New Study Shows One Bad Experience is Enough to Kill Customer Retention
A study just released by digital testing company, Applause, provides some data to back up what many of us have suspected for some time: a single bad digital experience is enough to send a new or prospective customer packing.
“Customers have ever-shrinking limits to their digital patience,” said Applause Chief Growth Officer, Luke Damian in the company's press release. “This raises the stakes that every brand must exceed in delivering engaging digital quality. Every customer journey is unique which makes testing each customer experience increasingly more complicated. There are so many different friction points along a journey that combine the physical and digital world. If you don’t get it right, you can not only hurt the customer experience, but also do even greater long-term damage to the brand and the business.”
From the press release:
The results of the survey conducted in January 2022 show that the vast majority of users will decide to leave a digital service based on only one less-than-ideal experience and nearly two-thirds will leave because of a poorly constructed sign-up experience. With digital interactions front and center for brands, success depends on designing experiences around new customers' high expectations and low patience during this critical touchpoint.
Interestingly, the report also said that the abandonment numbers would have been higher had it not been for some degree of captive audiences, meaning the employee experience is also suffering, even if they can't "abandon" the process.