“If it ain’t broke, you ain’t looking hard enough”

The poor economy has done nothing to lower customer expectations of online retailers, and recent mixed results data from ComScore and ForeSee Results indicate that retailers who continue to improve their customer experiences are pulling away from their competitors in both sales and customer satisfaction.

ComScore reports online retail up 4% for the holiday season. While an increase is always nice, this is a much lower growth rate than online retail has seen in the past. And last year’s comparison base was far from stellar. ForeSee Results shows a significant drop in customer satisfaction year over year. Since satisfaction is predictive of future financial results, a drop is concerning.

But still, I wondered how sales could be up at all if satisfaction was so far down.

A deeper look at the ComScore data shows the Top 25 retailers growing 13% while “Small and Mid Tail” retailers are declining 10%. Satisfaction scores are also split, but the differences we’re seeing seem to be more based on those retailers who are continually improving their sites versus those whose cost containment measures have slowed or stopped improvements. It appears that the retailers who closely measure the effectiveness of their sites from their customers’ perspectives and continuously improve their customers’ experiences are the retailers with increasing customer satisfaction scores. Those retailers who didn’t improve customer experience this year are suffering declining satisfaction scores. Many of those in the Top 25 are the retailers who have continued to enhance their customer experiences. Those enhancements are not only helping them to increase their sales, but because of the high visibility and usage of those tops sites, they’re also raising consumer expectations of all sites.

Customer satisfaction can be best defined as the degree to which a customer’s actual experience meets his or her expectations. Therefore, rising expectations can depress satisfaction scores if customer experience improvements don’t keep pace.

In the rapidly changing world of online retail, stopping or delaying improvements is like treading water in a swimming race. While you may temporarily save some energy, you will fall hopelessly behind and your only hope of catching up is spending a lot more energy than you likely saved treading water

Growing online retail businesses realize and fully embrace the need for continuous improvements, and they also realize that online retail in general is far from producing the level of customer experience truly necessary to provide excellent self-service shopping experiences. I recently heard Robin Terrell, Managing Director of John Lewis Direct in the UK (and Amazon alum), say “If it ain’t broke, you ain’t looking hard enough” in a talk about the need to improve customer experience. It’s a brilliant statement, and I totally agree with what he was saying.

So, “improving customer experience” is a huge and vague statement. Where do we start?

1. Recognize that it’s broke and you ain’t looking hard enough
   We’re still in our infancy in online retail, and we’ve got a long way to go. We too often try to increase our sales by generating more traffic and don’t spend enough time converting the traffic we’re already got. Often, the obstacles to conversion are not the big, shiny, whiz bang functionality; they’re lots of little things that add up to big problems. Those problems are hard to see without a concerted effort, as I discussed in more detail in my Tree Stump Theory post and other posts on conversion.
2. Truly learn how effective your site is from your customers’ perspective
   We can all identify lots of improvements we’d like to see on our sites, but it’s the improvements our customers most need that will drive our best growth. So understanding where we are and aren’t effective from our customers’ perspectives is critically important, but difficult.Focus groups and usability labs can be very helpful, but they can’t be our first or only methodology because it’s not possible to project learnings from a small group of people onto our entire population of customers.

   First, we need to quantitatively understand our effectiveness in the eyes of our total population, and that requires a statistically solid customer polling and analysis capability. Blatant and shameless plug alert: I’ve had great success using ForeSee Results in the past for exactly this purpose. Once we understand problem areas at a macro level, we can add a lot of color by interacting directly with customers in focus groups and usability labs. More details on this process can be found in my post entitled “Is elitism the source of poor usability?”

3. Consider getting some help from usability professionals
   Usability audits are different from usability labs. Usability auditors are professionally trained to understand how people interact with websites. Many of them have degrees in Human-Computer Interaction, a field that truly seeks to understand how people interact with software. These types of people can really help to identify problems with our user interfaces that untrained eyes have trouble seeing but which regularly obstruct customers from accomplishing their tasks.
4. Put in place a process to continuously improve
   This is really about budgetary and project management mindset. We must just accept the fact that we can’t tread water in a never-ending swimming race, and our only chance of competing is to keep swimming. We have to build our staffs, our budgets and our processes with the recognition that competing in the marketplace means continuously improving our customer experiences. Which leads to …
5. Wash, rinse, repeat
   Since the leaders in the marketplace are running this same cycle, we cannot rest. We must continue to recognize our sites are broken, continue to measure our effectiveness from our customers’ perspectives, find problems, fix them and begin again.

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We’ve got a lot of data that shows that retailers who best satisfy their customers generate the best financial results. I suppose that statement doesn’t sound like rocket science. But understanding that satisfaction has a direct relation to expectations and that our customers’ expectations can change independent of what we do on our own site is important. The leaders are continuously improving their sites, and they’re improvements are raising our customers’ expectations. We’ve all got to swim harder to keep pace.

What do you think? What’s your view on the marketplace? How have you see customer satisfaction affect your business?

Conversion tip: Don’t let bad error messages cost you sales

Writing error messages is not sexy. In fact, it’s incredibly tedious and boring. But don’t confuse tedious and boring with unimportant. Often, the quality of an error message can be the difference between a sale and an abandonment. And a poorly written error message is a needless and shameful way to lose a sale. The good news is that improving error messages has a high ROI as the cost of the investment is very low.

It’s important to remember that our sites are really self service software applications, and they’re very likely not as intuitive as we think they are. Referencing back to one of my previous posts, “Is elitism the source of poor usability,” we have to remember that our customers probably aren’t as tech savvy as we are, and they are definitely not anywhere near as familiar with our sites as we are. So, it’s important that we’re very clear in our messaging when something goes wrong.

So what does it take to write a quality error message?

1. Be specific
   It’s so important that we tell our customers exactly what went wrong. Our developers have to write code for every possible instance, but all too often we resort to generic and vague language in our error messages. Here are a couple of examples:

   

   As a customer, I’m not sure what I’m not sure what happened or what I should do about it. I might try once again, but if I got this message a second time I would be gone.

   

   This either/or scenario is really an example of a lazy error message. Which is it? Is the address improperly formatted or does it contain invalid characters? We need to tell customers specifically what is wrong and tell them how to fix it.

   Here’s a much better example:
   

2. Use clear language
   It’s very important to avoid anything that even remotely resembles tech jargon. Try instead to use short words that are part of everyday language.First, a bad example:
   

   Huh? Customers understand “password” but “authentication credentials” are certainly unclear and sound kind of scary, frankly.This one is much better:

   

   This is both specific and written in clear and simple language.

3. Strong visibility
   Error messages need to be extremely prominent. Use color and other symbols, such as exclamation points, to help the error message stand out. It’s also helpful to separate the error messages from the rest of the page with white space. Include the message prominently at the top of the page and also at the specific field, if it’s a form error.Here’s a good top of page error:
   

   I would like to see more white space around the error message, but otherwise this is really good.And I really like this way to highlight a particular field where the error has occurred. It may not be pretty, but then it probably shouldn’t be. It should stand out, and this does. Even better, we get a very specific message telling us exactly what’s wrong with the field.
   
   

4. Be polite
   Whenever an error occurs during our customer’s experience with our site, we’re in danger of losing her if we don’t handle it well. So, let’s be as courteous as possible. The cost of courtesy is zero, and it allows us to come across as friendly as possible.Here’s one that is both specific and polite:
   
   

   Here’s one that goes the extra mile to suggest calling Customer Service if there is still a problem. This is a very nice touch that will go a long way towards saving the sale.
   
   

5. Provide examples for how the information should be entered correctly
   It’s very important they we’re not only specific in defining the problem that occurred but also specific in explaining how to correct the problem. If the customer has entered his email incorrectly, we cannot assume that he knows what he did wrong or how to enter it correctly.Here’s an error message that explains the format pretty well:
   

   However, the customer may not understand what “domain” means. It may be be better to also use a real example with a well-known domain like “name@aol.com.” Even better, incorporate the information the customer entered, if possible.For example, the error might say something like:

   You entered “kevin” for your email address, which is not a complete address. Please enter an “@” symbol followed by an email provider after your email name. For example, “kevin@yahoo.com.”

Even better, be proactive. Stop the error before it occurs.

I really love how Restaurant.com handles their form fields. Upon entry to a form field, a dialogue box dynamically appears next to the field with some helpful information. The movement that occurs upon entry really draws your attention to the helpful information, which I find considerably more effective than help text persistently present under or next to a field. It’s far easier to ignore static text than something that appears when you enter the field.

Additionally, the folks at Restaurant.com have included some great help text that provides important information. In this example, they’re letting us know the address must match the billing address on our credit card. Excellent!

And here, we get some specific information about the value of our password and the basic requirements for the password. And we get some nice politeness to close it out.

Save those sales. Give error messaging your full attention.

Error messages should get just as much attention as any other site functionality in the requirements processes for our sites. We should give error messaging as much attention as we give to marketing copy. It may not be sexy, but it’s critically important if we want to avoid needlessly losing sales.

What do you think? How much time to you put into error messaging? Do you have examples of particularly good error messaging? Would you add anything to the list of quality error message attributes?

Sitting in the “Marketing Hot Seat”

My good buddy Adam Cohen, a Rosetta partner who heads up their Search, Online and Social Media businesses, issued a challenge called “The Marketing Hot

You’re the CMO.  You
have a marketing budget of $1M.  Your company is a consumer product
company, relatively unknown / early stage.  Customers who know the
product like it. CEO wants ROI within 12 months.  What do you do?

I thought this would be a fun exercise to take on, particularly because the scenario placed me in the seat of a manufacturer, publisher or product company. Would my retail oriented perspective provide a different line of thinking than would typically come from a manufacturer, and would that perspective be worthwhile? I’d certainly love to know your thoughts.

My take is actually the first one Adam posted on his blog, A Thousand Cuts. Check things out over there over the next few weeks to see perspectives from the other 12 bloggers.

Here’s my answer to Adam’s challenge:

OK.
Setting aside all the caveats about the fact that I don’t know what the product is, what it costs to make and what our margins are, here’s generically how I would approach the situation:

Strategy

1. Thoroughly understand the customers who like our product
   The customers who know our product like it. We need to find out why, in their words, and determine what personality traits, hobbies, demographics, etc. in those customers are relevant to their liking our products so that we can speak to others like them.
2. Get our online destinations right
   With a relatively small marketing budget, we’re going to need to maximize our online strategy. (Actually, we should do that even if have a large marketing budget.) We need to make sure our website and our retailer websites are highly usable and highly effective in merchandising our product and providing the ability for customers to easily spread the word about us.
3. Drive traffic with whatever budget is left
   Only when we have ensured that we have solid destinations for our traffic will we start to actively search for traffic.

Tactics

1. Learn as much as we can about the customers who most love the product.
   Why do they like it? What are there personality types; let’s use the Myers-Briggs personality test and really get a  thorough understanding of these folks. How do they describe our product? Let’s pay attention to the words they  use as we’re going to reuse those words in our copy.
2. Hire ForeSee Results to measure our site’s effectiveness from our customers’ perspectives.
   I realize this may seem self-serving since it’s my company, but I was a client for seven years before joining the  company three months ago, and I’ve see how well it works.  So, I want it in this role. So there! We’ll use  measurements, analysis, Session Replay and usability audits to ensure we’re providing the best experience  we can.
3. Hire Bryan Eisenberg to develop archetypes and to implement Persuasion Architecture on our site.
   We need to speak to customers in language that resonates, and Bryan understands how to do that. We’ll also use  his language for product descriptions and other content we give to retailers for their sites.
4. Create a high quality product video.
   We’ll use this video on our own site and we’ll give it to retailers for their sites. We’ll focus on the key aspects  customers love and use copy that includes words that resonate with those customers. We’ll also show real  customer testimonials.
5. Launch customer reviews and customer forums on our site
   We need to make sure our customers can openly provide their thoughts about our product, even when  they’re negative.
6. Launch several blogs on our site
   Since we only have one product, we need to provide some fresh and compelling content on our site to give people a reason to come back. The content doesn’t need to be about the product all the time. It can be able anything, as  long as it’s compelling. I’ll focus on general marketing, our CEO can blog about leadership, and we’ll find some  people to blog about topics our customers are interested in. All of this blog content will also be great for SEO.
7. Launch a marketing campaign to retailers informing them about key customers and teaching them how to sell the product
   Our initial marketing efforts will essentially be internal. Let’s get the sellers pumped up and doing their jobs well  before we send customers their way.
8. Develop a widget for retailers that gives customers the ability to easily share information about the product
   We need to give our customers ways to share information about our product on their own in a way that is easy and  positive. Let’s create a fun widget that people want to share on Facebook, Twitter, email, etc.
9. Get our SEO right, buy search terms, send emails, run re-marketing campaigns, etc.
   I don’t want to minimize the value of these techniques, but we really need to make sure our destinations are right  before we add lots of traffic.So there you have it. My main point here is to focus on the customers first, the destination second and the traffic driving last.

What do you think? Does my strategy make sense? How would you have addressed the challenge? Do your manufacturer/publisher/product partners address your needs?

Conversion tip: Don’t block the product with window signs

My friend Bryan Eisenberg is always telling retailers, “You don’t have traffic problems. You have conversion problems.” When 95+% of the people who come to a site don’t purchase, it’s a hard point to deny. Could giving customers quicker and better access to the product be one way to start to solve the conversion problem? My experience says Yes.

A quick story

Imagine walking into a store and smacking into a giant promotional banner that stretches from the ceiling to chest level. Below it and to its right hang a series of smaller promotional banners. A few feet behind the banners, you see a series of doors with signs above them that appear to represent different product categories. You push through the banners and open the door under the “Dresses” sign. There you step into a room where a flashy video projected on a large wall highlights stylish dresses and beautiful models and also runs copy about the same promotion you saw on the banner at the front of the store. The wall to the right features several smaller signs for various promotions. The wall to the left is littered with 20 or 30 doors, each with a sign above it for what appears to be a type of dress.

Nowhere in the room are there any dresses.

You pass through the door labeled “Casual dresses” and finally see actual merchandise.

Does that story seem ludicrous? Then why is that basically the experience on so many retail websites?

In brick and mortar retail, we use promotional signs in our windows to draw people into the store, where we expertly display lots and lots of product to customers the moment they walk in the door. We certainly reinforce our promotional messages with signage throughout the store, but we never block the product with the signs. On our sites, our promotions seem to be more important than our products. What message are we sending to our customers about the value of our products when promotions get more prominence than the merchandise?

When customers arrive at our home page, they’ve already effectively entered the store. So, why are our “window signs” blocking the product?

Apparel and department store sites seem to have almost uniformly adopted the experience described above, but most other retail sites that I’ve seen don’t stray too far from “the window sign” experience. Consumer electronics and computer sites often feature a few specific deals or featured products, but otherwise they generally follow a similar approach. In fact, about half of the Internet Retailer Top 25 sites on my recent viewing didn’t show any products on their home pages, and the remainder only displayed a very few select products.

Are we missing conversion opportunities by taking too many pages to get to the products?

Certain retail categories, like apparel, books, jewelry and flowers/gifts to name a few, seem to have large customer contingencies who are prone to browsing to see what’s new. Physical stores in those categories absolutely cater to the desire of customers to check out the latest stuff, but the web sites seem to assume customers are only interested in promotions. Or are the promotions simply the result of our own self-interest? What percentage of customers click on the promo spots versus hitting the search box or clicking into a department or sub-department? If it’s a fairly small percentage, perhaps a different approach might pay off.

A case study

When we launched the new Borders.com last year, we knew that about half our customers came to the store looking for something new to read without a specific book in mind. As a result, we created the Magic Shelf, a virtual and interactive book shelf that housed up to 120 books in an easily browsed application.
And we placed the Magic Shelf in the most prominent position on our home page — front and center. The decision to offer such valuable real estate to this new feature was hardly unanimous, but those of us who supported it won at least enough support to give it a try.

The result? Not only did customers say they loved it, those who interacted with the Magic Shelf converted at a rate 62% higher than those who didn’t. As we dug deeper, we discovered that the reason they converted more was that they viewed about 41% more products than those who didn’t interact with the Magic Shelf. (If you’re interested in more detail, you can download the case study we did with Allurent, the vendor we used to develop the Magic Shelf).

How might the shopping experience change on an apparel site if there was prominently placed virtual rack of some sort that allowed customers to easily browse, on one page, a wide selection of the latest styles? How about virtual jewelry cases or flower bins?

Ann Taylor trendsetting

The new Ann Taylor site design has made some strong strides towards a nice product browsing experience. While they still seem to feature window signs on the home page, their landing pages provide a very nice browsing experience where customers can easily peruse lots of merchandise. The product images are very clean and easy to see, and the page layout lends itself to the ability to occasionally replace one of the product spots with a visible but unobtrusive promo spot. Bravo to Matthew Seigel and the team at AnnTaylor.com!

I’m not sure it’s necessary to replicate a physical fixture to achieve the benefits of great product browsing. To me, the key is giving customers easy access to our merchandise and letting them very easily view lots of different items. That basic concept is something we discovered long ago in the physical retail world. How did we lose sight of it online?

What do you think? What is the thinking at your company? What sites have you seen that do a good job giving access to the product? Or, are the current methods working for you?

The Tree Stump Theory

Since I mentioned it in my eTail presentation last week, I’ve received a number of requests to expound on my Tree Stump Theory in this space. So, here goes:

As truly amazing as the human brain is, it’s not able to re-process everything we see anew every time we see it. So, our brains take some shortcuts by basically ignoring things we are very familiar with, and that can cause us trouble any time we have interactions with people who don’t have the same level of familiarity with something as we do. I usually talk about this in reference to website usability, but it actually applies to many areas of our lives. To illustrate the concept, I have my Tree Stump Theory…

Imagine if someone brought a big tree stump into one of your conference rooms. The first time you saw it, you would say something like “Hey, what’s with the tree stump?” Someone would give you a compelling reason why it was there, and you would go on with the meeting. The next time you entered the conference room, you would notice the tree stump but not ask about it. After while, someone might throw a tablecloth on it or dress it up in some manner, but it would still be there. You would no longer ask about it or think about it. Frankly, you wouldn’t even really see it. You’d just arrange yourselves at the table in a way that worked around the tree stump and go on with your meeting. Meanwhile, anyone new coming into the room can’t help but see the tree stump and find it to be an obstacle.

We all have these types of “tree stumps” on our sites and in our lives. I bet you could think of something like this in your house right now. They manifest themselves as obstacles to good web usability, but they’re also our biases, our stereotypes and any other set of assumptions we rely on, usually unconsciously, to drive our daily actions and decisions. Sometimes they’re relatively harmless, but more often than not tree stumps prevent people from buying on our sites, or they are the unspoken roots of disagreements and miscommunications in our daily interactions both at work and at home.

So how do we get rid of our tree stumps?

1. The first step is to recognize the fact that tree stumps are everywhere, even when we can’t see them.

If you’ve read this far, you’ve probably made it to step one.

2. Next, get some help finding them

The very nature of tree stumps makes them difficult to self-identify. If you’re dealing with web usability, try the steps prescribed in this post. If you’re concerned about tree stumps in strategies, policies or general decisions, seek some input from someone who is outside the general team and who has a different background from you and your key decision makers. Ask them to openly question everything.

3. Specifically call out assumptions, preferably in writing

Assumptions are the roots of tree stumps. We make assumptions so often that we don’t always realize we’re making them. Listen for statements or reasons that hint of tree stumps. The most obvious is “That’s the way we’ve always done it.” If you hear that one, sound the sirens. But there are other, less obvious comments like “People want…” or “Based on my experience…” or “In a previous life we…” Don’t get me wrong, some of these statements could be perfectly accurate and valid. But whenever someone is applying past experience to a currently situation, he or she is assuming the two situations are similar enough to warrant the comparison. That’s potentially an assumption fraught with problems because the number of potentially important variables in any situation is massive. Writing down those assumptions and then testing them on the current situation often brings bad assumptions to light.

Also, on the web usability side, remember that while your internal reason for a tree stump may seem extremely valid to everyone in the company, your customers don’t know those reasons and even if they did, they probably don’t care. Common explanations that won’t hold water with customers include:”I’m not in charge of that area;” “It doesn’t matter because people don’t use that anyway;” or the time-honored classic, “That’s due to the limitations of our platform.”

4. Schedule regular reviews of your own assumptions

This one in some ways is a repeat of #3, but the point here is to specifically and methodically question yourself. This is really hard to do, of course, but it has a tremendous amount of value. One technique I’ve used in various situations is to write down my first impressions of important situations so that I can regularly review them in the future after I’ve learned more. I recently talked with Shop.org about this technique in reference to starting a new job. Beyond that technique, it just takes practice and discipline to think about your own biases and assumptions to see if they still apply.

I also find it helpful to constantly look for new ideas. I read lots of business and science books. I don’t always agree with everything I read, but new ideas cause me to question my own ideas. I also enjoying reading thought-provoking blogs, some of which are listed to the right, and I follow interesting people on Twitter. More than anything, though, I love to spend time talking to people who think differently than I do and are willing to share their perspectives. (And I hope you’ll share your comments on this post and others.)

Tree stumps are everywhere. We’ve all got them. And as soon as we remove some, more will crop up. It takes a concerted effort and a solid process to regularly look for and remove the tree stumps in our lives and our businesses. But I’ll argue that those of us who are aware of our tree stumps are on a much faster path to improvement than those who go on ignoring them.

What do you think? What types of tree stumps have you run into? How do you go about removing them?