4 biggest digital optimization time wasters and how to avoid them.
May 31, 2023
Summary:
- Digital product teams lose significant time and revenue to inefficient tools, guesswork, and fragmented data.
- Relying on assumptions instead of clear analytics leads to misdiagnosed issues, wasted optimization efforts, and frustrated customers.
- Misaligned priorities and siloed teams create conflicting data, bottlenecks, and slow responses to high-impact problems.
- Waiting on experts or manually reproducing issues drains resources, while guided analytics, session replay, and opportunity analysis enable faster, self-serve insights.
- A unified digital analytics platform helps teams quickly identify friction across the customer journey and focus on the issues that matter most.
Have you ever spent hours trying to diagnose and isolate a customer complaint on your app or website, only to realize conversions didn’t improve after releasing a fix? How much time do you spend re-creating errors? Do you have multiple teams rebuilding nearly identical dashboards? Do you ever feel like you’re waiting for experts to deliver insights?
Digital product teams spend a staggering amount of time working with inefficient processes, costing them valuable customers and dollars. In fact, up to 30% of yearly revenue is lost on hard-to-use tools that complicate development and hinder operations.
So, what telltale signs point to a dead-end? These are the 4 biggest time wasters that could be slowing down your digital team.
1. Relying on guesswork.
Say you notice a drop in conversions. Yet, you’re unsure why or where along the customer flow it’s happening. While you have a few guesses, you can’t confidently say whether it’s a technical or behavioral issue, exactly what needs to be fixed, or if the issue impacts enough customers to bring it to the attention of your digital team—and that’s a problem.
Without the right tools and insights, digital teams often resort to guesswork to solve customer pain points. Not only does speculation about the causes of digital friction lead to ineffective solutions, but it also creates unhappy customers and uses up a team’s resources by guiding optimization efforts in the wrong direction.
How to avoid it: Turn to a digital analytics platform that includes features like session replay and opportunity analysis, which enables you to easily and quickly identify customer struggles.
2. Misaligned priorities.
Too much data isn’t always a good thing, especially when your product, engineering, and customer experience teams work in silos with different tools and can’t agree on whose data is right. It can lead to analysis paralysis and bottlenecks at every stage of the digital workflow, from discovery and diagnosis to resolution.
How to avoid it: To retain customers, teams need to act fast to catch and address the most impactful issues. Establish a single source of truth around the customer’s journey to break down silos and streamline operations.
3. Playing the waiting game.
Our data grows bigger, but the number of experts who understand it stays the same. Most data and analytics teams want to be seen as strategic experts or data storytellers, not “order takers” for routine data pulls, like, “Why was there a spike in visits last week?” or “Why are conversions lower today?”
Most digital product teams are already overwhelmed with a backlog of bugs & fixes. And they can’t train on highly complex analytics tools or wait for analytics experts to answer routine questions about their product performance.
How to avoid it: You don’t need to be a data expert to uncover the sources of digital friction on your website. Step-by-step guided analytics solutions, like our dashboard templates, enable teams to self-serve insights and troubleshoot on the fly.
4. Escalating issues or reproducing them manually.
An email forwarded by your manager from the CEO’s friend indicates they struggled on your web page. And yet as the product manager who owns the experience, you have 30 other critical issues in your backlog. Experience tells you this issue isn’t the top priority, but how do you validate with evidence so it doesn’t seem like you’re ignoring your boss? And how do you avoid wasting time trying to manually replicate every complaint that ends up in your inbox?
When constantly chasing complaints or prioritizing the squeakiest wheels, you aren’t focusing on what matters most to the customer.
How to avoid it: Instead of manually reproducing issues, quantified session replay can help you understand if a problem is unique to a single customer or representative of a larger issue.
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