Digital adoption is at the top of nearly every company’s priority for good reasons, from leveraging new technologies to enhance customer experience to increasing their competitiveness.
Digital platforms enable companies across industries to serve customers better, improve operations, and unlock new revenue opportunities. However, your digital platform must have the right capabilities and features to support your company’s needs.
So, with the variety of digital platforms in the market, how do you decide which one will suit your needs? In this post, we will talk about five absolute must-have features of any effective digital platform service.
1. User-Centric Design
One of the critical features of effective digital platform services is the user-centric design. At the core, digital platforms exist to serve users and help them accomplish tasks or objectives. The platforms struggle to drive adoption and retention without an intuitive, seamless user experience that adds genuine customer value.
Optimizing navigation, page layouts, visuals, content, interactions, and overall usability to align with user behaviors and expectations and address their pain points is critical. An excellent digital platform should support user and business goals without navigating issues.
The risk of working with digital platforms without a user-centric interface focus is deteriorating engagement and retention rates and, ultimately, your business revenue.
2. Data Analytics
Data analytics is another integral feature to ensure your digital platform services succeed. It involves leveraging user and customer behavioral data and trends to optimize performance, personalize experiences, and shape business decisions.
So, data analytics come in handy to drive adoption and increase engagement, which are significant issues with digital platforms, meaning you should understand how users interact with them.
In short, data analytics allows you to measure user performance, ensuring that you don’t have to guess what adjustments to make but rather make data-driven changes that increase adoption and engagement.
3. Content Management System
A reliable content management system (CMS) for your digital platform is a plus for business success. However, it should be user-friendly to empower content creation, editing, and uploading content online. Besides, an intuitive CMS negates the overreliance of IT to make content-based adjustments, saving on costs, resources, and time.
With a digital platform with a collaborative CMS, your content creators can create content more creatively, enhancing digital marketing. Also, content management becomes easy with targeted homepages, audience targeting, multilingual capabilities, responsive workflows and previews, and effective media management.
4. Social Feature
Today, people are more active on social media, meaning your staff will likely be on their social handles in their free time. This means high chances to engage with your posts, customers, and partners and make deals that can generate more revenue for your company.
As such, ensure you have a digital platform with social capabilities to empower users to comment, like, and share your deliverables with their colleagues. Additionally, this will allow employees to give their views and participate in discussions, leading to improved communication in your organization.
An effective digital platform should include social features like:
- Org charts to visually show department structures and key contacts.
- Following pages, channels, and people to let employees control the updates they see.
A staff directory to connect employees across departments and locations.
- Comment capabilities for reacting, mentioning others, and using topical hashtags.
- Rewards systems to recognize employee contributions through badges and kudos.
5. Seamless In-App Learning
Business software and applications are often complex, with many features, making training difficult. Typically, companies usually just give basic onboarding training and user manuals and expect the people using the software to bring tangible results.
It’s often impossible to train users on using the software until they’re pros so that they can start working, as this can require a lot of time and resources. For this reason, opt for a digital platform with in-built app learning resources, which simply means users can gradually pick up knowledge while working.
This feature is also beneficial when accessing an advanced tool, as a quick interactive guide will pop up to the overview functionality and give instructions on how to use it to access unfamiliar fields.
In general, in-app learning provides inclusive education through the digital – not needing any extensive training prior.
Conclusion
Are you looking to transform your customer experience and unlock new revenue opportunities? Then, you must invest in the right digital platform. An effective platform should have a user-centric design that optimizes usability, powerful data analytics capabilities to drive optimization, an intuitive content management system, social features to boost employee communication, and seamless in-app learning to simplify onboarding.
There are other features you require to prioritize in a digital platform. Still, with these, you can improve your business operations and secure a place in the digital world.
So, prioritize the above features when finding a digital platform, and you’ll ultimately achieve much greater customer acquisition, retention, loyalty, and long-term profits from your digital services.
