We just completed a cross-country seminar-series with the great folks from ZAAZ, a leading digital agency with a substantial analytics consulting practice. The title of the events was “Customer Value Optimization” – which is a concept that our two firms have been working on together.
What is Customer Value Optimization, you ask? I won’t get in to much detail here, but it can be summarized as “Using data-driven methods to enhance customer experience, with the ultimate goal of maximizing customer value.” ZAAZ is world-class at helping companies become more data-driven – and using some of ZAAZ’s methods with the right technology for managing the customer experience yields some pretty incredible results.
In each city we went to, we had the privilege of meeting and talking to a wide range of people from diverse companies – ranging from Mom & Pops to the Fortune 50. It was a great experience, the intimate forum enabled some of the participants to “come clean” and admit some of the challenges they face in running an ebusiness with their peers.
Regardless of the industry, size of company, title, or function, there was an impressive amount of consensus around the following points:
- Almost every participant admitted that the customer experience on their site is suboptimal. (Research confirms this)
- People managing sites don’t know enough about what works at what doesn’t – they typically have aggregate statistics, or a small subset of qualitative feedback.
- Most companies don’t know how to pick which aspects of their site to focus on, other than the obvious fires or an executive’s pet projects.
- Everyone says they have lots of data. But, they’re not sure if they have the right data, and they most certainly don’t know how to act on data.
There was a lot of talk about the state of the world we live in, with demanding and empowered customers, expectations of immediate gratification, and competition around every corner. So, everyone seemed to agree that customer experience is core to how businesses thrive online. But it’s hard to know what to do about it, right?
It’s these types of challenges that get me up in the morning, and that inspired us to do these events in the first place. Running a big web site is hard. I’ve done it, and I felt the pain of everyone in the audience at these seminars, and everyone out there doing it now. But there are things that can help – a lot. All of us at ZAAZ and Tealeaf have seen how with the right framework, the chaos of millions of customers zooming around your site (and your competitors’ sites) can be channeled into beautiful insights and attainable goals. Managers and practitioners who are equipped with the right tools (technology and data) and processes (methods and best practices) can become heroes.
At these events, we were fortunate enough to hear from a few of these heroes who have already seen some of these successes. A manager from a multi-billion dollar Telco provider explained how they are successfully keeping customers on the site, and preventing calls into customer service, by collecting data about customer issues at each step of the process funnel – and then prioritizing fixes in real-time. Someone from a major travel portal explained how he has reclaimed millions of dollars in revenue simply by cleaning up confusing instructions on their login screen. These two companies found these opportunities not by hunting and pecking for a “needle in a haystack” – but rather by applying the discipline of focus: using the right tools and processes to identify opportunities, prioritize them, and make improvements FAST.
All buzzwords aside, this is customer value optimization. (See? I’m not even capitalizing it!) The bag of tricks you need to get started with the data-driven processes that enable this type of work is not very intimidating. In fact, the ZAAZ guys can explain it to you very clearly and eloquently, as they did in the seminars. At Tealeaf, our goal is to help you apply an understanding of the customer experience to these processes. The magic happens at the convergence of these two concepts.
If you want to learn more about it, hear additional examples or have questions on how you can get started, check out a free webinar on Wednesday.
Hope you can join us, we'd like to hear about your challenges, solutions and successes.
-- John Berkley
Director of Product Management, Tealeaf