The Key to Improving Digital Adoption

If your digital adoption has slowed or stalled, you may want to address the problem from the customer’s point of view by assessing customer intent.

Customer intent essentially is answering the question: why is the customer contacting you? What problem are they trying to solve or what information do they need? Customers aren’t contacting you because they have nothing better to do; they are reaching out for a reason.

Understanding customer intent is an important clue into why your digital adoption isn’t working as planned. A common mistake brands make is to deflect as many contacts as possible into digital channels without considering if digital is the right channel.

Sending customers down a path where they are likely to fail in their quest for an answer or problem resolution is a formula for low satisfaction and low probability to return. So if a digital channel is not properly equipped to support a particular journey or use case, blindly directing all customers towards digital will create frustration and animosity among at least a subset of your customer base.

How to improve digital adoption

To improve digital adoption, brands should ensure that directing customers to digital channels will have a high likelihood of success.  In our research at J.D. Power, we find that the likelihood of success should be 85% or higher for customers to be satisfied with and want to return to the channel. Anything less than that can result in dissatisfaction, recontact and a reluctance to use digital in the future.

To determine if a customer will be successful in the digital channel, you must first understand intent. If the intent lines up with the digital channel’s capabilities, then send the customer to digital. If not, have them contact you by phone or chat or another channel where the probability of success is higher.

How to understand customer intent

Customer intent has been a focus of marketing organizations for several years as a way to improve conversion rates and ROI on marketing programs. Marketers predict customer intent by studying customer behavior in the purchase path and comparing that to what they know about the customer from the CRM or other personalization tools.

Service organizations can leverage the same tools and techniques to understand customer intent. Utilities experiencing an outage can predict with a high degree of certainty why a customer is contacting them. The same is true for wireless companies the day after the monthly bill is delivered or after a new phone is announced.

How to improve digital success rates

Step one is to do a better job of matching customer intent with channel capabilities. The next step is to understand the gaps in channel capabilities. If a digital channel has a low probability of success for a particular journey or use case, seek to understand what is causing failure.

What is it about the journey or use case that the digital channel is unable to support? What changes can be made or capabilities added to the digital channel to deliver a higher success rate?

Another approach would be to study the journey or use case and determine if products or policies or processes can be simplified in a way that gives the digital channel a better chance of success.

Getting started

Finding the right balance between understanding customer intent, improving the capabilities of the digital channels and simplifying products, policies and processes requires the formation of a cross-functional team and executive sponsorship.

Once formed, the team should establish a baseline, identify the journeys and channels with the greatest mismatch and tackle those first. Repeat the process for the next group. With a few wins on the books, the team will have momentum and an easier path for alignment across the organization and future funding.

Matching customer intent with channel capabilities is the key to restarting the digital adoption engine.

About the Author: Michael Vermillion leads CX improvement consulting for J.D. Power and works with CX-focused organizations to develop, align and execute CX strategy.

Where to find more insights like this:
This blog post was featured in the Customer Service Advice & Insights monthly newsletter. Make sure you're signed up to get the latest customer service channel intelligence >