Digital skills- enabling customers for tomorrow?

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As businesses become more and more digital; how can we support and enable those with limited digital skills or ability to be able to interact with businesses? Do we take the approach of sink or swim or should we be doing more to engage and develop our customers?

Customers
Skills Development
Interaction Design
Training
Lucy Graley
69 months ago

4 answers

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The idea should be to make digital as intuitive as possible such that the question of skill becomes less relevant. For instance, Alexa is digital, but all one needs to do is speak in order to use it with Amazon. QuickMVP enables entrepreneurs without coding skills to build their own landing pages. And so on. This doesn't mean that people shouldn't develop technical digital skills. However, they shouldn't be necessary in order to interact with businesses.

Michael Fruhling
69 months ago
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The efforts would need to be more on the business end of this situation, instead of the customers. Even though the digital disruption is catalyzing strong changes in behavior, the basic human-to-human interactions leave a positive and a more sustainable impact in the relationship.

Richie Nainaney
69 months ago
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Since many business challenges repeat themselves over time, I would point to the similarity between the development of VRU’s for telephone business and customer service interactions, and the development of graphic user interfaces for the non-technical customer. The key to successful VRU development was always the minimum number of decision trees (the minimum number of page clicks) to get the individual to the place they wanted for the action they wanted to take, balanced against the number or quantity of tasks that needed to be presented for choice (the number of which are greater in a graphic environment as are the potential wrong turns/clicks), and organized under a critically over-arching principal of making sure the customer did not feel a sense of loss of “control”. This last and most important principle is unfortunately, the one most often violated by companies who fail to provide sufficient live back-up service for those who cannot or will not use a VRU, or who seek to make profit not realizing that this is the wrong time to offer new products or commercial messages. Case after case has proven the brand equity damage that occurs due to a poor VRU interaction (today’s online interaction) far outweighs the equity that builds up through purchase and use of the product, yet companies routinely fail to incorporate this into the business plan. In a global world, the effort to accommodate the non-technical must take into consideration cultural factors, for example, Japanese customers years ago would not interact with a VRU system, even one using Nihon, and would switch to companies that provided live Nihon speaking support over companies that did not.
 
I don’t believe it is realistic to expect businesses to fund customer training in order to improve customer web interactions, nor would studies of customer behavior and experience indicate that this is a worthy expense as customers come to a business site for a specific purpose with the goal of a fast execution of their purpose and are unlikely to be willing to spend time on “training” in order to use the site. The key therefore, for the nontechnical, is experience planning where the directions are completely clear, carry no assumptions of prior experience or knowledge of basic web jargon, and are designed to navigate the user quickly and efficiently with no distractions to their desired action, while always be sensitive to the question “are they feeling in control?”

Barclay Fitzpatrick
69 months ago
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Enabling people to become customers is almost always good business. Removing hurdles to adoption increases sales opportunities.

Sellers of very large-ticket industrial items (like locomotives or commercial generators) offer financing. It's not so much because there's profit in providing financing but because enabling customers to buy creates sales opportunities.

It is incumbent on any company that presents itself directly to prospects and customers to make it as easy to perform the tasks required to achieve the goals they have for interacting. It may be chic to be a restaurant with no signage and an unlisted phone number but eventually, the charm wears off and then no one can find you.

Howard W
69 months ago

Have some input?