Decoding Online Consumer Experience

There is a plethora of literature on how to improve site design, conversion, engagement, etc., but there is something to be said about not ignoring the obvious and not repeating the mistakes of the past. Keeping it simple sometimes is “simply” avoiding the common mistakes!

Navigation – ease and appeal determine how well was the digital strategy executed, be it content, eCommerce or communication. Optimize your website to ensure all elements are covered. Bounce Rate and return frequency are good metrics to measure the effectiveness of your site navigation strategy.

Fewer Clicks – helping customers and stakeholders reach the goal fast is critical to achieving the desired results. This does require that goals for each site section and page are clearly defined, and in-line with the overall strategy. Website optimization for the desired goal(s) will help ensure that customers are not “bumped” around for more page views, while the conversion funnel gets deeper and deeper.

Search Efficiency – make it easy for the customers to search across your site. Up-sell and cross-sell opportunities and an urge to “over-educate” and “impress” your customers may come in the way of making the search and results more complicated than they ought to be. Conversion efficiency will be a direct indicator of how well is this working. I have been asked to show other products as a customer is going through the purchase cycle for product  X, so we can get their attention – my reaction is always that the best it will do is distract and the worst it will achieve is a lost sale.

Brand Communication – ensure a consistent brand experience across all customer touch points including, site, blog, community, social, sales and direct mail is a no-brainer, yet sometimes over-looked as organizations try and keep up with the evolving digital landscape.

Tracking and Reporting – make it focused around what a customer is doing on the site. Is the goal to drive engagement, e-commerce, education, etc.? Make sure the metrics are customer-centric.

I am proposing a common-sense approach to achieving desired results out of the online experience – set simple goals for each task and design the experience around that. It is easier than we often think, especially when we have to be burdened with conflicting brand and organizational asks!

Presenting Consistent Brand Experience to Customers

In all my experience working with organizations there has been a visible lack of coherent strategy for customer communication via various touch-points. I am referring to customer service, corporate websites, social forums, blogs and marketing campaigns. To be fair, the challenge has been in rapidity with which changes have been taking place across the above landscape, which makes the job of “keeping up” all the more difficult. However, these have now been around long enough that customers expect organizations to button-up and present a consistent brand experience.

I believe the challenge is not in how to deliver a consistent experience instead, why organizations fail to deliver a consistent experience across its customer touch points!

I find the lack of adequate investments, executive support and unclear role descriptions as the key factors that companies need to focus on. The benefits of a consistent communications approach are many – brand growth, customer retention, acquisition, etc., to name a few. So where does one start? If there are separate sites for sales, customer service, account management, etc., consolidating all into one consistent look & feel is a good start. Consolidating, with all reporting into one organization, will also help with messaging consistency that often gets lost in subjectivity across business units. Next step would be ensure customer can easily navigate between various sites as they engage with the brand. Now we are ready to actively interact with your community via, blogs (if? there is one!) and across social spectrum. Also, providing information and self-service tools across your company sites is trivial, yet engaging. Digital presence needs to be integral to overall strategy and appropriate controls need to be in place to ensure accountability, regular updates, monitoring and reporting.

Once we achieve an integrated look & feel for our brand, we can then start to understand customer behavior across these touch points and, in turn, start providing better products/services/support to our customers.

Making Mobile Strategy Attractive to the Bottom-Line

Smart phone users like to touch, play games, shop, watch videos -- make sure your mobile strategy conforms to "Entertainment" – low attention span is the only thing I will add to round out the observations on the impact of evolving smart phone adoption! 

As these devices grow, so does the need for a mobile as a marketing vehicle for brands. Free Wi-Fi, in the enterprise world is a step to entice customers, but how do we justify the ROI? Video viewing is prominent, so were other activities mentioned below. Consumers like entertainment on their devices, but what is the view from the provider’s (enterprises) perspective?

In the test for device usage (that I conducted with one of our restaurant partners), the content (non-video) was secondary and direct access to FB, twitter or other social book marking sites was prominent, followed by search and weather/local.

How do we balance the market need for a service and internal investments in providing that service? I talked about Challenges to Mobile Strategy in an older post. Monetization of a mobile experience is a real challenge, so ROI of the investment is a tough one for executives to swallow. However, if the there is increased in-store sales, patrons’ use of local coupons and promotions, greater brand exposure, positive mentions of the brand, etc., then the short-term investment could pay off big time over the long run. Traditional businesses have realized the latter, but need for immediate gratification appears to be trumping a full-blown and integrated strategy for mobile as a channel.

Decoding Customer Retention

Customer retention is an area, where organizations often look to, as business starts to plateau, or worse, starts to decline. Often the data is looked at, and research conducted to understand and mitigate the causes, before customers find a better value elsewhere. While, there are no wrong answers in how we launch retention programs, the effectiveness and sustainability will be a factor of how well we researched our offers. The areas outlined below may help develop a better understanding of our retention needs and offers.

• Is your core product/service still fulfilling the customer need? This is relevant where the core offering starts to get viewed as a necessity and there are alternatives that may either replace the need or alter it in ways that is not relevant to your organizations strengths and/or operations. Google’s search is being imitated and customer search behavior is modifying to social/video/mobile search. There is even a need for a simpler search engine being proposed by industry leaders. Search is still relevant, but Google is forced to think beyond the traditional model to accommodate changing consumer behavior.
• Are the customers getting what they were promised? Here is one of the obvious ones – if I buy a cell phone, but the calls getting dropped, it may be time to find an alternative. Setting customer expectations and meeting them is more than half the battle won, in spite of other changes that may be impacting your products and services.
• Do you have other products and services that enhance the value of your core offering? Not as easy and obvious, but extremely powerful. Customers trust and want to feel good about the brand they are already engaged with (assuming we have a check mark against #2 above). To enhance their brand experience, we need to develop and offer a portfolio that enhances the experience of our core offering. We are all familiar with bundles of phone, Internet and cable services that are now common place amongst the connectivity providers.
• Lastly, is the industry landscape changing? – are the competitors, technology, consumer behaviors altering the landscape such that; your product/service is becoming a commodity, new services are being added, customer expectations are changing, etc? One of the most fascinating examples of this dynamic is visible in the Satellite Internet industry, where broadband speeds, data capacity and prices are expected to be comparable to DSL and cable, as opposed to simply being better than dial-up.

Evaluating our portfolio in the light of the above questions may help find ways to keep customers excited about our brand and sustain growth through their greater participation and share of wallet (topic for a later post).