The Heart of Digital Quality: The Customer Experience
What ultimately defines digital quality? Some might say, “the reduction of defects,” and that’s a valid answer in the academic sense. But as our physical and digital lives blend over time, enabled more and more by mobile, multimodal and immersive experiences, the answer has to be more profound than that.
In other words, when does “functional” cease being an adequate barometer of digital quality? Objectivity matters, but the subjective experience of your customers matters quite a bit too.
I’ve had the privilege of discussing this topic with numerous experts on the Ready, Test, Go. podcast brought to you by Applause. One thing has become clear: digital quality is about more than just validating a set of features; it’s about strengthening the entire customer experience, from initial contact to ongoing engagement. Let’s see what the experts had to say on the matter.
Honor the customer experience
At its core, the customer experience is about creating an enjoyable environment for users. A workable experience might encourage future product use, but an enjoyable one taps deeper into the senses and sensibilities of the customers you want to entice and retain.
“Digital quality is just having an experience that a customer feels welcome in and enjoys,” said Zeb Winzenried, Director of Testing Services in Payments at Applause. It’s about ensuring that customers feel comfortable, valued and even empowered throughout their interaction with a digital product. After all, these products are increasingly becoming extensions of themselves.
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On this topic, Liz Kwo, Chief Commercial Officer at Everly Health, noted that health tech and healthcare providers succeed when they can explicitly tap into this concept. Empowerment builds trust, and that goes a long way.
“When I think about how to engage patients to support them, you really have to build that trust,” said Kwo, defining digital quality along these lines. “The ability to improve affordable accessible care, in a realm that allows the patient to be able to be in control and be able to engage and also feel encouraged and emboldened to leverage this care.”
Affordability, accessibility, control, engagement and empowerment — if it works for an industry with a long track record of distrust, it can sure persuade customers in others too.
The seamless customer journey
For many organizations, the goal of digital quality is to deliver a seamless customer journey. This means attempting to ensure that customers can easily navigate your digital product and achieve their desired outcomes without friction.
Gary Larkin, Chief Strategy Officer at Marker Trax, emphasized the importance of “delivering a seamless experience to an end consumer, whoever that is, that…persistently satisfies their need,” he said. Ongoing refinement is needed, not only with new launches, but also as different persona types engage with the product in different ways. “Sometimes your product’s going to fit a little better for the customer profile you didn’t anticipate,” Larkin said.
To achieve seamless customer journeys, organizations must minimize friction at every touchpoint. Stewart Frey, a media technology and solutions leader, defines a successful customer experience as one where “a consumer goes to the platform [and gets] an experience that keeps them on there, keeps them engaged, doesn’t get them frustrated and there’s minimal friction.”
In an age of high churn and quick cancellations, lengthy engagement counts for a lot. But how do you achieve that outcome? Todd Unger, Chief Experience Officer at the American Medical Association, likens digital quality to integrity — fundamentally prioritizing the customer experience as part of the product strategy. “You know that thing about integrity, which is, you do the right thing even when somebody’s not watching,” Unger said. “I think of digital quality as being about things working even when you’re not watching.”
Manufacturing delight
Usability, then, should be a foremost concern. Organizations should prioritize the individual steps of the customer journey, solicit feedback on how to improve them and make an ongoing commitment to honoring the customers’ needs. When users feel as though their needs are met and feedback is acknowledged, brands can create a two-way dialogue that actually manifests positive emotions.
DevOps thought leader Gene Kim says that the product should cater to its primary stakeholders, with the goal of “doing all the things in our work so that we delight the customer regardless of who the customer is internal or external,” he said.
Employees are stakeholders too, and their experience with creating a digital product has a trickle-down effect that is important to remember. Process change and efficiency can enable workers to address more issues, get closer to their customers and ultimately deliver better products. “Digital quality is everybody wanting that customer experience at the end,” said James Mortlock, Lead UAT Test Manager at Vodafone. “It needs to be like a feeling and a movement rather than a process…and the employee experience, in terms of deployment and delivery, being really high quality and very low effort.”
While no singular definition of digital quality exists, organizations can be confident in this takeaway: customers will determine your level of effectiveness. Meeting their quality standards should be the primary goal.
At Applause, we prioritize the user’s experience every day. Through our digital quality solutions and services, spanning everything from manual functional to user experience and accessibility testing, we deliver on customer engagements that brands can’t source internally. Whether it’s identifying friction in a new feature or full-scale support for a new product launch in a new market, Applause provides flexible, scalable testing to support your needs — and ultimately delight customers.
Let’s chat today about how Applause can help you achieve your customer-focused digital quality goals. And to subscribe to the Ready, Test, Go. podcast brought to you by Applause, follow one of the links below:
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