A Harvard Business Review Analytic Services study sponsored by Amplitude revealed that product analytics is the number one measurement for digital customer experiences.
The survey and report, Making the Leap to a Digital-First Enterprise, shows the shift in how digital business leaders are measuring the impact of digital experiences in the new era, with product analytics in the top spot over legacy measurement sources including web analytics, marketing attribution analytics, business intelligence tools and surveys.
The report uncovered five new pillars critical to laying the foundation for digital business success in the new digital-first era, including:
The digital-first era is here to stay: More than three quarters of executives surveyed (78%) said digital adoption has accelerated and will never return to previous levels, with customers having formed new and lasting digital habits. 92% said now is a unique opportunity to capitalize on digital acceleration.
Digital product is the epicentre of the digital business: 58% of executives cited a focus on user engagement as the number one indicator of a digital product’s long-term success.
This highlights the shift from measuring how to ‘get the customer in the door’, with metrics such as ad clicks and website traffic, to measuring how customers are realizing value within the digital product as the new benchmark for digital success.
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is fading in relevance: NPS used to be the holy grail of measuring customer sentiment and loyalty.
Now, only 16% of executives see customer sentiment scores such as NPS as important to a digital product’s long-term success, highlighting a key shift from measuring after-the-fact customer sentiment to real-time user engagement within the digital product experience as the critical digital success factor.
Data culture is a differentiator: 43% of executives cited the lack of a data-driven culture as the top challenge to making the leap to a digital-first business.
Nearly 40% of executives also cited the inability to analyse their customers’ full experience across devices and products, and a lack of centralized data, as key challenges.
Expectations are high and the competition relentless: 81% of executives believe user expectations for great digital experiences have never been higher, and 69% said competition for customer loyalty has never been fiercer, highlighting the urgency and criticality for all digital businesses to rethink how they deliver customer value in the new era.
"There are now two types of companies emerging faster than ever — digital disruptors and those being digitally disrupted," said Jennifer Johnson, chief marketing and strategy officer, Amplitude. "To survive in this new digital-first era, companies need a fundamentally new approach to understanding digital customer behaviour, predicting which behaviours translate to business outcomes and adapting digital experiences to maximize business outcomes.”
She noted that visibility through ad clicks and web traffic is not enough.
“The new digital business metric to unlocking growth is measuring where value is created and exchanged — in the digital product. Measuring digital success through this lens needs to be at the core of every digital business," she concluded.
