of the ongoing process in real or near real time. Integration is a critical part of building the data infrastructure, and should be facilitated through a standard set of APIs.
Behavioral Analysis
Customer behavior using your online properties is used to refine the online experience including driving future feature and function enhancements, and also to help drive more accurate personalization. Capturing that behavior and providing the tools to accurately analyze it is a core feature of an effective solution. At the most basic a solution captures the customer’s interaction for replay and analysis. At a minimum the solutions should support segmentation based on behavior that can be used to define the best messaging and action. Modern solutions though, go farther by providing some level of automated analysis, decision support, predictive recommendations and even automated actions in real-time. Purpose built behavioral analysis tools and models, which some providers offer, can elevate the overall usefulness and effectiveness of the solution.
The Role of AI and Automation
The use of AI, particularly machine learning (ML), can provide benefit in several ways. The analysis can have some level of automation that uses the AI to surface the most relevant behaviors and learnings. Think of this as decision augmentation as it facilitates more effective outcomes and actions. The automation can extend deeper to determining and delivering personalization actions for the customers.
Personalization is a powerful part of improving the DX. Personalization is based on some level of segmentation so the more accurate and detailed the segmentation, the better the experience. The AI can analyze the behavior patterns, compare with other existing transaction and behavioral data to determine the most effective personalization for the individual situation.
Additional Capabilities
There are a variety of solutions available, and as you might expect a fairly diverse set of additional capabilities depending on the particular focus of the provider. For more app focused solutions activities like onboarding, in-app support and user training are common additions. For more information on the various solutions check out the product analytics category on G2. If you are interested in discussing your specific digital experience challenges contact us here.
