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).

5 Keys to Increasing Marketing ROI

With the new year in sight, one of the pressing issues for managers is how to improve upon the marketing successes in 2011.  While acquiring new customers is an obvious growth strategy, marketers must also use analytics to unlock the real secrets behind marketing success. After all, your marketing dollars should stretch well beyond customer acquisition.

Often companies will focus on “net adds” as a success indicator, and fail to recognize the revenue growth potential by meeting the needs of their existing customers. I am not saying it is by design, but top-line growth is “sexier” to the management, and extracting that incremental dollar out of your existing customers needs a bit more work than designing a catchy marketing campaign – right analytics focus can help solve for the latter. The following 5 steps seem to have worked in my experience.

• Know your customers – demographics, location, spending habits, targeted wallet share, etc.
• Identify and create a portfolio of products that aligns with your customers’ needs and extends your brand beyond core product(s)
• Build relevant external partnerships to extend your products beyond the core competencies
• Target the products offerings to specific customer segments and avoid the “one-size-fits-all” approach to selling  
• Lastly don’t forget to utilize all the available customer touch points including, social forums, newsletters, email and others

These steps need to be repeated periodically to capture any changes in market, customer needs, etc. But, the key is to consistently evaluate (say, during quarterly reviews) your portfolio strategy on all of the above drivers and refine as needed.

Remember, it is much cheaper to manage a customer than acquire a new one!

Small Business Cloud Solutions

According to US Census bureau, there are more than 5 Million small businesses in the US with less than 20 employees and spanning all industry verticals including, services, manufacturing, non-profits, etc. 

With technology changing at a rapid pace and resource constraints at these organizations, need for “pay per use” technology solutions has been gaining momentum. In a recent Parks Associates survey (2011), 50% or more of the respondents indicated that they would prefer hosted solutions in one or more of;

• Online security
• Back-up and recovery
• Site hosting, design and management
• Email, hosted exchange and other

The market need is for a portfolio that can not only be branded and managed, but also is affordable to the target small business market. Verizon, AT&T, Comcast and others have several bundles/pricing, but with a large set of options available, small businesses are finding it difficult to make the right choices – although, that may only explain part of the hesitation and low adoption currently seen.

Based on my recent engagements, I believe service providers should;

• Understand the needs of the target market segments, since one size probably will "not" fit all
• Build a simple portfolio of products that does not require an expert to be evaluated
• Minimize the number of integration points from various solution providers
• Include business class customer support as a key component of the bundle

The challenge for the service providers is to understand that there are few small businesses that will buy or, can afford the bundle of services on offer, at least in the current environment. However, pricing a-la-carte for the client may not be ROI positive, given the nature of diversified services as outlined above. It will be interesting to see the business models evolve over the next 1-2 years, where an “a-la-carte bundle” is not encumbered by licensing and integration challenges, as well as, is cost-friendly to service provider and price-friendly to customers at the same time.

Mobile Internet Opportunity

Mobile solution across Wi-Fi networks is a territory that has yet to be explored from the perspectives of consumer experience, usage and revenue potential. There are several challenges that will need to be addressed as the right mobile strategies evolve that cater to the needs of all stakeholders – is there a mobile portal on the horizon? Here’s what we know thus far;

• Consumers are mostly interested in their favorable apps, social sites, weather, local events and deals, for the most part
• Device types are proliferating but also offer consistent pointers to consumer preferences (read iPhone type of smart devices and tablets)
• Advertisers are not sure of relevant pages for high-value ads
• Wi-Fi providers want a piece of the revenue (advertising & search) pie, however small that may be, but they also see mobile Wi-Fi as a marketing and branding channel
• Technology community is faced with creating an experience that caters to all these groups and still be scalable for relevance and locations (zip codes or other)
• And, the winner between downloadable apps and web based applications is yet to be decided

The solution probably lies in simplicity:

• Consumers want access so they can do whatever it is that they do on the web
• Local content and promotions appear to be the most viable long-term revenue drivers
• Branding and in-store coupons present another monetization channel to the service provider(s)

Signing in to mobile Wi-Fi internet during your next restaurant stop or hotel stay should not be that “boring.”