Think about what your customer did before they came to you today. They searched on Google. They placed an order on Amazon. They watched something on Netflix. And every single one of those experiences quietly raised the bar for what yours needs to feel like.
This is the benchmark problem that most digital leaders aren’t accounting for. When we asked 1,000 UK consumers what companies they mentally compare a brand’s digital experience to, only 8% said they compared it to direct competitors. 63% named Amazon, Google, Netflix, Apple and their banking app — companies with nothing to do with your sector, your product or your proposition, but who have spent decades making digital experience feel effortless.
That is the standard your customer is carrying when they arrive at you.
Nobody sits down to interact with a brand and thinks consciously about benchmarks. But every customer brings with them an accumulated sense of what good feels like, shaped by every digital interaction they have had. When something feels slow, or asks them to repeat themselves, or makes a simple task harder than it should be, they don’t compare it to your competitors. They don’t compare it to your competitors. They compare it to the last time a digital interaction felt genuinely frictionless. And that experience almost certainly came from outside your sector entirely.
This is what makes the benchmark problem so commercially significant. Your customer is not arriving at your digital experience with a blank slate. They are arriving with a set of expectations built by the most sophisticated digital products in the world. And when your experience falls short of that standard, it is not your competitors who benefit. It is the impression your brand leaves behind.
Most digital roadmaps are built around competitive intelligence and that is a reasonable starting point. But for digital experience it produces a dangerous ceiling. If your nearest competitor has a mediocre digital experience and you match it, you have closed the competitive gap and let your customer down at the same time. Because your customer is not comparing you to your competitor. They are comparing you to the best digital experience they have ever had.
The businesses pulling ahead have started asking a harder question. Does our digital experience feel as effortless as the best experiences our customers use every day? That question has no comfortable answer. But it is the right one.
The gap between where your digital roadmap is pointed and where your customers are already standing will not close by benchmarking harder against the brands you already know, because your customers stopped comparing you to those brands a long time ago. The standard they carry with them is set by the most effortless digital experiences in the world, and until your roadmap is calibrated against that reality rather than your competitive set, you are solving for the wrong problem.
If you want to understand where your digital experience sits against the benchmark your customers are using, get in touch with MSQ DX.