More Platforms, More Problems: Holistic Solutions Can Perfect Your Digital Experience If you're not looking at everything in the digital customer experience, you're missing something.
By Asim Zaheer Edited by Kara McIntyre
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Countless tools and services have been developed to help companies navigate our digital age. As businesses complete their digital transformation, they often buy solution after solution, hoping to gain more insight into their customer experience (CX) and activity on their online platforms. By 2025, global spending on services and technologies that support digital transformation is estimated to amount to $2.8 trillion.
For years, the point solutions on the market were siloed and did not easily speak to each other, even though they offered complementary perspectives on digital journeys. Businesses would run A/B tests, consumer surveys, web analytics, product analytics, compliance monitoring, voice of customer and session replay software simultaneously and have to piece the data together in order to understand how customers were interacting with their digital platforms.
This, we can now say, was the old way and the hard way; it was limiting and prevented companies from seeing a single view of a customer's end-to-end journey. The future is in holistic solutions.
Platform consolidation helps companies do it all
Though point solution consolidation is happening across sectors (i.e. marketing and customer engagement tools), the digital experience platform market is consolidating remarkably quickly. Larger companies acquired smaller digital experience solutions throughout 2020 and 2021, and we expect M&A activity to continue in 2022.
In addition, existing digital experience platforms continue to extend their scope and soon will be able to "do it all," capturing and analyzing most (if not all) customer experience data in order to provide companies with a holistic, real-time view of their digital ecosystem.
These holistic platforms are often driven by Digital Experience Intelligence (DXI) technology. DXI is a more powerful version of common Digital Experience Analytics (DEA) tools, with analytics and computing forces enhanced by machine learning innovations.
Related: Customer Experience Will Determine the Success of Your Company
Expanding the way we think about experience
Session replay was once considered the best way to understand customer behavior online. The software would record a user's session on a website, then play it back so that business leaders can understand the user's experiences.
Due to the skyrocketing volume of customer interactions on digital platforms, session replay now holds far less value by itself. Digital businesses must evolve alongside their customer preferences. Omni-channel experiences that include mobile (users are spending over four hours per day on mobile devices and 90% of the time in apps), web, in-person, social media interactions and more are becoming the norm and 90% of customers expect a consistent, seamless experience regardless of where the touchpoint is taking place.
To meet consumer demand and retain customers, brands must continually optimize their customer experience across all channels and eliminate technical issues quickly. Holistic DXI solutions make this possible, pulling in customer data from all channels, analyzing millions of data points in minutes, offering actionable insights and immediately flagging issues.
Without holistic omni-channel platforms, a company is likely to have gaps in CX visibility, which could cause it to miss an opportunity or overlook a major glitch that costs millions in lost revenue.
Related: Do This to Level Up Your Customer-Experience Management Game
Holistic solutions fuel AI and machine learning
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the key driver behind DXI technology, completing complex analyses at lightning speed, identifying issues it would take human teams weeks to find and fix. AI and machine learning (ML) technologies save time, boost productivity, and increase revenue long-term, which is why AI solutions are being integrated into business functions worldwide — 91.0% of leading businesses are investing in AI activities in 2022.
AI and ML algorithms need as much data as possible to be accurate, maximally useful and successful. Holistic platforms improve AI/ML outcomes by capturing all customer data in a single platform and feeding the algorithms with consistent, high volumes of data, eliminating issues that come with partial data input.
Breaking down the business benefits
Adopting a holistic solution improves overall business operations by:
Breaking down departmental silos by providing a single source of truth about the digital experience
Increasing collaboration by enabling all teams to work from the same customer data
Boosting decision-making efficiency by delivering clear recommendations and AI-powered priorities
Expanding employee capacity by removing the burden of managing/analyzing multiple single-purpose platforms, and through AI support
Enabling companies to provide a seamless digital experience that fosters customer happiness and retention, increasing long-term profit
Business leaders looking to perfect their digital customer experiences need to recognize when their view is too narrow and identify where they could benefit from combining point solutions. DXI platforms, and the holistic visibility they offer, could pave the path to deeper customer insights and competitive business success.
