By dshah@hubspot.com (Dharmesh Shah)

Next time you open Netflix, I want you to try something.

When you see your tailored suggestions, as the platform starts the video right where you left off on your iPad, stop and take note of that experience.

How do these experiences actually make you feel?

Does the device handoff give you a rush of excitement and gratitude?

Probably not.

Start over. Imagine opening Netflix again.

Your recommendations are gone, replaced with an unfiltered list of content. The list feels random, but then you’d expect at least a couple of shows to be of random interest. They’re not. That episode you’re halfway through on your iPad? You’ll have to scroll back and forth to find your place. Ultimately, you’ll probably just rewatch parts of the episode “just to be safe”.

If you’re like me (my apologies if you are), you’ll react more to this moment of friction than the moment of seamless performance. The seamless experience is largely invisible — it’s unfelt — while the bad experience is impossible to ignore. Based on how bad it is, it’ll haunt you and sometimes make you question your life choices.

It may even push you toward Hulu or Disney +, or another platform that you trust more.

The same dynamic is at play for the digital experiences you deliver to customers.

2020 and 2021 accelerated digital transformation across industries, creating a new set of expectations in your customers’ personal and professional lives.

For them, being delighted isn’t a capstone to their experience as your customer; it’s the cornerstone your relationship is built on. Today’s buyers have more options, and disruptors are acquiring — and retaining — new business through the experience they provide their customers.

These new expectations present huge opportunities for those who are willing to rethink their digital experiences and a huge risk for those who are not.

So, why are so many businesses failing to meet these expectations?

Is it because they just don’t care about the customers’ experience? Sometimes — but not usually. A vast majority of businesses would love to deliver a delightful experience.

The reason they don’t is mostly because cobbled-together point solutions can’t deliver a clear view of the customer.

After all, scaling companies are in a constant state of adaptation. As new needs and opportunities arise, companies introduce a network of individual solutions that solve discrete problems: a CRM to manage customer data, a CMS to build their website, and marketing automation to scale their efforts.

Over time, as you add more solutions, your company’s tech stack grows so unwieldy it becomes a barrier between you and your customers instead of a bridge. It keeps you from the agile reporting you need and makes automation way more complicated than it should be. It makes personalization unreliable and messaging fragmented.

Since the dawn of the digital age, the status quo has been to rely on a separate CRM, CMS and automation tool. It’s what many marketing …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron