App Loyalty is the New Brand Loyalty: Study

Application loyalty is the new brand loyalty as consumers demand a flawless digital customer experience according to from a new study examining consumers’ reliance on applications and digital services.

San Francisco based application performance management vendor AppDynamics, a Cisco company, released the latest report in its App Attention Index research series, revealing the emergence of “The Era of The Digital Reflex,” and what it calls “a seismic shift in the way consumers interact and engage with digital services and applications.”

The global study also identified how these digital dependencies impact consumers’ expectations of the businesses and brands they engage with, their increasing intolerance of performance problems and the urgency with which brands must take action in order to remain relevant and competitive in a world where application loyalty is the new brand loyalty.

According to the report’s findings, “Consumers choose retailers according to how quickly they can get access to a product or service without visiting a store (63%), and they pick their bank based on the ability to perform all transactions digitally (58%).”

The research discovered many consumers are unaware of how much their use of digital services has evolved. While the average person estimates that they use seven digital services each day, in fact they are using more than 30 digital services on a daily basis. While 68% recognize they use many more digital services than they are consciously aware of, they also acknowledge the positive impact digital services have on many aspects of their daily lives: 70% say digital services have helped reduce stress; and 68% claim digital services have improved their productivity at home and work, an increase from 43% in 2017.

Looking at the actual daily usage by digital service type, the study asked “Thinking about an average day, how many of the following types of digital service might you use?”  Ranking at the top at 3.5 was social media (instant messaging, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter), but also in the top 10 at 2.59 was finance (banking, payment apps, stocks and shares).

The use of digital services has evolved to become an unconscious extension of human behavior – a ‘Digital Reflex.’ While consumers used to make a conscious and deliberate decision to use a digital service to carry out a task or activity, they now happen spontaneously, with the majority (71%) of consumers admitting that digital services are so intrinsic to their daily lives that they don’t realize how much they now rely on them. As these digital reflexes become habitual, consumers are becoming increasingly dependent on devices and digital services, relying on them to complete many of their daily tasks.

• Fifty-five percent can only go without a mobile device for up to 4 hours before they find it difficult to manage tasks in their everyday life.
• Sixty-one percent admit they reach for their mobile phone before talking to anyone else when they wake up.

“The Era of the Digital Reflex” sees 76% reporting their expectations of how well digital services should perform are increasing, compared to only 62% in 2017. Seventy percent of respondents claim to be less tolerant of problems with digital services than they were two years ago. This increasing intolerance for problems is prompting consumers to demand a better and higher performing digital customer experience from the brands they engage with:

• Half would be willing to pay more for an organization’s product or service if its digital services were better than a competitor’s.
• Over the next three years, 85% of consumers expect to select brands on the variety of digital services (web, mobile, connected device, etc.) they provide.

More than half of consumers (54%) now place a higher value on their digital interactions with brands over the physical ones.

The report asserted businesses need to pay attention because consumers now have a zero-tolerance policy for anything other than an easy, fast and exceptional digital experience. The research showed in the event of performance issues, consumers will take decisive action such as turning to the competition (49%) and actively discouraging others from using a service or brand (63%) without notifying the brand and giving them a chance to make improvements.

“In The Era of the Digital Reflex, consumers will no longer forgive or forget poor experiences. A great digital performance is now the baseline for any business, but the real winners will be those that consistently exceed customer expectations by delivering a flawless experience,” said Danny Winokur, general manager, AppDynamics. “Cisco and AppDynamics help the world’s best companies achieve greatness with their applications by providing critical real-time data on application and business performance to pinpoint bottlenecks and enable immediate action.”

The study noted many businesses are already investing heavily in digital innovation to drive customer loyalty and revenue, but failure to monitor the performance of those applications and digital services puts brands at significant risk of unhappy customers, or even losing those customers to another brand.

The research, conducted by Insight Avenue in March 2019, included interviews with more than 7,000 consumers, including 2,000 s in both the United States and the United Kingdom, and 1,000 within Germany, France and Australia.