THIRD-PARTY APPS

Touchpoints you may be neglecting because of third-party apps

By our News Team | 2021

Increasingly, business success is linked to apps and services companies don’t own, says Andy MacMillan of human insight company UserTesting.

A growing trend of the digital age is that businesses rarely own all of their customer touchpoints. These include food delivery apps, online shopping and banking. Customer experiences are increasingly taking place via third-party apps. Occasionally brands have entire services they can’t directly control.

This is a game-changing development that raises critical questions. It is possible many companies haven’t sufficiently thought this through? How should brands manage their customer interactions when, so often, someone else is doing the actual interacting?

Photo by Eric McLean at Unsplash

The adoption of digital business models that rely on third-party providers has sharply accelerated, and it should prompt brands to have the thought: “This app has become important to my business. But I don’t own it. Is it accurately showing my entire [product]? How do I really know what my customer is experiencing?”

It’s a question that businesses frequently can’t answer because, unlike traditional one-to-one vendor-to-customer interactions, they lack the data to know. Imagine the insights a supermarket chain could gain with a better understanding of the experience that its customers are having with the now-significant [online delivery] part of its business. After all, a positive delivery experience means more repeat business for the grocer, and vice versa.

No company would release a product or app without soliciting detailed feedback on what users like and don’t like about them. The same precision is required of any other partners playing a role in the customer journey.

They must put themselves in customers’ shoes and recognise that what constitutes customer experience is much broader than they’d thought.

Source: Marketing Dive and UserTesting

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