“We are living through a digital-product revenue revolution, centered around using digital products to completely redesign the value we create for customers,” Jian Wei Hoh, head of business design at Ford said recently.
Hoh is not alone in his observation. A recent Harvard Business Review Analytics Services report sponsored by Amplitude—Making the Leap to a Digital-First Enterprise—reveals the extent to which executives across industries and sizes are embracing the digital-first mindset.
More than 90 percent of the executives surveyed agreed that this moment in time is a unique opportunity to capitalize on digital acceleration. As customers have increased their engagement with digital products in the wake of the pandemic, 81 percent of respondents agree that expectations for great digital experiences have never been higher.
“If you are not fulfilling your customers’ needs, they are going to leave,” said Tricia Han, Care.com’s chief product officer and another executive surveyed in the report.
In addition, companies are moving beyond vanity metrics like page views and clicks to track the success of digital interactions. Even standard feedback tools like Net Promotor Score (NPS) have fallen to the wayside; only 16 percent of executives listed NPS as an important measure of digital success. Instead, the 295 executives surveyed favored user engagement, lifetime value, and customer retention as key metrics to measure digital engagement.
This shift to evaluating digital success in terms of the full customer journey elevates another key theme of the report: digital teams need democratized insights to data. Every digital team at a company, whether they sit in marketing, product, engineering or design, needs tools like product analytics to explore the full customer journey and place informed digital bets. As the report notes:
Successful organizations do not allow centralized analytics functions, top-down decision making, or monolithic systems to cause bottlenecks to innovation. Rather, they provide employees across the enterprise with analytics tools so they can tap and understand data.
This viewpoint is reflected by organizations like 117-year-old Ford, which has emerged as an industry leader in embracing the digital-first mindset.
“We have an aspiration that everyone in the company is in service of making the customer’s life better,” said Hoh. “You cannot do that without data to understand the customer’s life, their journey, and their touchpoints.”
See highlights from the report in the infographic below, and download the full report to learn more insights shared by global executives.
