Why digital agility and customer experience matter more than ever

Companies born in the cloud have a great trait in common. These trailblazers have an innate ability to innovate fast – they are the first to bring new products and services to market, and the first to find new ways to delight their customers. And the secret to their speed? The agility to quickly adapt their digital strategies and tools to meet changing customer expectations. 

First, though, why bother? Well, if the stats are anything to go by, we’re well and truly living in the customer experience era. Your customers’ perceptions of your brand matter more than ever – 73% of consumers rank customer experience as an important factor in purchasing decisions. On the sobering flip side, 32% of all customers would stop doing business with a brand they loved after one bad experience.

No wonder 60% of organisations agree that customer experience delivers higher ROI than other initiatives. It’s clearly worth investing in. And a great place to start? Digital agility.  

We define digital agility as the ability to quickly and effectively adapt digital strategies to suit changing market conditions. It’s all about stripping away the complexities of manual processes, removing friction, and moving faster. 

And here’s why it matters. Today’s customers expect to be able to interact with your business from anywhere, any time. It’s this ‘always-on’ mentality that has catapulted digital agility to the top of the priority list for companies keen to stay one step ahead. Without digital agility, you will never be able to meet customers’ continually evolving expectations for speed and convenience.

The link between digital agility and CX

We explored the themes of digital agility and customer experience in a recent webinar (ingeniously called Digital Agility). In the webinar, our Vice President and General Manager Dan Bognar spoke to Katherine Boiciuc, a futurist at Maximus International in Australia; and Amanda Ong, Country Manager at StashAway in Singapore. Both Katherine and Amanda had some great insights to share.

Amanda, whose business had to pivot fast at the start of the pandemic, noted that the companies whose ‘Plan A’ was digital were in a much better position to move to ‘Plan B’ when work-from-home orders came into place. StashAway, a wealth management company, was already a tech-first company so could seamlessly switch with minimal disruption to customers. 

“We could continue to provide the same amazing customer experience through WhatsApp, email, social media, and phone. Even with our corporate account openings, which are more manual, we could use Docusign to quickly onboard these customers,” said Amanda.

In fact, StashAway slashed the time it took to open corporate accounts from three weeks to less than a week using Docusign – a great example of how digital tools can enhance customer experience.

Raising the bar even higher

Yet, as Katherine observed, there’s still plenty of room for improvement. “We’re in the hyperconnected world – we’ve never had more devices or information. But it’s not a discipline we’re making the most of when it comes to listening to the voice of customers.”

Every company that cares about customer experience should be listening deeply to what customers truly want, and delivering experiences that leave them clamouring for more. And to do this, it’s time to bring agility to the forefront of your digital strategy, so you can innovate faster than ever before. 

If these ideas resonate with you, then take 20 minutes out of your day to listen to the full Digital Agility webinar, now available on demand.