Capitalize on digital opportunities from transformation to optimization

Prioritizing your customer's changing needs and preferences is critical, whether you’ve built a solid digital experience or are in the process. After the pandemic, digital customer experience became a top business priority, especially for sectors like auto manufacturing, banking, and hotels. Organizations see an exponential relationship between improved customer experience (CX) and growth, so they’re investing in it. 

When offering customers new, innovative products, services, and experiences, digital transformation and continuous optimization help organizations keep up with the increasing pace of change.

This is why top-digital performers encourage their teams to make decisions based on customer insights and remove any roadblocks. Sharing customer insights ensures everyone in the organization stays aligned with your customer's needs or wants.

What top-performing digital leaders do differently

Delivering high-quality results faster and with stronger business outcomes isn't a matter of doing the same things you’re doing today more quickly; it requires a reinvention of your organization around a customer-focused approach.  

According to Forrester, digitally advanced organizations do three things differently. They: 

• Orient toward customers to keep all groups moving in the same direction
• Lead transformation from the top of the organization
• Deploy technology to improve customer outcomes

Some professionals feel limited by their structures and processes. However, top-performing digital leaders prioritize CX, innovation, and insight over tradition or comfort. 

Advanced digital organizations are almost three times more likely than beginners to prioritize using insights for decision-making (66% versus 25%, respectively). They encourage teams to develop iteratively over time and make decisions based on what their current and future customers think, feel, and do. 

For the digitally advanced, continuously learning from customers and using those insights at every stage of their process is the differentiator. Here are five ways that the top-digital leaders do things differently.

1. Personalize multichannel experiences

To level up their digital experience, Burberry knew personalization and bespoke design would be their focus. So, the British luxury fashion house revamped its app to feature custom-tailored digital experiences.

The plan was to surface a customer’s styling preferences and offer inspiring content, personalized product recommendations, and enhanced push notifications in a way that delights customers. The project's driving force was to strengthen the company's relationship with Burberry app users. 

Early results show a 200% increase in customer interaction with personalized content, leading to a rise in Burberry’s app store rating from 4.6 to 4.9. Customer insights led to the prioritization, design, and delivery of nine Burberry app projects.

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"UserTesting means we can reach out to customers remotely - at their homes in London or at their offices in New York. Having diverse perspectives for all the products we create is vital to our success."

Omar Musa

Director of Product Design & UX, Burberry

2. Enable teams to validate their decisions, even with hard-to-find audiences

Standing for Innovation, De-risking, and Enterprise Acceleration, the IDEA Center at Notre Dame has made a science out of testing the market viability of startups.

The IDEA center targets specific audiences through customer interviews and remote testing to get feedback on specialized products. This ensures only the best business ideas hit the marketplace. UserTesting's global network of validated, opt-in contributors plays a vital role.  

Thanks to the ability to consistently validate their hypotheses, the IDEA Center doubled the number of companies that started in the previous two years. They've validated over 100 new market opportunities and increased annual revenue by six times. 

Ben Hoggan Director of De-Risking at the University of Notre Dame’s IDEA Center

“One of my very first tests was to see if I could find just one very hard-to-find contributor with specific healthcare technology experience as lab techs that were performing exosome isolation and purification. Imagine my surprise when I found not one but three in UserTesting's panel. Hard to beat that.”

3. Challenge the assumption that they know their customers perfectly

Post Office Ltd is a government-owned organization in the United Kingdom, but it prioritizes CX as a cutting-edge startup.

When Penny Rance, UX Researcher at Post Office Ltd first joined, she realized that the product teams didn't fully understand who their customers were or why they used Post Office products. 

Rance was able to gather valuable feedback across more than 170+ products that the Post Office sells to understand the good, the bad, and the ugly of how customers felt and relay it to the product teams. The product teams adjusted offerings, and services, and better aligned the in-store experience with the digital one, during a global pandemic no less. 

Post Office Ltd saved money by eliminating traditional in-person lab testing and improved overall customer-centricity by getting connected with customers and sharing those insights across silos. 

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"I love having live conversations with customers because it's like being in a lab, but also I can share it so easily with my stakeholders and anybody else in my team who I can invite to watch, too."

Penny Rance

UX Researcher at Post Office Ltd

4. Double down on the agile method in strategy and process

CarMax started with a widespread online presence, but leaders knew they couldn't get complacent. So, while the online world has changed massively since the 90s, CarMax stuck to its original plan of revolutionizing the car buying process through technology.

To ensure they stayed competitive, America's largest used-car retailer created agile product teams and empowered them to make fast decisions with valuable insight. This drove an improved CX and led product teams to connect with car buyers in innovative ways. It also gave the team a sense of ownership and a shared understanding of how customers use the products. 

With UserTesting, CarMax continues to quickly evaluate, validate, and iterate on product ideas that solve their customers' problems. 

Chip Trout Senior Manager, Product Design, CarMax

“I let the users tell their own stories. It’s one this for a product designer to make a recommendation. It’s another, more powerful thing to combine that recommendation with videos from real users.”

5. Turn engagement into loyalty

When My Pup Powered by Purina decided to prioritize user engagement for their app, they had no idea how much things would change.

Through UserTesting, the pet product extraordinaire discovered that customers already knew exactly what they wanted. The team applied these insights to a roadmap for adding new features and making updates that increased ease of use and the attractiveness of the design based on customer feedback. The goal was to give users an experience that would be meaningful to them, and it worked. 

The team completely redesigned the app. They simplified content, added weekly tips and checklists to track progress, improved the colorful design, and simplified navigation. 

After listening to customers, engagement rose by 365%, returning users increased their usage by 28%, and active users rose by 48%. However, Purina isn't stopping there. They plan to continue optimizing the My Pup App with the help of UserTesting. 

Leslie Bogosian Lead UX/UI Designer, My Pup by Purina

“The My Pup team completely renovated our app based on the UserTesting responses and simplified content for our users to digest. This heightened engagement.”