4 minute read
Digital Confidence Will Play A Critical Role In Allowing Businesses
By Katie Fisher
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While the economic consequence of COVID-19 continues to unveil itself, we can’t help but watch the transformation of consumer confidence. Consumer confidence denotes positivity towards the economy and personal financial situation. It is the driving force behind all economic activity. However, in the aftermath of a global pandemic, when consumer confidence is at its lowest, digital confidence becomes equally as critical. The widespread call for public social distancing impacted every aspect of daily life. From hospitality, retail and food businesses to medical and banking services, the coronavirus transformed virtually every business into a digital one. As a result, digital confidence will play a critical role in allowing businesses to bounce-back post-COVID 19. What Is Digital Confidence?
Digital confidence refers to both businesses and customers having highly positive attitudes towards engaging through web pages and mobile applications. For businesses, this means trusting that your digital platforms will provide flawless user experience every time. Customers too want to share in that confidence. They want to have full faith in the ability of organisations to deliver services via digital
platforms. But before you can establish digital confidence amongst your customers, you must first develop it within your own team.
Why Is Digital Confidence Important?
When your business provides poor digital experiences, it undermines the validity of your products or services. On the other hand, digital confidence can even enhance an otherwise average product. Aled Miles, CEO of Sauce Labs, discusses the importance of digital confidence in our society. He states: “Let’s think back to the early stages of the 2020 U.S. Democratic primary election. You had a hastily assembled and even more hastily rolled out digital voting application delay and quite nearly undermine the results of the Iowa caucus. The immediate reaction from both political organisers and voters alike was to say this is why you can’t trust digital applications for important things like voting. In reality, the exact opposite is true. Digital applications hold great promise as a means to improve the way we do things in the public sphere, and that includes making it easier for more people to vote. Since the onset of the pandemic, we’ve seen that extended to equally critical causes like food delivery, telemedicine, and distance learning. The more confidence we have in organisations’ collective ability to deliver services via digital platforms, the more apt we are to take advantage of them. But when you have experiences like the one in Iowa, that confidence is eroded. Instead of using the mobile voting app, maybe you don’t vote at all next time. If you have a poor experience with a telehealth platform, maybe you ignore a symptom and don’t call the doctor next time. If your child has trouble logging in to the e-learning module, maybe they just skip school altogether the next day. In the absence of digital confidence, progress gets stalled. That’s why it’s so important to ensure every company can deliver it.”
How Can Businesses Build Digital Confidence?
To create digital confidence within your business, you want to be sure that your customers trust the web and mobile applications you are providing. Consider the risks a company might face in the post-COVID world if they are not providing a strong user experience. Digital confidence starts from the top. Business leaders need to recognise the importance of instilling digital confidence in both their team and their customers. The resolution to put user experience at the forefront must first be made before digital trust can begin to be built. The paradigm shift caused by the COVID pandemic means that digital change has had to happen at a rapid pace. It is now necessary to place quality user experience above functionality when it comes to creating a great digital experience. In order to build digital confidence, businesses must encourage team members to step out of their silos and work together to create quality digital capabilities. When teams can work side-by-side, and developers, engineers, product designers commit to building that quality, the silo mentality is broken down. Everyone should be ready to take responsibility for moving toward being a digital business. When developing digital confidence within your business, you must focus on agility and modernisation. Continuously monitoring customer experience and application performance will ensure that quality is always improving. And digital confidence will follow closely behind. And finally, always remember to take feedback into account. A business should work with the mindset of delivering the best possible user experience for its’ customers. Take their opinions above your own and value how your customers feel about your application and digital presence. You should create a process of continuous feedback which is available to everyone in the business.
As we begin to bring ourselves out from the plummeting lows of the pandemic that shook the world, it is essential to recognise the changes to business and the consumer. The importance of digital confidence has extended itself further toward critical causes like food delivery, digital medicine, and distance learning. The more confidence we have in organisations’ collective ability to deliver services via digital platforms, the more apt we are to take advantage of them. Our reality has transformed, and the push for businesses to engage with customers via digital platforms has become a requirement for the restoration of consumer confidence. In an unprecedented economic scene, businesses and consumers alike will use digital confidence in a critical role to propel us out of instability. Digital confidence is crucial in allowing enterprises to bounce-back postCOVID 19.
