The era of a brand only representing an in-person, website, or call center experience is over. CX and UX are now and forever intertwined, and, how brands position themselves in the marketplace must be based on this model while endearing the brand to this new-age consumer.
The enormous responsibility of marketing a brand has become even more challenging since the powerful fusion between in-person and digital interactions has become the norm. Every brand representation has to be centered around a conscious effort to build not just experiences but ‘exceptional and connected’ in-person and digital experiences (CX and UX). Brands are continuously searching for creative ways to humanize their digital experiences and digitize their in-person experiences.
The latter has been happening for decades as we moved from paper to email and email to online portals and websites and contact centers, all being woven in and promoted as a “better” way to interact with a brand. Examples like digital order boards inside McDonalds and headless teller atm machines inside the lobbies of banks.
“Humanizing the digital experience is about creating a sense of connection and empathy with the customer, not just delivering a functional service,” says Neil Patel, Founder of Neil Patel Digital. “It’s about understanding their needs, wants and emotions and designing an experience that feels personalized and authentic.”
The immediate and automated interactions with consumers in the virtual world demand an alignment between CX, UX, and the brand to a whole new level of importance. And today’s main challenge is to provide the humanization of the digital experience while ensuring that the digital channels are still able to deliver on the brand promise.
For every successful launch, there have also been failed experiences for both firms and customers. When the United States Postal Office first deployed its self-service kiosk, it was seen as extremely confusing. The kiosk was designed to process 80% of what a consumer had to stand in line for before, but, in practice out of the gates, only ended up handling about 26%. (1) When Chase sent automated SMS alerts regarding account updates or debt collection to customers without consent, it was seen as an intrusive form of information exchange. Because Chase did not give the customers a choice to opt-out, the bank was penalized with a $34 million Class Action settlement. (2)
In this article, we’ll share insights on how to provide the consumer with a balanced experience between technology and the human factor. Humanizing and improving the digital experience (UX) of your brand and ways to test effectiveness to avoid the fails.
Brand Perception at Warp Speed.
What is UX in the simplest of terms? A consumer’s perception of your brand as a result of the digital engagement with you be it through a website, mobile app, email, or self-service machine. Consumers create a link with your brand, at warp speed when they interact with your brand digitally, since the communication between brand and user is practically immediate and covers, in many cases, a variety of communication channels (omnichannel).
Although this relationship is developed through communication channels with a predesigned trip and certain response options, the reaction that the user may have to the experience is complex since more sensitive factors such as mood, past memories in relation to the brand, their perception, and feelings regarding the product, ease of use, emotional response to branding and advertising throughout the user journey.
There are currently various tools, strategies, and ways that can help create a more responsive consumer experience, one that connects to several consumers’ touchpoints and timelines while connecting the emotive feeling that a traditional in-person experience can promote.
Ways to Humanize the Digital Experience of your Brand And Testing Effectiveness
Creativity and Community Building
One of the common mistakes in UX design is directing all the efforts solely to the sale; since a merely commercial relationship is established. This leaves behind the emotional connection that can be created with a brand which is the one that is much deeper and longer lasting.
Creativity and community building play an important role because through them you can imagine new forms of dialogue that give added value to the brand. That is, they not only focus on positioning a product or service but on deepening and generating a dialogue based on a lifestyle, vision, or values.
Lynn Saladini, COO at apc (formerly ath Power Consulting) talks about a recent study where it was the community and connectivity to the buyer persona that created the best-in-class experience with mobile banking apps in the credit card space. “We took a look at many of the major credit card brands as a part of a digital credit card opening study conducted in 2022. If you had asked me personally which brand would come out on top and why I never would have gotten it right. The apc study finding showed overwhelmingly that consumers related to the Discover digital credit card application experience. Why? Because of the humanization of the mobile app and website. Instead of product pushing or screaming about best rates, they showed visuals of how and when to use the card in the community, their card can be personalized right down to showing your love of wildlife, Pride, and your favorite sports team. Discover currently offers 163 different designs to choose from and many of them are real conversation starters when they are used to tying the look and the sentiment to the conversation and the brand.”
Personalize the Experience
The center of humanizing customer digital experience has always been personalization. According to a report by McKinsey, 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions—and three-quarters will switch if they don’t like their experience. Another survey by TELUS International indicates that 43% of customers insist interactions should become more personalized. This is proof of how crucial personalization is; besides being a catalyst for brand loyalty, it’s a way to humanize customers’ digital experience (UX).
Rather than the random “How can I help you?” text that starts a pop-up chat window, a more memorable CX would be some sort of personalized question or text that meets the customer at whatever point of interaction they are —a text streamlined to what the customer is seeing or feeling or experiencing; Like; “I see you’ve put a size 7.5 and a size 8.0 in for our red boots in the shopping cart. May I help you determine the correct size?” This, for sure, would make the interaction feel personal —not generic— and memorable using readily available first-hand data.
Leverage Customer Data and Analytics
We’re right in the data-driven era and many companies are latching on to this to improve various aspects of their brand including CX and UX. Customers are consistently engaging with brands across multiple touchpoints (omnichannel) and throughout their entire journey, data, as well, is being collected in diverse forms.
In addition to personalization —making a humanized contextual interaction—, customer data and analytics can also be used to identify areas for improvement in their journey. By analyzing data about customer interactions with a business, you can identify pain points in the customer experience and develop strategies to address them. This could mean redesigning a website’s user interface to make it more intuitive, improving customer service response speed, or streamlining the checkout process on an e-commerce site. “There are several ways to garner a lot of data and insights without a huge price tag. Some of the tools apc uses are: online surveys, mobile app embedded surveys, text surveys, diary studies, brand Madlib studies, social media listening, and of course the more traditional things like mystery shopping and focus groups” says Saladini.
Feedback as an Opportunity for Dialogue
There’s nothing else that makes one feel heard than asking for their opinion. When talking about humanizing a digital experience, it’s important to pay attention to what users have to say, because what is more human than the ability to express the experience that one has in front of something? Seeking feedback and opinions from your customers is an incredible way to initiate a dialogue and strengthen your brand.
Today, users no longer wait for a company to give them the option of replying, but through the same social networks like Twitter and other platforms, they seek to make their opinion known regarding a product, a service, or an experience of purchase, strengthening or weakening the community around a brand.
Companies that see feedback as an opportunity for dialogue with their customers have more opportunities to grow since they integrate the customer’s real experience into their processes, generating a more collaborative relationship, and encouraging dialogue and not an imposition. A fabulous example of this is this comment made just this morning by a social influencer on Twitter about Nike: “Guys, confidence is sexy. Ford, Chevy, Toyota, Nike, etc. open up the comments on their ads. YES, some people openly ridicule them, but their fans defend them. And they also often say useful things that companies should note. It’s a bad look when you just block discourse instead~ Andrei A Dioumaev Twitter
Leverage the Power of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
While we may be discussing ‘humanizing’ digital experience, we can’t possibly ignore the huge benefits we can get from technology like artificial intelligence. AI integration and automation have so much to offer in improving the digital experience of a brand.
“By leveraging AI and automation to give CX delivery agents valuable data-driven insights to personalize and streamline customer-brand interactions, and by introducing the right digital channels, from social media to live chat, companies can meet their customers’ needs today and into the future.” —Maria Pardee, chief commercial officer at TELUS
With data collected, you can leverage the power of AI, deploying chatbots that can provide humanized contextual interaction with customers. However, you cannot leave everything to AI. There should also be a seamless setup to transfer complex queries to a human assistant for effective resolution.
Conclusion
The humanization of the digital experience is linked to the creative capacity of the work team that makes up the brand. It’s of little use to be able to record thousands of user behavior data if you do not know how to use this information to generate a more empathetic interaction.
Currently, the speed of the processes and 24/7 response capacity are something that the user takes for granted but finding a brand that understands their emotions and aspects more related to their way of life will forge a more lasting and strong relationship.
- Self-Service Kiosks Audit Report,” Office of Inspector General United States Postal Service. 2014. https:// www.uspsoig.gov/sites/default/files/document-library-files/2015/dr-ar-14-002.pdf
- Basso, Karina. “Chase Bank to Pay $34M in TCPA Class Action Lawsuit Settlement,” Top Class Actions. https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/closed-settlements/chase-bank-tcpa-class-action-settlement/.