Is a poor mobile experience hurting the Customer Experience (CX)?
Pop quiz: Is the VP of Customer Experience responsible for the mobile experience? Or is that the responsibility of QA or Product Management? Read on.
CX as a discipline has evolved tremendously over the last decade. We’ve advanced leaps and bounds in terms of customer journey analytics, self-service solutions and improving customer/agent interactions, all in a bid to deliver an improved CX.
It is a shame, therefore, that with all the time and money being spent on CX, that more attention isn’t being paid to the mobile experience.
It’s quite remarkable that the millions spent on improving the Net Promoter Score (NPS) can be instantly ruined when a customer has a negative mobile experience.
Sure, journey analytics and usability testing and solutions aim to minimize bad mobile experiences from occurring. However, they fundamentally fall short in “real-world” testing. Emulators and Simulators is not the same as testing on real devices. Your customers have over 4500 combinations of devices and operating systems! Whether it’s a customer with an iPhone 6 running iOS 11.2, an iPhone 6 running iOS 11.2.6, a Google Pixel running Android 8 … oh yes, and what about the Moto G (3rd gen) on Android 6 – all of these need to be tested.
And here’s the thing: It only takes one bad experience…on one of those 4500 device combinations, to be amplified into a negative impact on your CX and NPS.
Ouch.
So what’s a CX practitioner to do?
- First, the implication is clear: CX has to assume a Product Management role and ensure that sufficient quality is in-place to drive maximum user engagement and that 100% of users across 100% of devices will have a perfect experience. In the age of social media and app store reviews, that one user running your app on an Xperia XA Ultra on Android 6 having a negative experience will be told to the whole world.
- Second, CX can work with QA to ensure that breadth and depth of mobile testing is in place, and even built into the DevOps process. Sorry, CX practitioners, you’re going to be involved deeper with your product than you ever anticipated. That’s why you are so highly paid 😉
If all of the above sounds like bad news, it really isn’t. The first step to addressing the problem is acknowledging it. And the good news is that mobile testing platforms can instantly provide you a quality gauge across thousands of devices, so you can release confidently. By building device testing into the DevOps process, you can be assured that every time a developer checks-in code, it is instantly tested on thousands of device/OS combinations.
To sum it all up, CX needs to take a proactive role in ensuring a consistent experience for all users. Part customer advocate, part tester, part product manager. Ain’t life as a CX practitioner just grand?
