3 simple approaches to digital optimization.

Today, we rely more on digital interfaces to complete everyday tasks: paying bills, grocery shopping, refilling prescriptions, etc.

As consumers, this gives us many convenient digital options that make our day-to-day lives more efficient. But for the companies behind these websites, the stakes for delivering the best customer experience have never been higher. If the customer’s digital experience is less than satisfactory, they’ll move on to the next website or app.

So, how do you simplify your digital approach to achieve 100% customer satisfaction every time in every journey? Let’s look at how to get started.

1. Identify and understand where customers struggle.

Is it just me, or does clicking a button 17 times to confirm it’s broken a little… frustrating?

When a user repeatedly clicks on a website or app element—a button, link, image, or anything in between—and it doesn’t do what the user expects, we call this a rage click. One of many behaviors that indicate user frustration, rage clicks often signal slow response times, broken components, dead links, design flaws, and other usability issues.

While one small friction point might not seem like a big deal, it can add up and eventually frustrate someone enough to leave a website and never return. To retain customers, you must provide the best digital experience on the first (and every) visit.

For example, one quick-serve restaurant (QSR) was tasked with increasing online orders. Their KPIs were healthy and steady, but the team knew they could do more. Partnering with Quantum Metric, the QSR leveraged out-of-the-box friction detection to identify a rage click when it occurred at the beginning of the ordering process.

Through one-click quantification, they uncovered that the impact of this friction extended to nearly 10% of their online orders. With a few quick fixes to make the ordering process clearer, the team resolved the issues and saw an immediate 10% increase in orders started, leading to a significant increase in online orders overall.

2. Learn where people engage (or don’t) on your website.

A thoughtful webpage flow and button design are critical for a high-converting website. But, sometimes, website elements look clickable even when they aren’t, confusing users and disrupting their path to conversion.

Case in point: One retailer trying to drive sign-ups to their new, branded credit cards had a landing page with eye-catching imagery and bold announcements about the great deals customers receive upon sign-up. Unfortunately, they weren’t getting the interest they anticipated and fell short of their KPIs.

After months of testing new sign-up flows, the team turned to Quantum Metric for help. Through journeys and heatmaps, the team understood that most customers didn’t make it past the landing page because the actual sign-up mechanism was a tiny, unnoticeable button towards the bottom—and customers were clicking everything except that button.

To investigate on-page engagement, look at where your visitors are actually clicking instead of only at the places you intended for them to click. Then, address those areas by redesigning them to look more clickable or vice versa.

3. Remove the biggest barriers in the customer’s digital journey.

Rarely will users browse a website without an end goal in mind. Even in retail, the “just browsing” shoppers are there for a reason: to see the latest trends, find out if an item is back in stock, try out that coupon, etc. Every website visitor is on a journey, and your job is to ensure it can successfully reach its end.

The easiest way to ensure journey success every time is to reverse engineer it: look for incomplete journeys and strive to understand what caused the barrier to completion. But you’re still not quite done yet.

Not only do you need to find these barriers, but you also need to understand the baseline relative to what’s impactful to your business. Think about which would hurt your bottom line more: a segment of 10,000 customers experiencing a digital error, but everyone can still convert, or a segment of 500 customers with a different error that prevents everyone from converting?

The challenge is you’re more likely to hear about the 10,000 customers. Someone is bound to call the contact center, submit survey feedback, or worse yet, an executive may run into the error themselves. If you’re constantly chasing complaints or prioritizing the squeakiest wheels, you aren’t fixing what matters to your business’s most important driver: the customer.

For example, a CMO at a major airline started a fire drill because they ran into an issue while booking their flights for an upcoming business trip. Rather than spending hours trying to reproduce the issue to uncover why the CMO experienced a poor booking experience, the airline’s digital team used Quantum Metric to find the CMO’s session. They then discovered that the error occurred because the CMO couldn’t book the 10th leg of their around-the-world trip within a single itinerary.

With this insight and the ability to look across all customer sessions, the team understood how big of an issue this actually wasn’t—no one books trips with that many connectors, so for most customers, it was a non-issue. Within minutes, the team was able to right-size the issue and stop the panic.

See where to optimize at every step of the customer journey.

Ready to start on the fast track to digital optimization? In our guide, Optimize the 5 pillars of the digital customer journey, we share insights into doing just that as well as achieving digital excellence.

Get the guide to see:

• The top time wasters slowing down your digital transformation
• Key questions to ask about your data at every touchpoint and how to answer
• Stories from leading brands across top industries like travel, retail, and banking

Download the full guide here.