Why Is The Digital Customer Experience Truly Different

Recently I have been advising a startup called Quantum Metric on their go to market strategy.

- Sven Gerjets

Their product allows companies to quickly identify revenue impacting issues on their website through predictive analytics and creates the ability to play back user sessions for rapid troubleshooting. This opportunity has forced me to really think about why purely digital customer experiences are different for CIO’s when it comes to delivering technology and interacting with business partners. It has highlighted why we have to put our Chief Customer Experience Officer hats on when supporting our company’s online experiences.

I have had the privilege of working for some amazing Fortune 500 consumer companies in a number of industries. Even though the industries differed, these companies all had one thing in common. They had traditional customer experiences and they had purely digital ones. I remember the first time I was responsible for large e-commerce applications that supported nearly a billion dollars in revenue. The company was Symantec and my team supported the IT systems for the consumer business. It’s funny how negative experiences seem to stand out, because when I think about that job, one experience jumps out at me. It was one of the first times my business partner who was responsible for our online revenue called and said “our close rates are down five percent, your team must have broken something.” Little did I know at the time that these kinds of problems would haunt me from time to time for the next decade and a half. Sometimes we would find defects impacting the customers, while other times we would find things like pricing changes or market climate shifts to be the culprit.