Digital Trends & Customer Experience – Where we are heading in 2023

The team at GW headed to Customer Experience Live & Canvas Conference in November to get up to speed with the latest trends in CX and Digital Products. Naturally, there were a lot of findings but I thought I would touch on one of the keynotes and then focus on what is going to be big in 2023.

Whisk: The Ultimate Cooking App

Nick Holzherr

https://whisk.com

We began the day at Canvas with Nick Holzherr, Founder of Whisk talking about how to grow a community in apps.

Whisk is an all-in-one app for recipe saving, meal planning, grocery shopping, and recipe sharing. It was first launched in 2020. You can build private communities or public.

Nick and the team realised early on in the journey that to properly monetise and create a buzz they should follow other brands such as Strava or Goodreads in creating “Growth Loops”.

What is a Growth Loop?

The growth loop is a system that starts with acquiring users and then keeping them engaged by providing value. The ultimate goal of the loop is to have a self-sustaining approach wherein users keep coming back and referring new users. The growth loop framework has three parts — input, action and output.

So for instance with Goodreads, you get rewarded for writing a review and again rewarded when a friend or colleague reads your review and makes a purchase and on we go.

Playing to the Audience & Creating Content for SEO

Nick and the team knew that food was in the top 3 hobbies universally. By utilising the growth loop approach users created content, half of which was original and half which was imported. Curated content then bled into SEO, similar to Goodreads when you search for a book you quite often get a result from Goodreads and now similarly the same applies when searching for recipes you get results for Whisk.

TikTok & Creators

Whisk recipes can now be linked to Tik Tok posts which have dramatically increased reach and bought down the average age of users. They have also acquired creators by using Amplitude & Appfire technology and have been able to link up with the most engaged creators to create original content for them and the Whisk platform.

With 3 full-time people now used to find creators, they found that for every 100 creators they recruit, it leads to 35,000 users per month. It’s also cheaper to get users via creators than it is by paid acquisition by IOS or Android.

The big takeaways

Grow slow and steady, utilise growth loops in digital products and use machine learning to find the most cost-effective way to acquire new users.

Trends & Focus in 2023

CX Experience Live had speakers from all over the world who headed up digital teams for brands such as Crocs, HSBC, Barclaycard Payments, Birmingham City Council, Cancer Research UK, Halfords, National Express & BT amongst others.

Stats, Facts & hot takes for 2023

1. Getting the balance between humanising the connection between Company & Consumer and utilising Automation to get the best results remains a vital conundrum.

2. Behaviour analysis and analytics are key in driving bespoke customer service. There is never a one-fits-all solution.

3. Data suggests that by the end of 2023 two-out-of-three people globally will be online.

4. The typical internet user spends 40% of their life online.

5. Tik Tok has become the leading social platform globally with YouTube and Facebook following.

6. Divide your digital budgets by what unites your audience.

7. Virtual Worlds and the Metaverse is only going to grow for the foreseeable.

8. Fortnite has 260 million monthly active players, Roblox has 200 million monthly players and Minecraft has 170 million players.

9. The Metaverse, though trend-wise leans hard towards gaming.

10. Facebook isn’t dying.

11. Messengers (i.e. WhatsApp Business) are going to play a more central role in marketing in 2023.

12. The Rise of Wearables

- The number of global consumers wearing smartwatches has increased by 60% in the last two years.
- More adults now wear a “Smart Wrist” device than own a gaming console.
- The increasing use of Smart Wrist devices may cannibalise time spent on our phones.

15. The ability to own, manage and use our own digital identity is increasingly important.

16. Self-sovereign identity (SSI) offers a secure, portable online ID, owned by individuals.

17. SSI has the potential to become omnipresent for Log-ins, Preferences, Finance, Healthcare and Passports.

If you have any thoughts about any of the above or want our views on any current issues relating to digital products we'd welcome a conversation. Please reach out to me Reuben.Boughton@griffiths-waite.co.uk.