Popular Apps and User Experience. What Can Digital Providers Learn?

There is a sea of change in user behavior. Almost everyone is now digital — always on; always connected. Our methods of communicating have evolved as the digital age has developed, changing our viewpoints on convenience, choice, reliability and speed. Ultimately, our expectations revolve around having a compelling digital customer experience.

Who is Delivering this Powerful Digital Experience?

As Don Norman refers to in “The Design of Everyday Things,” it is a crucial design element to give users feedback on the action that they performed. One such example of a digital service that provides this response is WhatsApp. This simple service appeals to the user’s primary need of connectivity and provides feedback via “acknowledgment” (the first significant feature which led to its success). The user receives immediate gratification when sending a message, as it allows them to view if the message was received and read, leading to a successful digital experience.

Some banking and insurance providers are yet another example. Geico’s comprehensive app provides a world-class experience where the user hardly needs to speak to a human agent. Capital One, a bank that doesn’t even have a physical presence in many US states, possesses an excellent mobile app that is compelling many users to utilize their services. In addition to supporting service to credit card, mortgage and auto loan accounts, they were the first bank to allow access through Alexa’s voice interface with the ability to answer natural language queries (“How much did I spend at Starbucks last month?”). Capital One clearly made the “bank in the pocket” concept a reality and acquired a significant market share over other geographically desirable banks by providing an excellent digital customer experience.

What Does it Take?

Of course, digital providers also want to deliver what their customer wants, especially in the realm of digital commerce, but it is not always a simple task. However, many popular apps have several features that all digital businesses can take a lesson from.

• A simple and intuitive UI – Digital journeys should not be overloaded with elements in a way which may detract from simplicity. Intuitive and frictionless user experience is more powerful than a medley of features.
• Carrier-grade reliability – Providing reliable experience with valuable user feedback plays a vital role in delivering a good digital customer experience.
• Self-care – Millennials and GenZ prefer not to reach out to customer care (via chat, phone or email) and instead like solving issues on their own. Allowing users to view all the required information and manage their subscriptions provides a better experience.

Benefits and Challenges for Mobile Service Providers

There is a huge motivation to go through a transformative digital journey as it has the potential to:

• Improve user experience, user satisfaction, loyalty and overall NPS
• Increase efficiency
• Boost cost savings and revenue
• Offload the burden of physical stores and call centers
• Increase roaming revenue
• Simplify the buying experience
• Improve customer control

Digital channels have increasingly taken center stage as there is no longer room for inconsistent or disjointed user experiences. However, mobile service providers face roadblocks such as the magnitude of information, real-time access, reliability, security, scalability, subscriber relationships and other complex use cases. Building a digital commerce experience is even more complex as it calls for a huge amount of accurate information for the customer and the operator (with several legal implications). Managing this requires specialized systems built for the job and integrated into the operator’s architecture. Adapted or re-engineered systems simply “bolted on” will not suffice. For operators to transform every consumer touchpoint and unlock the new digital engagement opportunities that users want, they need to re-tool with digital-grade technology.

At MATRIXX, we design based on what really matters to people. Our technology is targeted to drive engagement with the primary goal to be with the customer at every possible touchpoint. Our platform makes sure that our customers are not missing any avenue of engagement, is revamping the user experience and re-imagining how customers interact with their service provider. Read more about how we are delivering for digital leaders in our case studies.