The power of the specialized digital experience according to Forrester

Forrester recently published its “Now Tech: Global Digital Experience Services, Q4 2021” report to profile 37 digital providers that are helping brands with digital marketing, commerce and customer experience initiatives.

In their report, Forrester analysts Ted Schadler and Frederic Giron define digital providers as “essential partners to building [your brand’s] digital experience.” And digital experience means quite a lot. It embodies the combination of creativity and technology; everything from strategy, to implementation, to marketing, to optimization, and all that’s in between. 

From our perspective, the digital experience is just as essential as your brand’s digital provider. Maybe now more than ever. After all, during the first three months of the pandemic, digital advanced the equivalent of ten years. A year and a half later, the world is now more digitally literate than ever before. And it’s only getting more so. To make it in a digital world, businesses must develop digital experiences to both meet the current needs of their customers and to future-proof their brand.

When shopping for the digital provider that will best fit your brand’s digital needs, Forrester breaks their recommendations down according to size. DEPT® is relatively small in this standing, at about 2,500 employees compared to 25,000 at large providers. 

That said, what is the benefit of making your essential partner in creating digital experiences a comparatively small provider?

Forrester reports that, unlike the large and mid-sized digital counterparts, “Smaller providers generally don’t have the breadth or scale but may offer specialties that the bigger players don’t provide.”

Other major research firms confirm the value of a specialized digital experience. Mckinsey notes that a highly personalized, individual approach to a customer experience – particularly when a brand’s customer base is in the millions – boosts customer loyalty and gives that brand a competitive edge that is hard to imitate. And Harvard Business Review observes that in a world where digital feels almost ubiquitous, “there is no satisfactory excuse for a poor digital experience.” In short, if a brand does not successfully meet or surpass a customer’s digital expectations, they’re quick to move on. After all, countless other brands are just a quick search away.

We can also confirm the value of the specialized digital experience because we are highly specialized. Because “small” certainly does not mean that pushing out amazing global digital experiences is beyond our capability. Whether it’s the unique AR filter & branded hashtag we created for ASOS that generated over 1.2 billion views in just three weeks, the Lovie-nominated virtual landscape we were tasked with creating for the Eurovision Song Contest, or our work for Philips’s “Right under your nose” campaign to raise awareness of men’s health issues, we believe that specialized digital experiences work really, really well.