When introducing new digital experiences to a customer group, one can never forget the need for some form of education, which is why it’s so important to understand the behaviours of your customers—and that means more than simply understanding their willingness to use technology.

Even with the growth of social media, there are similarities to the emergence of the dot-com boom of 10 years ago when there was a “build it and they will come” mentality towards the Internet. We all know how many activities failed then, and although it is only a decade later, history seems to repeating itself.

There has been a groundswell of backlash against social media and digital experiences because organizations say—we built it and it failed. One of the problems is the fact that organizations tend to develop digital experiences based upon a critical mass of users doing a certain activity. But, they fail to dig in deep enough to determine whether their customers will actually use technology to engage with that experience.

It’s important for companies to recognize a few things before they launch a new initiative. When an experience is conceived, companies need to speak with their customers—either through a quantitative or qualitative approach—to determine whether the initiative will be embraced or if there will be resistance to adoption.

Secondly, based upon their customer feedback, organizations should then analyze what proportion of their customers will actually embrace the experience to determine a measured performance indicator based upon sound analysis.

Finally, organizations need to test the experience with a group of customers who are highly predisposed to digital technology. Even though an idea looks good on paper, there may be other behavioural reasons that could create obstacles to successful implementation.

At Delvinia, the power of having AskingCanadians™ and developing in-house tools to facilitate this process in a timely and cost-effective manner has enabled us to apply our interactive approach to designing digital experiences, without missing the window of opportunity to implement them.