Back in the early days of the Internet, many companies struggled initially with the imperative for creating Web sites. They tried to find motivation when the fuller industry implications of the new but clearly important new medium were still unclear. The same cycle also happened with subsequent evolutions of what's now increasingly called online digital experience, including the arrival of Web-based advertising, social networks, online communities, and mobile apps to name some of the more significant advances in recent years.
The pattern seems fairly consistent: Novel technologies emerge, which enable fundamentally new possibilities. Then companies try to figure out how to apply them to best benefit their businesses, often at first missing what makes the new technologies special. Instead, they employ them like they did previous advances.
Then a few stand-out exemplars -- usually from the startup world -- demonstrate the inherent advantages of the new technologies with a notable market proof point, typically a digital experience that has successfully drawn in and created value for millions of people in an important new way that is somehow better, cheaper, and/or easier. The resulting industry dissection and distilling of the lessons from these examples then seep back into the mainstream, though often more slowly than we'd like.
Thus the first Web sites looked like traditional brochures, digital ads were broadly blasted like newspaper ads instead of being narrowly targeted and algorithmically placed, social media was used by businesses as mostly a publishing medium rather than for more meaningful and productive engagement, and so on.
The good news is that in the large, the uniqueness and inherent strength of each new technology advance is steadily and slowly unlocked and then broadly learned. It almost always takes many years to do this however, often five to ten or more years, before an important new technology's uniquely significant aspects are well understood and broadly applied by the industry.
All would be still be relatively well if learning new technology was our only challenge. However, as influential thinkers like Ray Kurzweil have long posited, we would soon enter a world of exponential change driven by technology, and in particular, the power laws of computer networks. This is now the reality we live in.
Today, each new major technological advance in digital experience therefore comes more and more quickly. Consumer products, which can most easily take advantage of these ideas, are being adopted ever more and more quickly. This is a result of the almost complete lack of friction existing today in digital distribution, and am improved general understanding of the growth and adoption of digital experiences.
Examples of the kind of rapid shifts and fast growth that are possible abound: Tablets became mainstream in the shortest amount of time of any technology up to that point in 2012. Most recently, Pokemon GO was able to acquire its first 50 million users in just 19 days. On the business side of digital experience -- a more challenging space with additional barriers to user acquisition -- the growth stories of Slack or Dropbox have shown it's still possible to achieve very significant and viral growth.
The key insight here is this: Many of these new online services become substantial digital channels in their own right and to which companies often must respond, which has led to digital channel proliferation/fragmentation and what I recently dubbed as "The Engagement Paradox" in Brand Quarterly. Companies now have to be on Facebook (and most other major social networks), have a strategy of some kind for tablets, Internet of Things, Slack, and file sync and sharing, as well as hundreds, even thousands, of other engagement channels.
Most organizations simply don't have the resources to participate in these new channels, despite the benefits of doing so. Yet do it they must, as customer experience has become perhaps the top differentiating factor that separates the leaders and the laggards when it comes to corporate performance, according to a widely followed yearly report by Watermark Consulting.
The short version: Customer experience laggards underperform the S&P 500 significantly as a whole, while leaders outperform it by a good margin.
The implication is if you're not participating in a popular new digital channel, then your customer experience is missing entirely. You have no chance to engage or create value there. This also highlights a related issue: One's overall share of digital experience drops as new digital channels continue emerge and grow en masse. This is a real risk to many organizations as they fall behind, except for the minority that have figured out how to organize and scale better for exponential digital change.
To underscore this point, recent industry data from McKinsey shows there's no bell curve here: There are relatively few companies in the vanguard of digital maturity today, while the great majority are behind, and even regressing due to how fast technology is moving past them.
While we now have some inkling at least of how we might better keep up with the drumbeat of digital progress, a whole raft of new incoming digital experience technologies, from Internet of Things to virtual and augmented reality, are inbound and demanding at least careful evaluation and planning, if not outright early experiments to build initial competency and organizational knowledge in these vital new areas.
It's important to point out as well that most of these digital experience advances are additive and very few truly replace what came before. So while e-mail and Web sites emerged in the early and mid-1990s, and certainly e-mail is getting very long in the tooth, it's still a valid and widely used channel for communication and engagement. This means all of the old digital experience capabilities must be maintained and used, until returns from them diminish sufficiently.
This has led to the outsourcing of digital channel handling and management to what are known as customer experience management (CEM) vendors, such as Adobe and Sitecore, which can theoretically cope with and handle new channels on the behalf of their customers, as new ones emerge.
However, given the early maturity phase of the the CEM industry, I'd argue that, for the moment, these platforms largely address only the largest and most well-known channels of the day. This is a scale challenge similar to the unified communications industry, which also isn't keeping up very well with recent advances in digital experience and engagement. So, I find that CEM is promising, but far from a panacea.
The bottom line is that organizations need to have a clear-eyed view of the digital experience landscape and what the major moving parts are today. Here's a round-up and brief assessment of the largest and most significant digital experience channels that most organizations must either a) address well today or b) be considering carefully for the future, listed in approximate order of initial emergence in the marketplace:
Clearly, there is quite a lot to consider here, and to reconcile with each other, which is one of the key points: Most organizations must spend as much time considering how to organize for modern, integrated digital experience, as executing well on it.
Please also note that the digital experience channels here are just the main ones that companies must consider. Most organizations have serious additional homework to do to remain well connected to their key stakeholders in digital channels.
For this, I recommend that organizations proactively develop roadmaps that cast a wide net to include all relevant candidate technologies where appropriate. Then a) conduct small experiments to validate emerging digital experience technologies, b) build effective digital solutions that actively encourage sustainably and self-evolving co-creation with their stakeholders, and c) begin investing seriously in more holistic, coordinated, and data-validated and guided digital experiences.
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