Dangers in the First Steps of a Digital Experience

Organizations are scrambling to deliver a new digital experience through a "Mobile First" approach. The big risk would be to deliver a fancy front experience that is "App Driven" instead of a a big data enabled dynamic and swarming process that consider the customer journey, customer behavior, customer preferences, customer history and the customer channels. Here are some of the key dangers that need to be guarded against when considering a rich and effective customer experience demanded in the new digital world.

Sizzle Over Substance:

It is easy to fall for just a better user experience that the new digital approaches can certainly deliver. While a new customer experience is necessary to show real differentiation when entering the digital world, it's the satisfaction of the whole experience; not just the interface that happens to be on your phone or pad. This means understanding what the customer wants by knowing the customer and their likely behavior and response. If this customer is shopping their business or reducing their investment in your organization, having appropriate process actions delivered in more important than the interface. Customer journey mapping, customer tendencies and real time mood detection might be in the mix along with a needed new experience.

Latest Craze:

The world would have you believe that there is an "App for That". Well in specialized situations, there probably are, but in when targeting an overall outcome, not necessarily. Let's take getting in shape and losing weight (my constant battle).  I have to use several Apps. One for tracking my activity, one for tracking my caloric intake and many for all my body health indicators. There is very little offered to bring things together in a process and overall status that I can automatically feed to my group of people that are holding me accountable (me, spouse, doctors, trainer). I like Apps, even though they are a craze, but they are not enough for measuring, monitoring and communicating my health status to even me. I picked on Apps in this case, but there are many more shiny and eye catching crazes to watch out for today and more will emerge tomorrow.

Easy to Deliver:

With the pressure to deliver something quickly, there is a nasty temptation to go for the easiest and widest path. Lets jump for the digital technology that allows for speed of development over the business experience for example. Let's optimize of open source and nearly free, so that we can avoid building a business case. While this approach works for delivering proof of concepts easily, these approaches might not be the real digital solution your customers and your organization really needs. The easy path is to put a new front end an old  and tired transaction based package / legacy application. While this might be a good first step in a transformation, use it to buy time to design a better digital business model.

Net; Net: 

Organizations are at a cross road and have to decide how to become a competitive entity in the new digital world. There needs to be efforts for the short term and efforts for the long term. Hopefully they are designed to work in concert or at least designed to learn from the short term to deliver better in the long term. Watch your step please.