Three things are happening that should make anyone with a customer-facing digital platform (which is pretty much any business) sit up and take notice;
- The attention span of humans is now only 8 seconds
- Our tolerance-level online is now 2.5 – 3 seconds, and dropping fast
- We are more likely to complain about a bad customer experience via social media platforms, now more than ever before.
So why does this matter and how should business respond?
Here’s what I know;
- Everyone is being bombarded with demands on our time and resources
- Those resources and time are getting less and less each day
… which is why digital is so great, because it means I can book that haircut, transfer that money, pay that bill, do an Amazon shop or book that family holiday at a time that is convenient to me!
And whilst this is happening, there are a host of new businesses springing up to meet these demands of mine, which means I now have more choice available to me than ever before.
- If I want food for dinner, not only can I order online from Coles and Woollies, I can also do the same thing at HelloFresh or GoFresh
- If I want to buy health insurance I can buy that from any number of financial institutions; not just Bupa, NIB or MediBank
- If I want to book a holiday I can do that via my favourite airline, Expedia, Trivago or directly with the resort
So given all of this choice, what are the reasons I buy from where I buy? For me it is two things: convenience and customer experience.
Convenience can be hard to control, because what is convenient for one person won’t be for another. But customer experience is something you can control, as long as you have the tools to do this.
Three interesting points around customer experience on digital platforms that relate to anyone;
- The speed of a website has become so synonymous with user experience, that Amazon, Walmart and Nordstrom all measure their response times in milliseconds. They can also demonstrate that by improving their sites response time by 100ms they will increase their revenue by 1%, as will an increased load time reduce their revenues.
- T-Mobile will tell you that when you build your digital customer journey, keep all of the up-front steps (homepage etc) as fast as possible, with the heavy process and response time resources happening at the end of the customer journey (because this is where customers are more tolerant of slower performance).
- The key technical elements that impact your customer’s experience on your digital platform includes responsiveness, the number of third parties linked to your site, the number of web page objects on your webpage and the size of your homepage.
As the Nordstrom Performance Team have said – “who says response times need to be 2.5 seconds? Our customers”.
And as customer expectations rise, and tolerance reduces; what are you doing to understand your customers experience on your digital platforms.
As it has been said before, if you aren’t interested in disrupting your business, don’t worry; because somebody else will.
