Digital Experience is the Brand

We live in a world where customers expect a digital experience. That experience makes or breaks brands today. According to TheApp Attention Index, people today are far less tolerant of problems with digital services than they were just two years ago, and they're now far more likely to take decisive action -deleting apps, turning to the competition, and sharing their negative experiences far and wide.

The index gives us some key insights into these changes in consumer behavior:

• An average person used 34 digital services every day
• 61% admit they reach for their mobile phone before talking to anyone else when they wake up
• 55% can only go without a mobile device for up to 4 hours before they find it difficult to manage tasks in their everyday life
• 71% admit that digital services are so intrinsic to their daily lives, they don't realize how much they rely on them

It's evident that the penalty for poor application experience is very high, with over 49% of surveyed users stating they have switched suppliers due to poor digital experience. Not to mention, a 100ms delay in load time resulted in a 7% drop in conversion, which when compounded, substantially impacts the bottom line.

The digital experienceis not just scanning a document or having a video call with a regional manager; it means actuallydoing an end to end transaction completely digitally. Today, application loyalty is the new brand loyalty, meaning that consumers are loyal to the brands that deliver digital experience perfection. In the same report, 70% of consumers said they want digital experiences to be more personalized than those that happen face-to-face. Furthermore, 50% stated that they would be willing to pay more for an organization's product or service if its digital services were better than a competitor's.

The Pandemic's effect on Customer Experience

As the pandemic has hit us, it pushed all age groups towards extreme digital adoption. This is no longer a gen x or gen y statement; it is true across all ages, making it far more important to act upon than ever before.

In a recent McKinsey & Company study, interesting demographics emerged during these pandemic times, which led to some key observations:

• Digital preferences of older Western European consumer cohorts (ages 51-64 and 65+) aligning for the first time with those of younger demographicsfor most banking services
• Declines across markets in consumers' desire to visit branchesfor transactions-shifts that may stick for the long-term
• Digital is expected to become the default channelfor most customers and the sole sales and service channel for many

Because of this scenario, users don't just compare one bank's app experience with another bank's app experience, but as the apps on their phones sit next to the apps from other industries (Amazon, Facebook, Uber, etc.) subconsciously, the expectation is set in that the banking app should be as good in the experience as the others, if not a leap ahead: That is the bar we are measured against.

The good news is that the technology to not only meet the app experience bar set by these companies, but to surpass them is available, and our development teams are always keen to get their hands on them and embed them within our customers' journeys towards making the app experience exceptional. Butas the customer experience simplifies, there is a multifold explosion in application complexity:

• Businesses are investing in making things better, easier, and more engaging for their customers
• This innovation is driven by investments that only increase complexity
• Highly distributed, multi-cloud, micro-services, APIs, containers, IOT environments, and relentless code releases that introduce constant change
• And all of this is happening at a staggering scale

Check back here next week for the second part of this series blog. We shall analyze the impact of a multi-cloud environment and how it affects Customer Experience, while discussing pragmatic steps towards overcoming those challenges andelevating our applications CX not just from Functional to Joyful, but to a Meaningful one.

Can't wait until then to learn more? Check out our financial services security site, financial services security infographic, or security outcomes study to learn more.