Changing dynamics of user experience in the digital world: Debprotim Roy, Founder & CEO, Canvs
A growing number of established companies are becoming porous organizations thanks to the age of digital transformation. At the same time, customer behaviour in the current digital world has dramatically moved away from a quiet attitude to an alert, informed, and a highly knowledgeable role that no company can ignore.
Organizations today are using the changing dynamics of digital technology to engage with their consumers in a variety of ways through their products, services, platforms and channels. Consumers today can now participate at varying levels with an organization's value chain from its research and development department to its product development phase. Take, for instance, MyStarbucks idea.com from Starbucks. Through this website, the company allowed its users to submit, monitor and track ideas and used more than 277 of 150,000 views registered on the site. By providing a voice to its consumers, Starbucks helped mould their own experience and used the vital information supplied by its users to further reform.
What makes for invaluable user experience? Is it a scenario where consumers obtain value, and the company makes a profit? If recent research is to be considered, technology will be the impetus for fundamental transformations that will empower businesses to gain a competitive edge.
By engaging with their consumers, companies are gathering vital information at every point to discover and deduce insights that are becoming stimuli for innovation. We are now seeing user preferences generating segment stereotypes, outspoken reviewers highlighting influencers and prevailing opinions prioritizing the advancements in products and services.
There are numerous benefits to enhancing user experience; for one, it delivers tangible gains to companies who have triumphantly executed user-centric strategies. Across industries, satisfied consumers are spending more, displaying a more profound sense of loyalty to companies and creating conducive environments for companies to lower their costs while at the same time enhancing companies' levels of employee engagement.
Companies such as Uber, Apple and Amazon that continually reinvent themselves, offer comfortable, prompt and personalized human experiences that are boosting their bottom line and building customer loyalty. Taking a cue from this, conventional business-to-business companies are also making bold moves to develop dynamic shared digital ecosystems around the needs of their consumers.
Building a more engaging user experience begins with transforming the mindset that there is a solution waiting to be discovered, for an issue that a company is trying to resolve. And to that extent, a critical framework central to any innovation process is human-centred design. Regardless of the tools or methods used, the human-centred design ensures positive, empathy-based and
holistic results that are purposeful and useful ideas aimed at resolving customer problems and working towards the purpose they have been intended to serve.
A human-centred design mindset has the potential of building alliances across companies and installing a common purpose of the joint effort. This is why successful companies in the digital world are developing value propositions based on a consumer-first design process aimed at engaging the customer and focusing on their needs while using human-centred design throughout.
One of the world's biggest nitrogen fertilizer producers, Yara pioneered its customer experience by introducing a farmer-first mindset proposition. The company brought value to both the business and its consumers through its one-stop engagement digital platform known as MyYara. This channel connected with farmers and helped build valuable experiences based on exchanges. Today, it provides real-time recommendations to farmers on crop nutrition, efficiency ratios and harvest information while at the same time gathering crucial data from their users.
To define a collaborative exchange and get it right, requires responsiveness to human emotions and strike the right balance. A skilful combination of strategy and design around customer participation and flow of information designed into the collaborative exchange can create a win-win customer experience.
The proliferation of digital touchpoints has dramatically accelerated in today's digital economy. And it's only going to compound further. Unprecedented new opportunities are being created with advances such as deep learning and artificial intelligence, but despite enhanced innovative opportunities in the digital world, the priority remains -- human connections.
Companies must radically and continually think through their consumer experience in the digital world towards designing highly participative customer exchanges that build reciprocally-propitious information flows. Winning in this phase of digitalization is heavily dependant on the customer’s buy-in. Thankfully the converse of this problem is a boon that it presents; a plethora of tools to hear out the consumer.
