How to create great customer experiences with digital products

In an increasingly digitalised world, the success of companies depends more and more on their digital products. Many traditional product manufacturers are now adding digital features and services to their physical products, and some companies are even completely reinventing their business models. New market entrants often provide digital offerings from the outset.

Digital products offer a number of advantages. They are intangible, infinitely reproducible and thus scalable. They can be adapted quickly and with little effort to the changing needs and wishes of the clientele. 

However: In view of an enormously growing offer, competition with digital products is becoming increasingly fierce. Excellent customer experiences are the decisive criterion for success.

To achieve the highest possible customer satisfaction, digital products require a different approach to development, management and operation than physical products. We describe what to consider and how companies can improve customer experiences with digital products in our white paper "HCreating outstanding customer experiences with digital products: The Digital Product Playbook for CMOs“.

From our projects we know that in many cases companies are not yet using or exploiting the potential of digital products. In order to identify success factors, we surveyed experts and managers responsible for digital products from German companies in various sectors. 

We identified five success factors that distinguish digital product leaders from laggards:

1. Digital products from trailblazers have a 29 per cent higher maturity level and lead to twice as high results compared to laggards.  
2. Digital product leaders are particularly good at engaging relevant stakeholders to add value, leveraging the ecosystem, strategically planning communications, setting and measuring sustainable financial goals, and managing their product in an agile way.
3. Leaders who meet these five differentiators together are 32 per cent more likely to achieve commercial success.
4. Digital product leaders show a higher degree of maturity in other important dimensions such as governance, IT architecture and legal certainty.
5. Digital product leaders still have potential for optimisation in the factors of sales channels, business model and offering model.

Our whitepaper shows practical and implementation-oriented recommendations on how you can successfully set up your digital product in a customer-centric way in development, market entry and operation.