Digital efficiency has become increasingly important in the dynamic relationship between customers and brands. It has become a norm where digital, smooth and effortless experiences transpire almost daily between digital-native businesses, online retail companies and customers. However, where does that leave the companies that have yet to create easy processes?

For starters, perfecting seamless customer experiences for the long term takes more than changing minor systems, operations or procedures (e.g. how customers make a booking with your company). Instead, it requires a whole re-evaluation of your business strategy, a thorough consideration of the customer’s journey and a revamp of how your company interacts with the target audience. That includes fixing clunky online-offline processes and modernising fractured back-end, front-end systems, as well as other core features of the company.

Brands that successfully create accessible experiences that embed seamlessly into their customers’ lives have 3 things in common:

1. A clear purpose of improving the customer experience
2. Architecting core services to enable efficient processes
3. Constant re-evaluating to ensure the delivery of core services in the desired state

Currently, mainstream CX scores like Net Promoter Score (NPS) or Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) struggle to indicate a seamless experience accurately. Moreover, businesses often find difficulties determining if they are making good progress in crafting easy and accessible processes.

Many experts know the importance of brands in evaluating efficient experiences. Therefore, we’ve highlighted the best companies within these sectors while including key metrics that brands should consider when benchmarking their efficiency levels.

What is the digital efficiency score?

The digital efficiency score evaluates how easy specific products/processes are – ensuring that customers save time and effort

Why is it important to measure digital efficiency?

1. Existing measures do not provide sufficient context as to whether customers will find a process/product seamless or easy to use.
2. The shift to digital incentivises companies to gauge the simplicity of their digital and, in some cases, physical and digital (phygital) experiences.
3. Brands should ensure that they are not wasting their customers’ time and attention when engaging with their services/products.

Best practices

Kakao Bank: Embodying convenience at every step

What happens when a top-notch social media application decides to create a bank?

You get Kakao Bank.

Kakao, who owns Kakao Talk, South Korea’s most popular instant messaging app, created its digital bank in 2017. Riding on the popularity of Kakao Talk, the bank almost instantly gained 300,000 accounts within the first 24 hours and another 2 million within 2 weeks.

However, it does not take its popularity for granted, as it always strives to make banking as convenient as possible. Therefore, it re-evaluated banking processes at every step – bringing new light to traditional banking practices.

Here are a few ways Kakao Bank embraced digital efficiency in its banking processes:

• Account opening process:
  • 7 steps under 7 minutes with intuitive guides
• Mortgage-application process:
  • Utilises AI chatbots to help customers better apply for loans.
  • The AI bot provides expected interest rates and maximum borrowing amount in under 3 minutes after applicants have provided information regarding the property of interest, yearly income, marital status and other relevant information.
  • The applicant finalises the loan application by sending in the self-identification code and uploading a copy of the sales contract.

Outcome:

• 20 million concurrent users
• #1 Mobile Banking App in Korea
• 25% YOY growth for deposits
• USD19 billion loans since its inception and a 16% YOY growth
• USD19 million in platform revenues and USD43.7 million in banking fee revenues in Q2 2022

Alibaba: Showcasing the best usage of tech to reduce friction

The world’s biggest e-commerce company’s aspirations for seamless customer experiences at all touchpoints are well-known across industries. As a result, the company embraces innovations that drive efficient, easy experiences as the core of its technological roadmap.

With 1.3 billion global users across Alibaba’s ecosystem and counting, it’s no surprise that this tech mammoth is constantly optimising its ways of managing customer traffic, enquiries and overall experiences with AI – particularly machine learning.

Within the past 6 years, Alibaba entered the cutthroat brick-and-mortar retail space with its own grocery chain – Freshippo, aiming to revolutionise the traditional grocery shopping process.

How Alibaba crafts seamless customer experiences on its e-commerce platforms and in Freshippo:

• Utilises its AIRec engine to analyse user behaviours in real-time, refines the data and provides personalised recommendations that optimise user experiences.
• Rolls out AliMe, a smart chatbot to answer customer enquiries on Alibaba’s platform, act as a shopping guide and chat with customers as a fun activity.
• Adopts self-checkout technology in its physical grocery chain (Freshippo) to increase checkout seamlessness and labour efficiency.
• Provides quick delivery for customers staying within 3km of a Freshippo store.

Outcome:

• Personalised recommendations in milliseconds
• Resolution rate of 93.1% with AliMe
• Chat latency of less than 30ms with AliMe
• Self-checkouts improve labour efficiency by 200%
• Time spent on checkouts is reduced by 61%
• Freshippo delivery under 30 minutes within a 3 km radius

Ping An Health: Quality care in under a minute

In 2016, patients in China had to wait an average of around 3 hours to visit a doctor, which included their waiting and commute times. However, patients spend only 8 minutes with the doctor – making up a meagre 4.4% of the average 3 hours. The unequal spread of hospitals and clinics around China is one of the main factors behind long commutes and patient wait times. No doubt, visiting the doctor was a tedious process. To avoid the hassle, patients would rather self-diagnose and purchase off-the-shelf medication. And that leads to other complications, including misdiagnosis, wrong medication consumption and more.

Ping An Healthcare recognised this and created “One-Minute Clinics” to link the fragmented, in-person medical consulting and pharmaceutical industry with big data, artificial intelligence and advanced logistics. Thus, Ping An established automatic vending machines, enabling patients to receive proper medical consultation and easy access to medication. These “One-Minute Clinics” support seamless medical services with the following efforts:

• Medical booths where visitors can attain medical advice and pay directly for medication
• An ‘AI doctor’ can respond to patient enquiries, complete basic patient assessments and provide automatic transfers to a professional doctor for treatment and medication.
• Patients can now purchase the prescribed medication within the booth itself. If the medicine is unavailable, patients can opt for delivery.

Outcome:

• More than 100 average daily users
• Average one-on-one consultant time is less than 5 minutes
• Less than an hour of medication delivery timeTime tak
• 24/7 response in 30 seconds
• AI-based diagnosis recommendations made in seconds

How should we measure digital efficiency?

There are various approaches to gauge your digital efficiency. Here are a few methods and examples to get you started.

1. Steps taken to complete digital processes

Reflects how much effort users need to complete your processes

• Example: Kotak 811’s bank account opening process takes around 4-5 clicks

2. Time taken to complete digital processes

Helps identify areas of improvement, such as simplifying workflows or optimising user interfaces.

• Example: MYbank from Ant Group created a “310 Model” to support SME financing, offering loans that take < 3 minutes to apply and 1 minute to approve, with zero human intervention.

3. Automation rates

Indicates the extent of automated processes that can help improve productivity and increase scalability, especially when meeting growing demand

• Example: Woolworths’ voice bot, Olive, automates thousands of conversations weekly.