Key Takeaways

Before Jumping in With Fixes, Companies Must Determine The Best Opportunities

To find improvement opportunities that will have the biggest impact on the customer experience and business metrics, companies need to start their digital improvement projects by analyzing web and app analytics, operational data, and multiple forms of customer research.

Great Digital Experiences Don’t Happen By Accident -- They Must Be Actively Designed

Firms need to take a rigorous approach to digital improvement projects. This means learning -- and then sticking to -- a user-centered design process that includes research, analysis, ideation, prototyping, and testing. Digital teams that need help in this area can tap into a variety of external research and design agencies.

Digital Experience Improvement Projects Must Support Established Business Objectives

To maximize digital budgets and ensure ongoing funding, companies need to deliver web, mobile, and tablet touchpoints that align with core brand attributes and support business objectives such as cost savings, revenue generation, and loyalty building. Key to this work: creating a unifi ed customer experience.

Why Read This Report

Whenever we ask customer experience professionals how important it is to improve their digital customer experiences, they reply emphatically, “It’s critical!” But still firms struggle to identify what digital experience improvements they need to make — and, once that’s nailed down, how exactly to make them. This report gives customer experience professionals the tools and processes they need to act on digital customer experience improvement across touchpoints like websites, mobile phones, and tablets. Forrester recommends 10 tactics for evaluating digital touchpoints and determining customers’ needs, proven and emerging methodologies for redesigning digital interactions, and best practices for ensuring that your digital experiences support your business objectives.

Follow 10 Established And Emerging Digital Experience Best Practices

Digital touchpoints can drive revenue, lower costs, build brands, and engender customer loyalty. But to achieve these potential benefits, companies must deliver digital interactions that meet their customers’ needs in easy and enjoyable ways (see Figure 1).

Unfortunately, many executives struggle to manage a mushrooming suite of poorly designed sites and apps that actually work against them by driving customers to more expensive channels (like the phone) or, worse, to competitors.1 So it’s no surprise customer experience professionals recently told Forrester that improving the online experience was their No. 1 priority, followed closely by improving cross-channel and mobile experiences (see Figure 2).

What can firms do to get the most out of their digital investments? Forrester recommends the following 10 tactics for understanding what digital improvements you need to make, making the right redesign decisions, and aligning digital improvements with business objectives.

Best Practices For Determining What You Need To Improve

The first step on the path to making digital customer experience improvements is to identify the problem areas that need attention. Getting insights from a variety of sources will help.

No. 10: Flex Your Analytics And Operational Data

Quantitative data from analytics platforms and internal operations systems — like those used in your call center — can help improve digital experiences dramatically because it separates fact from fiction. To mine this data for experience improvement opportunities, focus your efforts on four main tasks:

Examine the actual behavior of customers on your websites. Web analytics software is the best tool for understanding where visitors go on your existing website and what they do when they get there.3 Site owners at one company that we spoke with used web analytics to prove a 65% customer drop-off rate at a point where login was required, prior to checkout. And when analysts at InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) mined web analytics data for design opportunities, they found users pogo-sticking between search results and hotel landing pages, which tipped them off to the fact that users were digging for specific information.

Study customers’ mobile and tablet behaviour, too. Just like website interactions, mobile and tablet behaviors are highly measurable. Best practices for measuring mobile sites are strongly rooted in traditional web analytics — understanding traffic sources, on-site behavior, and obstacles that impede conversions (see Figure 3). And best practices for measuring applications are based on evaluating task completion, functionality, and user experience (see Figure 4).

Examine customer behavior across channels. To fully understand your digital opportunities, you need to know the answers to questions like: How many people phone the call center after visiting another touchpoint, and what are they calling about? Web execs at Lands’ End realized that a large number of customer service calls focused on selecting the right size for an article of clothing. When the company added contextual help about product sizing and fit to the product pages on its website, call center volume dropped by 20% — a huge cost savings. But goals like deflecting call center traffic will only happen if the experiences that customers have with digital touchpoints are better than the experiences they have with other channels.

Target the moments that matter. Not all interactions matter equally to customers, so Fidelity developed a straightforward framework to evaluate where it should focus its attention. The model first relies on customer feedback data to determine which interactions are most likely to create a promoter or detractor. It then uses operational data to determine the number of customers affected by each interaction. The analysis helps prioritize investments by showing which interactions have the most impact on loyalty and examining their frequency of occurrence.

No. 9: Conduct Expert Reviews Of Web, Mobile, And Tablet Touchpoints

Expert reviews, also known as “heuristic evaluations” or “scenario reviews,” are quick and inexpensive ways to determine what’s currently broken on your sites and apps.6 To conduct an expert review, first locate potential reviewers who can empathize with your customers’ needs and then have them:

Try to accomplish relevant customer goals. Following the principles of Forrester’s scenario design methodology, attempt to complete customer goals that are specific to the business purpose of your site or app — such as configuring a four-door sedan, purchasing a set of bath towels, or finding the nutritional information for a menu item. Beware of confusing customer goals with business objectives like branding or cross-selling: Your customers don’t wake in the morning and say, “I’d like to have an online brand experience today” or “I’d like to be cross-sold.”

Look for well-known customer experience flaws. While attempting to accomplish relevant customer goals, identify specific problems that would slow users down or keep them from accomplishing their goals altogether.9 For this, you’ll need a set of evaluation criteria, like those in Forrester’s Website User Experience Review, Mobile Website User Experience Review, and Application User Experience Review.10 These criteria, which are based on academic research and industry best practices with proven impact on customer experience, are divided into four categories: value, navigation, presentation, and trust (see Figure 5). Combined, these questions examine if a particular touchpoint has content and functionality that’s easy to find and digest and if customers are likely to feel comfortable during the interaction.

No. 8: Reach Out To Real Customers

Employees want to do right by their customers, but it’s easy for behind-the-scenes staff to get out of sync with real customers’ needs. When that happens, digital project team members will inevitably make decisions based on flawed assumptions about customers’ knowledge and preferences. To quell design debates and accurately focus project priorities, integrate input from your actual customers on an ongoing basis.

Solicit customer feedback about the current experience. Surveys can help you gather customer feedback about specific digital interactions and gauge how your customers feel about their experiences in aggregate. Given the large number of customers that surveys can reach, they can also help you validate the statistical relevance of customer sentiments. Of course, surveys are only effective if customers actually fill them out. To increase survey completion, communicate three things: 1) why the company wants feedback; 2) how the feedback will be used; and 3) how long the survey will take to complete. Intuit found that setting simple expectations about survey length increased response rates by nearly 10%.

Gather and analyze unsolicited customer feedback. Customers constantly provide unsolicited (and incredibly honest) feedback about their experiences through emails, support calls, chat sessions, and posts on social media sites. When Pizza Pizza, one of Canada’s largest pizza chains, was building a pizza ordering app for smartphones, the design team reviewed recorded calls, comments from its website, and inbound email. It found that many customers preferred fewer steps to the online ordering process, as long as it wasn’t difficult to go back and modify selections made in previous steps. The team also mined blogs, iTunes App Store reviews, and other app ratings sites for reactions to competitors’ apps that might hold clues about what its customers wanted.

Uncover hidden customer needs through ethnographic research. Ethnography, which has roots in the field of anthropology, is simply about observing your customers’ behavior in a natural setting — their home, office, car, or even the shopping mall.12 For example, employees from the interactive agency Organic observed members of a high-end fitness club lining up 30-people deep prior to some classes. By chatting with the people in the queue, the team learned that members were willing to stand around for a half an hour not only to get into a class but also to snag a specific spot on the studio floor. Based on this insight, Organic developed functionality that enables members to reserve a specific spot from the web or a mobile device. Now members only need to show up 10 minutes before class to claim their place.

Test designs with users to uncover specific usability problems. Usability testing is the best way to identify user experience problems that are unique to a particular group of site users. These tests work best when real customers try to fulfill actual tasks using your current website, mobile app, or tablet app — or a mocked-up prototype. Have members of the project team look on and listen while customers move through their tasks, identifying areas where they get stuck, become confused, or express negative thoughts about the interface.

Document customer insights in personas and journey maps. Customer insights are worthless when they’re locked in your head or squirreled away in a database. You need to share your customer research with the people responsible for your digital touchpoints. Personas and journey maps are two effective tools for accomplishing that.13 Personas are fictional characters that embody your target customers’ key behaviors, attributes, motivations, and goals (see Figure 6).14 Journey maps visually illustrate a particular persona’s activities over time — like discovering, evaluating, buying, using, and getting support for a product or service (see Figure 7).15 Together, these tools help create a shared understanding of customers’ real needs and pain points.

Best Practices For Redesigning Digital Touchpoints

Once they’ve found out where digital touchpoints need to be improved, customer experience professionals need to follow a proven design process and think holistically about the improvements they make.

No. 7: Adopt Proven User-Centered Design Processes

The right digital interactions, implemented the right way, don’t just happen. Instead, they must be actively designed. This requires learning — and then sticking to — the steps in a user-centered design process (see Figure 8).

Conduct and analyze customer research. A typical design process starts with research to understand customers’ attitudes, needs, desires, and motivations.17 Once this research has been completed, you need to synthesize and communicate findings with the project team and, eventually, the rest of your organization. During this time, the team may need to reframe the project focus. Why? Project teams often set out to solve one problem, but research insights lead them to discover that there’s actually a bigger (or just different) problem that’s more important to tackle.

Come up with dozens, if not hundreds, of possible ideas. Using the outputs of the analysis phase as a guide, brainstorm ways to solve the problem at hand. Generate as many ideas as possible, temporarily suspending your consideration for logistical and operational constraints. As Fred Leichter, chief customer experience officer at Fidelity Investments, explains, “It’s easier to make a profound idea reasonable than to make a reasonable idea profound. We start with stuff that’s out there, wild, and aggressive and figure out if it has merit. Smart people will figure out how to get great ideas implemented.”

Iteratively prototype and test the possible solutions. Rather than getting stuck in analysisparalysis, focus on making your ideas tangible through quick and cheap low-fidelity prototypes. These can take a variety of formats ranging from rough pen-and-paper sketches to wireframes that lay out major pieces of content and functionality (see Figure 9).18 Next, put the prototypes in front of real customers and employees for feedback — not just once but multiple times. Repeat this process of testing and refining your prototypes, adding additional levels of fidelity to quickly arrive at an optimal solution.

Co-create with your employees and customers. Design is a participatory process, not something to be determined by one person in a locked room and delivered on a silver platter. That’s why you need to include people from across the entire customer experience ecosystem — customers, employees, and external partners — to help synthesize research data, ideate possible solutions, create prototypes, and provide feedback.19 Designers call this co-creation. For example, to ensure that they fully understood Pizza Pizza’s business needs, Plastic Mobile team members held a workshop where they asked stakeholders to sketch what they thought was most important for the app’s home page design (see Figure 10).

No. 6: Take Advantage Of The Inherent Characteristics Of Digital Touchpoints

Websites, mobile phones, tablets, kiosks, and other digital touchpoints offer many different ways for customers to connect with your company — and each other. However, they vary wildly in their display characteristics and capabilities — and these factors have a significant effect on the customer’s experience. That’s why companies need to abandon a one-size-fits-all approach and design digital interactions with these inherent differences in mind.

Create touchpoint-appropriate interfaces. While the differences between a website viewed on a tablet and a PC may only have seemingly slight variations, that same site will look vastly different on a mobile phone. And of course, the input capabilities of a keyboard and mouse vary drastically from those of a touchscreen. That’s why firms need to design interfaces that take maximum advantage of each touchpoint.20 Citibank’s senior vice president (SVP) of strategy for mobile and emerging technologies put it this way: “We didn’t want to just go build a 2X bigger version of the mobile app . . . . We looked at tablets as a new form factor, a new way of engaging with clients . . . one that deserved its own thinking.”

Right-size content and functionality. Content and functionality don’t need to be recreated for every touchpoint. Instead, they should be created once and reused/resized. For example, The Boston Globe’s desktop site provides a navigation bar across the top of the page, while the mobile site hides the navigation behind a “sections” menu. Meanwhile, the mobile app uses a different paradigm that provides the same content in a way that leverages specific device capabilities (see Figure 11). In the UK, when retailer Sainsbury’s recognized that people were calling to change the time slots they’d entered on the website for home delivery, the company began sending automated text reminders that gave users the opportunity to change the delivery time without having to go back to the site, increasing both customer satisfaction and cost savings.

Use native device data to deliver a contextualized experience. The real-time data that mobile and table devices supply, combined with each customer’s historical behavior, can make for smarter, more contextual digital interactions.22 Subtle contextual changes can be powerful, such as a retailer’s website that recommends products in a similar price range, a tech company that changes its related items based on session clickstreams, or a mobile site that uses location to send relevant weather information and ads. But contextualized interactions should also be subtle — and companies should not presume to know everything the customer wants. Consider the backlash against the retailer Urban Outfitters when it funneled shoppers only to women’s items once it discovered a shopper was female, completely ignoring the fact that women also shop for men.23

Look for opportunities to make interactions social. As digital devices weave themselves tighter into the social fabric of customers’ lives, digital interactions are becoming social as a rule, not an exception.24 Pervasive platforms like Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter enable content sharing from just about any digital touchpoint. But social is about more than sharing, and customer experience professionals should look for ways to integrate social behaviors across the entire customer journey.25 For example, to draw attention to its Black Friday deals, J.C. Penney gave its Facebook fans access to exclusive deals and a chance to win a VIP shopping experience. And low-cost mobile telecom network giffgaff uses a community as the venue for all customer support and service.

No. 5: Get Outside Help When And Where You Need It

Since the dawn of the Web, companies have been struggling with the decision of whether to build in-house digital teams or partner with external specialists. While in-house design and development teams have the advantage of deep domain knowledge, in today’s complex landscape, it’s difficult for any but the savviest internal teams to do it all themselves.26 Depending on their own strengths and gaps, companies should look to outside firms to help them:

Carry out and analyze ethnographic research. Ethnographic research is critical to developing deep customer understanding, which is in turn critical for creating customer experience improvements that matter. However, most companies don’t have the in-house skills or knowhow to conduct this kind of research or synthesize the results into meaningful and actionable findings. Firms such as Boston-based Essential Design and STBY in Europe have extensive experience with research techniques like customer interviews, in-home observations, and diary studies — and can deliver the insights required to keep digital initiatives on target.

Conduct user experience research. At the other end of the design process, companies need to gather feedback on how well their digital products and services meet customers’ needs — and if they do so in easy and enjoyable ways. Just like upfront research, many firms simply don’t have the skills or tools to conduct user experience research themselves.27 Not to worry. Consultancies like AnswerLab and Bentley University provide services ranging from remote usability testing to lab-based eye tracking studies, as well as other research, and craft detailed readouts that highlight the most salient findings.

Deliver large projects related to digital marketing. Today’s largest interactive agencies — giants like Razorfish and Digitas — have traditionally focused on designing and developing marketing-related touchpoints that customers use to discover and evaluate a company’s products and services. The sheer number of bodies required to plan and execute these typically large projects just isn’t readily available in most marketing departments today, making these projects difficult — if not impossible — to staff internally.

Simplify complex information and transactions. Many of the firms we talk to on a regular basis cite extensive usability prowess and the ability to leverage digital touchpoints to fundamentally change business processes as the reasons for seeking outside help. For example, when Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association-College Retirement Equities Fund (TIAACREF) needed help improving online tools that explain how older users’ retirement investments would annuitize over their lifetimes, it chose to work with EffectiveUI in part due to the firm’s experience in simplifying complex customer interactions.28 And to create a mobile solution that meshed with customers’ expectations about the ordering process, Plastic Mobile challenged the way Pizza Pizza’s back-end systems handled online orders.

Spark new ideas for digital innovations. When companies embark on customer experience improvement projects, they’re typically trying to do a better of job of meeting customers’ needs. But when Citibank partnered with digital service design agency Fjord to design its first-ever tablet banking app, it aimed to far exceed them. This project wasn’t born out of any particular business problem but out of a perceived opportunity to experiment and innovate, and project leaders didn’t want to be constrained by what had been done on other platforms or through other channels. The resulting app included rich data visualizations and comparisons with how other people spend money — tools that aren’t available on the Citibank website.29 This type of out-of-the-box thinking can be challenging for internal teams that feel stuck in their day-to-day work and is often best jump-started by an outside agency.

Develop internal skills and processes. Customer experience experts from the outside provide important services, but as Jared Spool, founder of User Interface Engineering (UIE), says, “Outsourcing user experience work is like outsourcing your vacation. It gets the job done but doesn’t have the effects you were hoping for.” In other words, digital projects are most effective when they help drive real customer understanding and shift companies toward customer- centric ways of working. That’s why UIE now focuses on training project teams to create digital products and services themselves. Even without explicit training in place, teams working with outside agencies should seek every opportunity to learn the ropes by tagging along on research studies and participating throughout the design process.

No. 4: Plan For The Post-Launch Reality

Digital project teams put an incredible amount of effort into any initial launch — but that’s just day one of a digital touchpoint’s life. What happens on day two through infinity? Companies that launch without an answer to this question ultimately wind up with unsupported sites and orphan apps that confuse or annoy their customers. Don’t fall into this launch-it-and-leave-it trap. Instead, make sure your digital touchpoints get the ongoing attention they require.

Plan to maintain and improve existing sites and apps. After Citibank launched its iPad banking app in July 2011, the company updated it three more times before the end of the year, adding access to check images for bank customers, contextual help in the form of tutorial overlays, social-media sharing, and in-depth visual analytics for credit card accounts. Citibank is now adopting this model — a quick succession of customer experience improvements — across digital touchpoints. In addition to planning what they’ll update, companies need to map out who will be responsible for tasks like ongoing content development, community management, and bug fixes.

Envision how to extend digital products and services to new platforms. Think it’s complicated to manage digital interactions across websites, mobile phones, and tablets? Well hold on to your hat, because the decade ahead will bring further adoption of a dizzying array of platforms including interactive TVs, car dashboards, game boxes, in-store devices, and wearables.30 To make sure you don’t get blindsided by the rapid mainstreaming of a new technology platform, each new product launch should include some discussion of if and/or how the current content or feature set should be ported to other devices and platforms down the road.

Create an end-of-life plan before you launch. Although it can be painful to admit it at the outset of a large and exciting project, most digital touchpoints aren’t going to live forever — at least not in their original states. Links will change, sites may get merged or go away completely, and companies may decide to stop supporting installed apps. Changes like these will likely meet with negative customer reactions ranging from disappointment to frustration and anger. To avoid such responses to an inevitable event, firms need to create one or more contingency plans for sunsetting their digital products and services without leaving customers high and dry.

Best Practices For Ensuring That Digital Supports Your Business

As they make improvements to their digital properties, customer experience professionals need to ensure that the decisions they make are in full support of the brand and business goals. They must use a common measurement framework and strive to provide a unified experience that spans all touchpoints.

No. 3: Bolster Your Company’s Brand

Whether you’re fixing a small usability bug, gutting your entire website, or launching a new mobile app, every decision that you make will ultimately shape your brand in some way. Unfortunately, the digital experiences that many companies deliver inadvertently dilute — or worse, blatantly contradict — their core brand messaging. To create digital experiences that support the brand image you want to portray: 

Surface your company’s brand positioning statement. In our ongoing conversations with customer experience professionals, an alarming number say that they’re not sure exactly what their brand stands for — and many admit that they’ve never even talked with their company’s brand and marketing groups. If this sounds familiar, stop whatever it is you’re doing, pick up the phone, and start to forge these critical relationships. Why? Without a clear understanding of your brand, you’ll have no idea what kinds of digital interactions are appropriate — and which aren’t.32 Once you understand the brand, document its key attributes and positioning statement in an accessible and memorable format that makes it easy for all digital project teams to reference.

Use content, functionality, and design elements that support key attributes. Digital channels are communication media — they automatically create an impression of what your brand stands for. That’s why you need to provide content and functionality that support your firm’s brand positioning. For example, in support of its mission “to bring innovation and inspiration to every athlete in the world,” Nike’s website showcases innovative product features that translate into performance-enhancing benefits and provides useful tools like a training log and pace calculator for runners. Nike also incorporates elements like language — “The perfect combination of lightness and adaptive fit for the ultimate ride” — and images of active people that are consistent with the intent of its positioning.

Improve usability to reinforce brand value. Digital touchpoints are also delivery channels that provide tangible proof of the real value your brand provides. Customers come to digital channels with goals like finding specific information, making purchases, or getting service. To avoid frustrating and annoying your customers — a bad way to build any brand — focus on supplying the content and functionality that will help customers easily achieve their goals. For example, customers who are looking to find and apply for a low-cost credit card might need mobile content that includes annual fees and annual percentage rate plus full web functionality that lets them apply.

No. 2: Measure Digital Touchpoint Performance Against Business Metrics

Digital customer experience projects don’t get funded without some anticipated benefit to the business. To clear the path for initial funding and ongoing support, measure and evangelize the impact of customer experience on the business metrics that matter most to your organization.

Begin and end every project with a discussion of business objectives. Fidelity Investments’ digital design group starts projects by setting business objectives, like increasing customers’ new account registration rates by 6%. This becomes the driver for projects like redesigning a registration form to increase the number of users who successfully complete it. The team then finishes projects with an examination of performance against the expected results. If results are less than expected, the group examines the reasons why and uses what it learns to improve the next project.

Build ROI models. Using measurable business goals — like boosting revenue or lowering service costs — it’s possible to construct customer experience return on investment (ROI) models that even the mathematically challenged will appreciate. First, establish a baseline with current metrics like traffic, conversion rates, average order size, cost per order, and gross margin. Then, estimate low and high improvement ranges for these metrics based on industry-specific averages and anticipated benefits from the project’s enhancements. A few multiplication and addition equations later, you’ve got a realistic ROI model to help you evaluate potential benefits versus estimated costs (see Figure 12).

Create a holistic customer experience measurement framework. When firms only measure outcomes from digital channels, they’re not viewing the entire picture of what a customer experiences. For example, a customer might successfully buy a product online but then call to ask questions about delivery timelines because the site didn’t specify when the product would ship. This could lead to dissatisfaction or, worse, order cancellation. But website metrics alone won’t connect those dots. That’s why customer experience professionals need to establish a framework of cross-channel metrics that track what customers think and feel (“The package took forever to get here!), what actually happened (the package took four days to arrive), and what customers will do as a result of their experience (like tell a friend or cancel the order).

No. 1: Unify The Overall Customer Experience

Today’s digital landscape is distributed across a fractured array of services and devices. It’s also increasingly entangled with physical touchpoints and environments. With customers able to interact through multiple channels at any given moment — and often using multiple touchpoints in pursuit of a single goal — companies need to ensure that they present a coherent face across all interactions.35 When they don’t, they risk diluting their brand and frustrating customers who expect a cohesive experience. To create a unified customer experience:

Use recognizable visual design patterns. The first thing customers react to when they hit any digital touchpoint is its visual design. While companies needn’t strive for a 1:1 mapping of visual elements from one touchpoint to another, the patterns and styles for imagery, typography, and layouts should be carried over from one touchpoint to another, while matching styles used in offline channels as well. For example, The New York Times’ stately serif fonts accentuate the firm’s heritage across all of its touchpoints — traditional and digital. And Toms Shoes incorporates elements of its imagery, typography, and layout on both its website and its Twitter page (see Figure 13).

Make it easy for customers to shift from one channel to another. Consumers now move seamlessly from email to Web, from Facebook to phone, and from TV to tablet. Unified customer experiences actively facilitate this touchpoint hopping and don’t force customers to start cold in each new channel. For example, Amazon.com’s Whispernet enables customers to read to any given point on their Kindles and then pick up from that very same point on a different device. And French insurance carrier Groupama developed a mobile app that seamlessly connects customers to a phone call with a service agent after an auto accident. Before the call is connected, the agent has access to the customer’s name, location, and reason for calling.

Create cross-channel governance practices. For most companies, working across silos will take some getting used to. Formal customer experience governance processes can help instill the required rigor. For example, Barclaycard US assigned one executive to oversee each of nine highlevel processes that constitute a major part of the customer journey, like acquiring a customer, servicing customer issues, and collecting on delinquent accounts. Each exec is responsible for every digital and physical interaction that affects their part of the journey, regardless of where the supporting functions for those interactions — like marketing, underwriting, systems development, eBusiness, and the call center — report into organizationally.