Why getting it right first time is the ultimate boost to your customer engagement

Ranjitha Kumar, Chief Scientist at UserTesting

Andy MacMillan, CEO of UserTesting

In today’s fast-paced digital economy, the value of early customer feedback cannot be overstated. Every year, businesses around the globe waste a staggering trillion dollars and countless hours rectifying avoidable errors, many of which could have been identified and addressed had they been attuned to their customers from the get-go. Basketball coach John Wooden once asked, “If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?” This sentiment rings especially true in our current landscape, where getting it right the first time by integrating direct customer feedback early in the process can be the difference between success and costly overhauls.

Digital transformation is a major undertaking for companies, not least because of the stakes involved. If companies succeed, it will revolutionise operations, leading to measurably better outcomes. If it goes badly, however, the failures will be clear for all to see. Loyalty and brand values will be hit hard.

A key part of ensuring success and minimising the risk in digital transformation investments is to ensure the experience meets customer expectations. And central to that is the process of getting direct feedback from customers on digital products before – and after – they go to market.

Companies spend a fortune each year on correcting failed digital products, whether they be apps, brands, websites or something else. According to one estimate, “rework” – a known vicious circle in software development that is responsible for the delays, extra costs and risks that arise in the process – is costing businesses upwards of a trillion dollars a year, with 30-50 per cent of all project time spent on rework. That’s before you mention the implications it has for employee morale as well.

For the most part, rework happens when requirements are altered, designs are updated, code gets changed – once the work has already been started. Often software is tested for bugs and looked at by internal users frequently. However, direct customer feedback and usability testing are often overlooked. If we don’t understand how users will react to the product, how they feel about the experience, and whether they can successfully use it as intended, we tend to go back to the drawing board and redo a lot of the initial work. When these issues are found so late, it makes the whole process wasteful and expensive. But while rework can’t be completely avoided, it can be significantly reduced.

Part of this lapse is understandable. A key ingredient of competitiveness at a time when digital transformation is dominating companies’ agendas is the ability to stay ahead of rivals. That means products must be built and launched at a far faster rate. Time to market matters. Shortcuts can seem like the only way of ensuring a company’s survival.

Ensuring successful transformation

Imagine you’re a retail outlet undergoing transformation from brick-and-mortar to online. With that shift comes a series of major operational challenges – how to ensure frictionless online ordering, for instance, or how to integrate a secure yet smooth payments system.

The success of the transformation rests on whether customers are satisfied with every element of the digital product experience along with the organisation’s ability to drive change management. In a marketplace full of businesses undergoing similar journeys, meeting customer expectations is the main differentiator.

In order to be successful, therefore, the organisation must know where problems lie in the customer journey well before it launches, and continuously ensure it is meeting expectations. Organisations require fine-grained insights from would-be customers of all types – and they need them to be accurate and delivered quickly.

The value of continuous product testing

“We fundamentally believe that your product is never ‘finished’ – it’s simply at its latest stage of evolution,” says Andy MacMillan, CEO of UserTesting. “The technology landscape is constantly shifting, customer needs are ever-changing, and the only way to keep pace is through continuous product testing.”

UserTesting’s AI-powered platform enables businesses to find highly targeted and niche audiences, continuously test and get feedback on their products from real humans, and analyse data across the studies to identify key customer insights.

“Businesses come to us because they recognise that to deliver an exceptional customer experience, they must engage in an ongoing dialogue with their users,” says MacMillan. “And that means rethinking how customer insights fit into the product development lifecycle. We provide the platform for that essential conversation.”

Using video, as well as other data forms such as written and audio, businesses can leverage technology to swiftly engage with their customers. They can ask customers to share their experiences with prototypes, concepts and even live interactions, to observe how respondents behave and react to the developing product. This approach yields a vast array of data points, surpassing what traditional usability testing typically provides.

Automatic surfacing of customer insights

But UserTesting does it all for you. Its platform can return most test results within a few hours. It makes recruiting target audiences much simpler through its networks, enables test design and launch with a few clicks, and its machine learning capabilities speed up post-test analysis by automatically surfacing valuable insights from verbal, written and behavioural data.

For example, anything that signals a point of friction in the customer experience can be detected and its location in the video pinpointed, allowing the organisation to address any issues within the experience. AI-generated summaries point to their source videos, allowing the user to verify the insight and do further analysis.

This adds an important layer of assurance. Businesses reliant on data are often wary of automated technologies, given the very human need to see things with their own eyes. The fact that UserTesting directs its end-users to the precise insights they want to see, and does so with speed, provides a way of ensuring the data being fed back to the organisation can be trusted.

“UserTesting’s machine learning automates the cumbersome process of identifying qualified test participants and sifting through hours of user feedback videos to extract actionable insights,” says Ranjitha Kumar, Chief Scientist at UserTesting. “This accelerates customer research, which means it can be more deeply embedded in the entire product development life cycle – ensuring that the products and experiences being built land with their customers right the first time.”

Integrating feedback quickly

One of UserTesting’s customers is a company that provides SaaS products for customer support, sales and other customer communications, serving some of the world’s largest businesses. It wanted to launch an instant buy function, as well as boost engagement on its customer onboarding page.

The SaaS company leveraged UserTesting to gather insights from respondents on everything from the location of the Get Help button on the onboarding webpage to its experiences with two instant buy prototypes.

Once the organisation operationalised the feedback had acted on the insights – repositioning the Get Help button at the top right of the screen, and opting for an instant buy function that focused on notifications, both of which a majority of respondents said they preferred – the numbers went up. The Get Help button saw a 300 per cent rise in clicks, and the company realised a 12 per cent increase in annual revenue thanks to improvements to its instant buy function.

This illustrates the power of customer feedback to inform effective product decisions. After implementing insights gathered through the UserTesting platform, the customer saw marked improvements in customer engagement and revenue. This showcases how targeted, direct customer feedback can make a real difference in optimising a product’s user experience.

Human insight is gold dust

Removing risk from digital transformation is key to its success. That seems obvious, but for too long, companies have opted to bypass the process of experience research and properly testing their products to ensure they will resonate with their current and future customers – real humans.

By using the sophisticated AI-powered tools developed by UserTesting, businesses can get closer to customers than ever before – and do so well in advance of product launch.

Mitigating risk within the software development lifecycle is vital for growing loyalty, maintaining brand values, and driving everything else in the right direction. And by baking the insights from humans (actual users and customers) into the process, the chances of failure in the digital transformation journey immediately fall.

To find out more, visit usertesting.com.