“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?

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?

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?

Innovation by popular opinion – evolutionary or revolutionary?

What do Best Buy, Starbucks and Barack Obama all have in common? They’ve all launched sites designed to solicit customer ideas for their business and policies. (At least Obama used to have this capability on the transition site Change.gov. I can’t seem to find the ability on WhiteHouse.gov.) MyStarbucksIdea.com has been around for over a year, and Best Buy’s Idea X just launched. Given my recent post on how defending the status quo kills companies, I wondered if this sort of solution would help companies find that next great revolutionary idea to transform the company.

I really like this idea as a way to generate some fresh new ideas that come from the people being served by a business. And there are some very good ideas on the new Best Buy site; ideas that range from improvements to their Reward Zone program to ways for customers to register for help in busier stores. I love that customers have this ability to submit their ideas, and I love that Best Buy and Starbucks are using open brand techniques and letting all ideas be shown publicly, even when they aren’t always complimentary.

But, man, what a task to review all of those ideas! As a way of helping to sift through the ideas, each of these sites has a voting mechanism ostensibly designed to move the best ideas to the top.Or at least the most popular ideas.

So, will this concept help companies find that next great revolutionary idea for their businesses? 

I’m not so sure. My experience is that popular voting is a pretty good way to find evolutionary ideas, but it doesn’t work as well for revolutionary ideas. This is because most people tend to gravitate towards incremental improvements to concepts already familiar to them and have trouble visualizing radically new concepts.

To be clear, I’m not in any way knocking these systems or the idea of the popular vote. I love that Best Buy and Starbucks are reaching out to their customers and trying to find ways to improve their businesses by better meeting their customers’ needs and expectations, and my guess is they’re not looking for revolutionary ideas via this mechanism. (Although, given both company’s solid histories of revolutionary innovations, if they come across a revolutionary idea I’m sure they’ll act upon it quickly.)

So, how then do companies find revolutionary ideas?

It seems we often rely on executive brainstorming sessions. Those sessions almost always use the same technique (i.e. generate lots of ideas and vote on your favorites) and I find those techniques are exactly the reason they usually fail to produce transformational ideas. Usually, there aren’t a lot of guidelines issued prior to the session — by design — and the problems to be solved are usually not well-defined and agreed upon. As a result, the most out-of-the-box ideas tend to lack votes and end up in the trash heap.

I recently read a Harvard Business Review article that promoted a different approach. Instead of coming up with random ideas on the fly, the approach is to spend time garnering support with individuals from a variety of functional areas prior to submission of the idea. Feedback is incorporated and the idea is able to develop more fully. Only once it’s gone through some development is an idea submitted for review by executive decision makers.

How different would these strategy brainstorming sessions be if the ideas had some development before they were suggested? Of course, radical ideas that cause transformational change will still meet resistance from all who benefit from the status quo, particularly when those revolutionary ideas are, almost by their nature, not likely to produce immediate financial results. This is the primary issue address by Clayton M. Christensen in his excellent book, The Innovator’s Dilemma. Christensen advocates creating entirely separate groups or even funding new start-up companies as a way to incubate these new strategies while they develop. This incubation approach is much the way many e-commerce organizations got their start, and I think it worked in many ways. Of course, now the new dilemma is how to bring it all back together with the parent companies. (Sigh) Nothing’s easy.

I hope more companies will follow Best Buy’s and Starbucks’ leads in opening their brands to customer ideas and public feedback. I look forward to the many great ideas I’m sure will come from it. I hope also that we can all find some techniques to deliver some really great revolutionary ideas to keep our companies vibrant and relevant for a long time to come.

What do you think? Do you have any great brainstorming techniques to share? Have you seen new ideas come to life in your company?