Slick, cookie-cutter digital customer experience fails to differentiate brands
Think providing a seamless digital CX is all you need to maintain your brand in the eyes of the consumer? Chris Henderson, MullenLowe Profero’s Sydney MD warns that slick, generic out-of-the box solutions could actually be doing more harm than good.
The last thing any marketer wants is for their brand to look and feel just like the competitor. However, our industry’s current focus on streamlining customer experience via tech platforms risks exactly that.
The scramble for next generation customer experiences (CX) has agencies, consultancies and marketers making brand interactions more intuitive. Innovating to find more efficiency is an important part of refining customer experiences, but it offers no competitive advantage if everyone else follows a category-generic playbook.
Brands using technology as their differentiator run the risk of creating generic interfaces and experiences. We’ve all heard about the out-of-the-box solutions that vendors promise will fix everything. Smooth and integrated customer experiences might create satisfied punters, but this is only half the battle. Brands looking for proper ROI need to consider emotional motivators when devising strategies to win and retain high-value customers.
Good piece; concise and informative. The nub appears to be creating an efficient CX that differentiates sufficiently. If the massive test/re-test automation game is homogenising the interface pathways, then our heuristic responses might fall in line with expectations of those established ruts. But as you point out, it is a more valuable proposition to shift upstream from within that it is to find the next ‘unconnected’. The mechanisms for keeping them captive might be different from those needing to capture them in the first place. Thanks for the HBR link.
Thanks Antony – glad you found it interesting.
I agree with your view, Chris.
And there are similar themes across much of the digital landscape. Same but different, for example, is the argument that whilst targeted content across search, social, etc (paid and not) gets people where they’re ‘probably’ going faster, it also reinforces biases and can in many cases limit the discovery of ‘new’. The net result is likely that segments of society are being pushed further apart and challenged to consider alternatives less often. It’s hard to see how this is a good thing.
On another note, platforms & tech are almost always ‘functional’ solutions, designed and sold to save time and money. It’s what’s done with the tools, by great people not great tools, where the magic is made.
There is something to be said for a familiarity consumers find in the functional workings of UX being consistent. “I know that when I click this, that will happen – because that’s just what I’ve come to expect”. We all know the human brain loves predictability which is why UX finds grooves and only the bravest companies push outside of these norms.
Thanks for your comments Tom – I agree, it’s a sad day when someone’s exposure to a potential experience/service/content is being limited by the rules a set strategy has imposed. For me, this is where things like A.I. really become useful – a lightning quick analysis of an extraordinary data set that includes emotion, time and context to continuously inform something a little different each time. The interaction design may be the same (reduce cognitive stress, thumbs up) but the content, product, service delivered can be more relevant, or to your point, discoverable beyond someone’s everyday heuristics.