I refer to the year 2020 as The Great Accelerator. I believe we were naturally moving toward using more technology and working more remotely long before anyone heard the term coronavirus. However, the pandemic has accelerated that pace drastically – perhaps by ten or fifteen years. As with any type of acceleration of this magnitude, there has been a lot of pain. While many people were struggling to keep up with the technical pace of 2019, they’ve been left behind in 2020.
Idea #5 to making the digital experience better: Don’t assume your customers are as digitally savvy as your kids.
Many of your customers (and coworkers and friends and family members) haven’t been able to keep up with the different ways of communicating electronically. When they receive an email with a video, they may not know how to play it; when they’re asked to digitally sign something, they may not know what DocuSign or HelloSign is; and when they’re sent a link to download a document from Dropbox, they may not know whether it’s safe to click or not. It’s confusing. Don’t assume they know how to do these things. In fact, assume they don’t know and make it easy for them.
It’s not too hard to consider these challenges and help. Simply add extra instructions. Provide a phone number or an extremely welcoming note letting them know to call you if they need anything. Use graphics on LinkedIn and a hug obvious “play” sign on all videos. Most importantly, just be aware that it’s not only those folks getting ready to retire that may not understand the latest technology. Today it’s a greater percentage of your customers because of The Great Accelerator. If you’re aware of this, you’ll figure out how to make it work.
This is the last of our five ways to make the digital experience better for your customers. I hope you enjoyed these tips because we need to improve our efforts of communicating digitally … it’s not going away!
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