Last year marked a significant technological milestone: the 10th anniversary of the Great App Boom. Surging smartphone sales despite the Great Recession, explosive popularity of app stores, mainstream adoption of Facebook and Twitter, and the emergence of Spotify were all milestones that marked the beginning of the app revolution.
After a decade, it frequently appears that we spend much of our time on our smartphones. The pandemic changed things for many who had not previously relied on their mobile devices. Just about anything you need can be delivered or picked up curbside with a few taps on your phone and little to no interaction with firms or employees.
Is it possible that everything has gone too far? Are we losing touch with one another? Consumers and brands are still figuring it out, but we have an issue in Houston when it comes to how businesses approach client interactions.
In recent years, businesses have invested billions of dollars and countless hours in developing digital efforts to better serve the connected customer. In our app-driven world, this is both rational and necessary. However, too many firms are overlooking a critical component: the need to communicate with customers on a personal level.
To be sure, most businesses continue to prioritize customer experience as their true north, especially in an age when consumers can discover anything about a firm and its products online and switch brand allegiances with a click or a phone tap.
Is your entire data set assisting you in creating fantastic digital experiences?
Businesses have come to rely on data-driven insights—clicks, email response rates, behavioral actions, and so on—for clues into what customers like and dislike as the Big Data mania has taken off alongside the app frenzy. While such analytics can assist businesses in identifying trends in customer behavior, data is a poor substitute for real-life human experience.
According to a Salesforce study, customer experience is now as important as a company’s products or services, with 84 percent of consumers agreeing. Surprisingly, while 75% want businesses to leverage new technologies to create remarkable experiences, 54% believe it is more difficult than ever for businesses to earn their trust.
Genuine human insight can’t be replaced.
“Watching these firms spend millions of dollars in marketing and advertisement to make me come back to them—when I was there already, and all they had to do was a simple, inexpensive, and straightforward thing: Treat me with a little civility,” said Walmart founder Sam Walton.
To clarify, businesses who strive to create exceptional digital experiences are aiming to do the right thing. They simply make a mistake when they become enamoured with data and fail to listen to clients as living, breathing individuals.
Do you want to make it big in the post-app-boom world? Recognize that the need for a company to communicate with customers as persons hasn’t changed as a result of digital innovation.
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