We hear all the time that online experiences are growing in importance to consumers and workers. We hear that we’re all integrating our phones and the stuff that’s delivered through them with our everyday lives. We hear that the line between the real world and the virtual world is getting blurred, and that new developments like AR/VR, metaverses, and AI will blur it even further. We don’t hear much about what this is all going to mean, and I think that’s an important topic as we prepare for a new year.
Cisco’s “App Attention Index 2023” report is, like most vendor reports, a mixture of real insight and self-serving posturing. Not surprisingly, the subliminal conclusion is that enterprises and operators need to spend like sailors to enrich the digital experiences of their customers or there’s a threat of mass disenchantment. “Beware the Application Generation” hearkens back to “Caesar, beware the ides of March”, and most know what happened when Caesar ignored that warning. But the real insight here is that we have integrated our digital devices and experiences with our lives, and we’re therefore more likely to be impacted when they’re below par.
One point that the report makes up front is that we’ve gotten fussier about the use of digital experiences. When smartphones and apps were a novelty, people did a lot of stuff just to experience something new. The sheer volume of new things you can do online and on your phone has made that kind of wholesale browsing impractical, and that in itself encourages a kind of digital Darwinism; you have to fight your way to the top of the food chain to survive. It’s this trend, combined with longer experience in integrating technology with their lives, that has created what Cisco classifies as “the Application Generation”. I have to admit I’m not wild about that term because it seems to constrain the impacts here to youth; I think that anyone of any age who has become facile with online/smartphone use has undergone the same sophistication transformation the report describes.
Cisco provides an interesting chart on the number of digital services used by category, and the most interesting thing about it is that it shows just how much online/smartphone experiences have permeated our lives. Entertainment, socialization, buying things, banking, news, food delivery…you get the picture. All the top categories are things that are routine. Online information used to be the way of addressing unexpected complexity. Today, we don’t use online technology just for the complicated things; we do use it for that, but the use there is swamped by the routine. That’s what’s changed, and the change will accelerate.
I had a conversation with a friend that illustrates what’s happening here. They were changing banks because their old-line bank choice had an online banking app that was unreliable and uninspiring. They’d become accustomed to online financial services working well, based on experience with insurance and brokerage, and even though they were less than two miles from the branch they’d dealt with for a decade, and drove past it daily, they didn’t want to have to go in. Users see, and depend on, the digital face of the firms who partner in their lives and they don’t want to see the real face.
It takes a while for the report to get through the attitude shifts and new mindsets of the Application Generation, but eventually it gets to the point, which is that these shifts and mindsets are combining to make us really fussy about our online experiences. Rather than parrot what the report says here, I want to offer an analysis by raising what I think are critical points.
The first point is that what we’re all looking for is the experience, not the components of the experience. My friend with the banking problem might find, in a deep dive into what’s going on, that the bank isn’t at fault and the problem is the company that hosts the software or connects to the Internet. So what? It’s the bank’s app they’re using and so it’s up to the bank to make things right. Similarly, great performance at the app level is not going to reflect on the technology providers who actually assure it, but on the bank. “The Internet is whatever isn’t on my desk,” a user told me a couple years ago. Everything is lumped into a single thing, and that single thing is less the anonymous Internet than the experiences and the instrument they’re delivered through. Network providers fight churn and TAM issues not by improving the network but by making phone deals.
The important truth that leads to is that connection services will never be seen as important; they’re implied. You can’t differentiate based on stuff that’s designed to be taken for granted. Your customers will leave you if you’re bad, but they won’t value “betterness” except when it’s a remedy to “badness”. If there is a path to making connection services pay off, it has to be the path of B2C and B2B, but always focused on the experience source and what they can do to make the experience better overall. In this respect, the traditional net neutrality stuff, and the bill-and-keep-no-settlement model that evolved for the Internet, works against the operators. They can’t influence others who provide consumer connectivity because there’s no financial connection to leverage.
The next important point I want to raise is that all of this digital enrichment of our lives isn’t making us smarter. I think the Cisco report portrays the “Application Generation” as savvy, but the fact is that it’s really facile, which isn’t the same thing. If an experience is bad, they don’t know much more about fixing it than prior generations did, but they’re a lot fussier when they contact someone to demand it be fixed. That’s because it’s more integrated with their lives, and thus its loss is a greater burden.
I got comments from 211 companies on their online customer support in the months since I started Andover Intel. One thing that stood out was that 185 of those companies said that they had underestimated the growth in the cost and complexity of customer support. Stuff that’s integrated into people’s lives demands better support. Stuff that’s more complicated, whether it’s because the product/service is more complicated or because users are less equipped to participate, demands more of the support relationship. This double whammy means that just providing the same level of support satisfaction they might have achieved a decade ago is likely to cost (based on the averages they provided) almost double what it did then, unless there’s a shift in support strategy.
This is what could really justify AI in customer support missions. To provide both cheaper and more insightful/useful support at the same time is impossible if you assume human agents, particularly considering the fact that the largest support complaint offered by callers is difficulty understanding the accents of lower-cost offshore agents.
In the end, though, this isn’t going to be enough. One thing that enterprises and consumers seem to agree on is that the experiences, services, and products that we increasingly build our lives around have to be created with an eye toward being self-supporting. Fixing something isn’t nearly as useful, as generating of positive thoughts, as having it never break.
