What is the Shift Toward Digital Experience?

Today I Learned: The homepage of your website does not count as your digital presence.

If you think about the way people interact with companies today, it’s not just through one website or one page. Even if you are talking about web presence, people will find pages that are three levels down through Google search or from email links that send them to specific pages.

More than that, the Internet of Things (IoT) makes it so that you don’t have to go far in search of information. If you’re flying somewhere, you can use mobile devices and kiosks to help you check in. In Germany, you can actually order a meal on a touch screen. This is how people are interacting with your company in the modern era.

What this points to is something called the digital experience. It means having a real life customer experience or interaction that is enhanced or facilitated by technology. The focus here isn’t so much the technology—which makes the interaction possible—but the experience.

One of the companies that is already doing this is Disney. Disney at some point figured out that people hated waiting in lines, so they got this thing called FastPass. You also know that when you're riding Splash Mountain, they try to take your picture. You can have this and many other digital experiences while you're visiting their theme parks.

Disney is now consolidating all of that into a single system called "MyMagic+," which provides you with many of these services. They’ve created a RFID-wristband known as a “MagicBand” that you can use to get into your hotel room, pay for items, retrieve photos and use as a FastPass. It’s all at the convenient touch of your wrist.

How to Enrich Your Customers’ Digital Experience

When you're talking about this experience on a technical front, you can say that Disney is able to build great websites, devices and mobile apps. But their goal isn't just to build these components. Their goal is to help customers understand that having this sort of digital experience is important, and that it would lead to a greater appreciation of their brand and product.

Many companies are already creating useful tools to build good content. But the key difference in this conversation is context.

Companies will need to come up with better strategies to creating good context. How does what you know about people, like their history and preferences, change the way you interact with them?

As Gartner would say: "The role of content in the digital world may not be described as a 'place,' in the sense of a destination, at all. Rather, digital content must make itself available to a user when and where it's needed."

In order to create your own version of the wristband, you need the right technology. But creating helpful content and providing it in the right context are what really make an interaction rich. Discover a way to do all three and you’ll find yourself one step ahead of the competition.

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This post was originally published on Business 2 Community.