The burning platform death spiral

Welcome back to our 5 Top Challenges for Digital Leaders series.

This week brings us to the final instalment of Driving Channel Strategy, and we’re talking about ways to encourage customers to migrate to digital channels.
 
As we covered in Are the robots coming for our jobs?, most organisations have a Push/Pull strategy when it comes to driving digital adoption.

There’s an abundance of Pull opportunities: I challenge you to describe a traditional industry that doesn’t have latent customer demand for digital services (really, leave a comment below and let me know).

And you have to admit that 2020, despite being a dumpster fire of epic proportions, has been pretty good for encouraging consumers to make the switch to digital.

But sometimes you need some Push strategies too: many organisations want to maximise the opportunity that digital transformation offers.

It could be that you need greater digital volumes to help you manage your growth aspirations, to better cope with future pandemics or risk events, or simply so your digital project pays for itself.

Whatever the reason it’s a great idea to develop a digital adoption plan and here’s some different approaches for you to consider:

One: Can you email your way to digital adoption?

It’s very tempting to run an email campaign to eligible customers, telling them about your new digital services and maybe even offering an incentive for use.

But will it really transfer into changed customer behaviour?

To be smart, your email should be timed to coincide with your customer’s need. An email that tells customers that they can now update their details online, is really going to hit home for the 3% or so of customers who are about to change their details. For everyone else it’s irrelevant and not likely to be retained.

The incentive you’re offering has to be enough to encourage sustained behaviour (and the average time to embed a habit is 66 days), which is never going to work with one-off use cases like “update your details”.
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And the slow adopters, the laggards, who really need the push the most, may not even be big email readers.

Two: A burning platform is a bold but potentially risky strategy.

If you really want to drive your customers to digital channels, you can make your alternative channel experience so bad that it becomes a no-brainer.

Airlines used to do this all the time. You could try the beautiful shiny new self-service kiosk with no queue, or die a slow painful death in the staff-assisted check-in line.

Every time you’re on hold for a call centre and they tell you that your call will be answered in 47 minutes but you could do the task yourself via the website – that’s an example of the burning platform approach.

It’s risky on two counts – firstly what’s the reputational damage you are causing from having a poor experience through one of your channels, in order to drive adoption in another?

Secondly, you have to be super sure that your new digital experience actually meets your customers’ needs - otherwise you’ve created a death spiral where the customer is shunted between call centre and website and back again. And that customer is going to be really mad when they finally get to talk to someone.
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(A well-timed prompt about a new channel when the alternative is NOT a long wait on hold is still a great option though, as you'll see below).

Three: go cold turkey and turn off the old way of doing things.

It’s effective for maximising adoption but this strategy is probably even more risky than the burning platform as it is forcing customers to change their behaviour whether they like it or not.

You will certainly get to listen to a lot of customer feedback!

There are some situations where the risk is more manageable – for example if your brand has a reputation for innovation (think Apple no longer offering a separate headphone jack, we pretty much all got over that).

Or your entire industry is doing it (like NZ banks who are phasing out cheques next year).

Or it’s an online safety issue (like additional authentication).
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In these situations, undoubtedly there will be customer impact and negative feedback, but that will be short-lived and life will go on.

Four: capture the adoption conversation at the point of interaction (my favourite).

In-channel adoption can be something as simple as a “what’s new” promo on your website or it may be notifications or prompts within your digital channels – “we’ve noticed your subscription is about to expire, want to update it here and now?”
Or it can be through a staff-assisted channel – “did you know we now have the ability to do that in our mobile channel? Would you like me to set that up for you and talk you through how it works?”
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In my view this strategy ticks all the boxes – it’s relevant, supports customers who need more help and encourages customer choice.
 
Job done!
 
BEFORE YOU GO: Check out the new video of me chatting with my friend Kerry Topp from The Kerry Topp Collective. This week we’re talking about how to figure out what customers actually want.
 
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