It’s almost always a given that constraints exist on both the time and budget that are available to optimize your customers’ experience. You probably have a long list of issues to address, voices in the room and possibly even competing interests.
Where do you start?
Once you get past the urgent issues, it can be hard to tell what’s most important. I have found that the missing link for most ebusinesses is quantification—without quantifying the business impact of each customer experience issue, you may not prioritize the most important ones. And lack of quantification may even prevent you from addressing some issues at all.
My previous blog entries have talked about best practices that help you to become aware of customer experience issues and to understand why these issues are occurring. In the process of sharing real-world examples of these best practices, I also touched on how you would quantify the impact of a particular issue. This quantification leads to the final best practice I’m going to discuss in this series: prioritize your customer experience issues based on the business impact.
For every issue, you need to be able to answer the following questions:
- When did this issue start?
- How many visitors per day experience it?
- What is the difference in conversion rates (or other key task completion rates) between visitors who experience the issue and those who don’t?
- Given the number of visitors affected, to what losses in sales/profits do these changes in conversion rates translate? In other words, how much business is being lost every day because of this issue?
- How does lost sales/profits compare with other issues? How does it compare with the cost of resolving the problem?
Armed with this knowledge, you can build a clearly quantifiable business case that helps you set customer experience optimization priorities and improve revenue.
Let’s look at an example. Tealeaf customer Art.com generates significant traffic via search engines. Many of these indexed links send a user directly to specific product pages within their web site. However, the inventory on the site is incredibly dynamic, with products constantly going in and out of stock. Because the search engine indices can’t keep up, the first impression many customers get is a “sorry this product is no longer available” message. While reviewing customer sessions in Tealeaf, the user experience team at Art.com saw a number of customers getting this experience. Obviously, this is not the favorable first impression they wanted to impart, but no one really knew the magnitude of the problem.
The team realized that determining the extent of this problem would be very simple using Tealeaf. To their surprise, they found that 15,000 to 20,000 customers per day were seeing this unfriendly message. By reviewing multiple user sessions, seeing their purchase behavior and experiencing the “anti-shopping” experience first hand, it was an easy decision to re prioritize a better solution to this issue. The company immediately focused on a redesign that would give customers a more positive and actionable screen that recommends alternative products even if the original product is currently out of stock.
What are the best practices for quantifying the business impact?
- Once a customer experience problem has been identified, use your customer experience management solution to determine the number of visitors impacted and the impact on conversion rates (or task completion rates) for those visitors.
- Monetize the outcome by using a measure for the average value lost by customers not completing this task (for example the average shopping cart value for a checkout process). The number of customers impacted during a defined time period, the drop in conversion rates based on the issue and the average value for these lost transactions will enable you to calculate the approximate overall loss for a given period of time because of this issue.
For Art.com, this customer experience management best practice was what made it a no-brainer to invest in turning a formerly unfriendly, negative experience into a more positive, pro-shopping experience for its customers. As an additional benefit, Art.com was able to realize a greater return on their SEO/SEM customer acquisition programs. You too will benefit from knowing that you’re investing your resources where they will make the biggest improvements to customer experience.
-- John Dawes, Vice President, Product Management
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