Passing the Mum test. How easy are your digital interfaces?

Welcome back to our 5 Top Challenges for Digital Leaders series! We’re currently exploring the topic of driving digital channel strategy. 

Channel strategy is certainly a hot topic at the moment. COVID lockdowns have accelerated consumer demand for digital services. In fact, McKinsey tell us that during 2020 we’ve seen a quantum leap in digitisation and digital adoption.

As a result, organisations now want to know if they’ve invested in the right channels, if there’s other channels they can invest less in and if there are efficiencies they can leverage between channels (can you build it in one place and leverage it in another?)

Enter the channel strategy. What is it and how do you get it right?

At a high level your channel strategy is how you expect to interact with your customers over the next three to five years.

It should include your sales and service interactions. It should clearly state what the main purposes of each channel is for your organisation and it should talk about the changes you want to make (new functionality, new channels, exiting or grandparenting old channels, technology platform considerations).

​Ideally, you’ll have some metrics by channel, so you understand what they are currently being used for, and some financials so you can understand the total cost to run that channel and the marginal cost of each new interaction.
 
You also need a crystal ball.

This is the classic scenario made famous by Henry Ford’s (alleged*) quote – “if I had asked people what they wanted they would have said faster horses”.

(*alleged because whilst disappointingly he apparently did not actually say the words, he did think along those lines).

Most human beings are notoriously poor at forecasting how technology could change their behaviour in the future.

And most technology enthusiasts are relatively poor at estimating the extent of effort for the mainstream population to adopt a new technology.

I was talking to a colleague the other day about how (as a direct result of the library being closed for lockdown) my 85-year-old mum now likes to listen to podcasts on her iPad. On the one hand her enthusiastic adoption of this “new” technology (new for her) surprised me but on the other hand it’s just full circle back to the pre-TV days when she got a lot of her entertainment from listening (to the radio). She’s comfortable with using her iPad and she’s comfortable with consuming aural content, so podcasts were an easy transition for her.

Weirdly I think this is a good learning for your channel strategy.

​It’s not enough to think about new technologies and how they can potentially change the way you interact with your customers; you have to also think about the underlying human behaviour required and whether this will be easy and familiar to your customers or not.​

We talked in an earlier post about some ideas to help differentiate a trend from a fad and I suggested three questions to ask:

1. Is there a critical mass of customers who have the capability to use this technology now or shortly in the future?
2. Is there a tangible benefit for users from using the new technology?
3. Are customers already using this tech or something similar elsewhere?

 
It’s always the blogger’s prerogative to reconsider their opinions, so now I propose an addition to point 3:  Are customers already using this tech or something similar elsewhere? And is the behaviour needed to use this tech familiar to your users?

This might mean listening (in the case of my mum’s podcasts), tapping your phone on the EFTPOS terminal (in the case of mobile payments) or talking to your smart home device.

New channel technologies that involve talking rather than typing, using natural language processing, voice interfaces and digital humans are growing in usage and popularity. Most of us can talk and in many situations these interfaces will be easier and faster than a touch screen.

NLP capabilities are catching up quickly to enable conversations to feel more life-like and to enable multiple tasks (“OK Google how long will it take to walk to the train station and do I need to take an umbrella?”).

As you work through your channel strategy it’s worth including an indicator of customer effort to learn and to use your channels.

If your new channel or technology requires a significant change in customer behaviour then expect a slower take-up and to have to invest more effort in customer education.

(Mothers, by the way, can be an excellent yardstick for how easy a digital channel is, as my teenagers will tell you!)

Ultimately BMI (brain-machine interfaces – the most famous example being Neuralink, Elon Musk’s solution for neurological disorders) may one day negate the need to worry about how easy it is for customers to interface with your channels but I’m pretty sure you don’t need to be including BMI in your channel strategy just yet!

Take care and see you next week

If you found this post helpful then join our email list and receive these posts straight to your in-box each week!