“We are living through a digital-product revenue revolution, centered around using digital products to completely redesign the value we create for customers,” Jian Wei Hoh, former head of business design at Ford said.
Hoh is not alone in his observation. A Harvard Business Review Analytics Services report sponsored by Amplitude—Making the Leap to a Digital-First Enterprise—reveals just how much executives across industries and sizes are embracing the digital-first mindset.
More than 90 percent of the executives surveyed agreed that this moment in time is a unique opportunity to capitalize on digital acceleration. As customers have increased their engagement with digital products, 80 percent indicate the experience a company provides is as important as its services and products.
“If you are not fulfilling your customers’ needs, they are going to leave,” said Tricia Han, Care.com’s former chief product officer and another executive surveyed in the report.
In addition, companies are moving beyond vanity metrics like page views and clicks to track the success of digital interactions. Even standard feedback tools like Net Promotor Score (NPS) have fallen to the wayside; only 16 percent of executives listed NPS as an important measure of digital success. Instead, the 295 executives surveyed favored user engagement, lifetime value, and customer retention as key metrics to measure digital engagement.
The shift to evaluating digital success in terms of the full customer journey elevates another key theme: all teams need democratized insights to data.
When every team across your company—whether they're in marketing, product, engineering or design—can access and use digital analytics, they're empowered to 1) quickly understand everything customers do across the full journey, and 2) turn these insights into experiences that drive engagement. As the report notes:
Successful organizations do not allow centralized analytics functions, top-down decision making, or monolithic systems to cause bottlenecks to innovation. Rather, they provide employees across the enterprise with analytics tools so they can tap and understand data.
Leading organizations understand that they can no longer get away with delivering disjointed experiences. They're switching to end-to-end digital solutions that stitch together every page view, button click, and email received across all data sources and destinations—into a single timeline.
The result? Technical and non-technical teams can quickly and easily uncover insights and transform them into personalized experiences that meet customers in the moment—and keep them coming back for more.
This viewpoint is reflected by organizations like 120-year-old Ford, which has emerged as an industry leader in embracing the digital-first mindset.
“We have an aspiration that everyone in the company is in service of making the customer’s life better,” said Hoh. “You cannot do that without data to understand the customer’s life, their journey, and their touchpoints.”
Download the full report to learn more insights shared by global executives.
