Is Your Customer Experience Actually Built for Your Customer?

Chris Andrew:

Yeah. Well, thanks for coming on and, listening to us. I’m Chris from 10xl. We’re a New Zealand-based e-commerce marketing agency. We’ve got clients focused on industries, like health care, supplements, beauty skin care, fitness, and sport.

And also joined by, Cole, a very smart man from NeuroSpot, but he’ll tell you a bit more about his role shortly. What we’re here today is to tell you about the ins and outs of how to build a great customer experience, specifically online, but a lot of the principles will also apply to omnichannel as well. So, yeah, take it away.

Cole Armstrong:

Yeah. Thanks, Chris. My name’s Cole Armstrong and I’m the Managing Director of Behavioral Insights and Strategy agency NeuroSpot. Now, at NeuroSpot, our role is to work with brands and find out what it takes to build out experiences that change people’s behavior. So gonna hear a lot.

You’re gonna hear that word behavior come up again and again today. Now we apply very scientifically using the frameworks from the world’s psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics. We’ve been fortunate to work with clients across a range of sectors. Some of our recent clients include New Zealand brands such as Countdown of a Warehouse, Southern Cross Travel, AA Insurance, Trust Power, and many others. So, it’s a very exciting area, and, I’m really pleased to be able to talk to you about the topic today. 

The point we emphasized is that good businesses, both those operating online and those operating in the real world are good human businesses. You know, these are businesses built around how people actually operate, how they make decisions. And whether this is for purposeful design, which I hope, or through, shared good luck, which, and some of this is probably the case. So they’ve got a strong alignment with the psychology of real people, how we make decisions.

So there’s a bit of a distinction here, that underlies many of the features that are lauded by mixed brands such as Netflix and Uber. You know, for example, how Netflix serves up, a range of titles, and amongst the 4000 plus movie and documentary sets that they have on their New Zealand site. Or Uber in terms of giving people certainty around pricing where the car is located. Now the idea is that the technology is an expression of how users make this decision. And this applies equally to some of the best practices, which are that you’ll come up on your screen very shortly, Chris. For many of the best practice conventions such as 1 click ordering or guest checkout.

You know, well, many of us on this call might get excited about this, about these from a technology or a solution standpoint. For the person on the other end and I’m sure all of you have been sitting there on the other end. It’s not so much a technology that excites, but the fact that it really you know, it naturally fits with the mind of a user, and it fits with a mindset or view at that point. So there’s a psychological insight, which is sitting behind that. But this is where I think things get interesting.

We talked about Uber, and we’ve talked about Netflix. We could talk about the likes of Amazon or many others. These are principles that are not just relevant to big, multinational, technology firms. These, ideas and concepts, which we’ve applied to smaller organizations as well. So if there’s anybody who’s kind of first time you’ve come across some of these ideas, I’d say, listen out for the process, more than some of the individual solutions. And if you don’t if you have an interest in us, feel free to reach out after the presentation. 

Chris:

Some great examples there, Cole. I particularly like the bolt example because it’s quite accessible as well. Like, it doesn’t cost a huge amount of money to get access to that real streamlined checkout experience, which, now, otherwise, you’d need to be on something like Shopify to get good access. So, yeah, it’s a really good example of an active user experience. So, the next section is just talking about what are the key steps.

If we boil it down into just three basic parts, it’s how to get a more effective customer experience going on in your organization, understanding the customer decision-making process, and doing the research to understand what is that buyer journey like. And then how do we tweak it? How do we change it to meet their needs a little bit better? And then the road to delivering that as well.

That’s the hard part. Right? Gotta get a good dose of creativity and good digital design thrown into the mix. And, you know, also the ability to properly test ideas, not everything you’re gonna try is gonna pan out. And this final point is important.

You know, a good idea is simply that an idea until it’s proven to the wider world. So that’s where kind of platforms like VWO and other A/B testing tools come in to make sure you’re confident to make changes and grow sustainably and progressively. Right? And there are no prizes for ideas that just sound good. You want ideas that deliver results as big as possible ideally.

That’s the philosophy behind 10 XL as well. Cool. So the next section just loops back to your earlier point, Cole, around, what good checkout experiences are there these days, and I think Shopify really does set the gold standard here for, a high checkouts-to-order conversion rate. It drives sales. It doesn’t. That’s why they’ve been pushing it for a long time. 

As opposed to that, guest checkout, one-click checkout, that approach works extremely well, not just, you know, across the board, but specifically a mobile as well where people smash all this detail into these tiny little phones, you wanna make that process as easy as possible. So when it comes down to designing for your customers, it is about designing for, you know, what limitations they’re working in, as they’re living a busy life. You know, often on the go, they don’t have much time. So, solving for that is a really big deal. When Shopify tested this, they found a massive 1.7 times uplift and just the checkout conversion rate across all devices. But, you know, the numbers got even data on mobile. It was more, 1.9. So, it’s quite interesting, right? That’s baked in out of the box with like a Shopify experience, but you can always bolt something like that onto your e-commerce store with, you know, something like bold.

If you don’t run on the Shopify stack, what we’re saying here is to test the different approaches. Right? Because there’s trade-offs and those checkouts. You know, you are streamlining and making people go through quite quickly. Most of the time it’s gonna work out with the different ways that you can implement and different technologies that you can use.

So we’re saying test and learn. Let’s see what works best for you. Think you’ll find though that all of the customers are shopping, browsing, and buying on their mobile devices. So that’s, a really important experience to get right. That kind of leads on to this next section, right, this next part.

Cole:

Yeah. So we’re gonna bring it back to, a few basic principles, which hopefully you can take away and we can give you a little bit of a better understanding of how people actually make decisions. And first thing to say is that what we have got to talk about is how all people, all humans make decisions. Now there will be differences in context and so on, but that’s where testing, becomes super important. But, I mean, the principles underlying this, are kind of universal.

So one thing to say is that no matter whether you’re talking about users, customers, scriveners, donors, taxpayers, or, the like, whatever description you use, the person sitting behind that hasn’t changed. It’s just a contact and the purpose and therefore the principles that we’re talking about are just as relevant, and I’m sure you could appreciate that from your own life. Now, going back to you as a professional and you as a design, you know, designing an experience, that we’re trying to influence how to engage with, whatever you’re trying to do is making a lot of decisions. They’re being flooded with a lot of information. More information than we can, than we’re able to process. And even if we do process it, a lot is going on. So it’s estimated that we’re making, 35,000 decisions per day, which is, I think that my maths is correct. It’s about 23 micro-decisions per minute. So that’s interesting.

That shows that a lot is going on underneath the surface itself. What that means is people have a finite level of attention. They’ve got a finite ability to process your information. They’ve got a finite amount of cognitive bandwidth. To make these 35 cars in the business. And so our brain has actually evolved.

It’s not something that’s just emerged in 2022, I remember. You know, the creation of engineers and so on. This is something that our brains evolved to do, many thousands or 1000 years ago. And what it does is it operates using a range of mutual shortcuts, or heuristics as there’s another term of psychology. And that helps us make quick decisions that are appropriate for the information at hand that work in most situations.

Including when we’re trying to buy something online or trying to find information. So to give you an example, if most of my friends are buying Allbirds shoes or they’ve got an iPhone, I would not need to engage, actively engage as much, with a feature set. The cost was competitive, competitive options. My brain might actually take that on board and say, well, if people like me are using these items, it’s probably a right for someone like me. In other words, this is social proof. And what that means, is that for Albirds or Apple, actually the opportunity to sell to me is that much easier.

It’s not guaranteed, but it makes it easier. I think that’s quite an ingenious approach. This is the way we’re thinking. But now, it seems we have hit the road because we actually need to be able to apply this to a real situation in terms of designing an experience. It’s kind of 2, 2 frameworks that I find are particularly useful. So if we’re thinking about a digital journey, like the overall journey, the behavioral scientist at Ariali from Duke University talks about it as a quick call. He talks about it in terms of a rocket ship. So something which is kind of heading off towards the moon. So you kinda know where it’s going. But you need to account for, you need to give it fuel to keep it going, you also need to account for friction and gravity because that might stop you from reaching a destination.

In terms of a digital experience or a digital journey, you should know the destination where you want your customers or your users to get to. But you also need to be thinking about, well, what can we do to maintain someone’s motivation if you want to keep going? And how can we minimize some of the barriers and friction along the way? But the way to do this is to think about it in terms of micro-moments, and that’s where the second model on the right becomes really useful. It comes from a guy named DJ Fogg from, Stanford University.

And, he talks about the idea that a behavior only occurs when there’s a trigger. Maybe there’s a call to action. Maybe there’s a phrase or an image or something. Something kicks off that behavior, trying But that behavior will only occur if your level of motivation outweighs the level of effort, or ability to format. So, it’s kind of an interesting little point behind this, as I’m a user, I might be highly motivated.

And then, therefore, I might be willing to go through a lot of effort to reach the end. Equally, if I’ve got a small level of motivation, If you make it extra easy, I still might get to where you want me to be. That second model, I think, is really useful. And while we can’t go into too much detail here, worth having a Google because they’re having a read-off because it’s really interesting tips and tricks. So let’s start talking about.

So we’re gonna Chris, I’m not gonna go through, motivation and and inspection or ability, separately. Just talk about a couple of examples. Needless to say, these are examples. There’s a lot more sitting beneath the surface and a lot of other ideas, which you might be able to view yourself, what did you use?

But let’s talk about building motivation to purchase. Well, the first thing we’re going through is the application and use of comparison groups. And I think this is useful because a lot of conversations I tend to have are around some sort of value perception, angle. And I think there are lots of opportunities within a digital situation to think about how this is being used. So, when we’re deciding whether to buy something or when we’re deciding whether something is high or low value, we’re actually making these decisions and a relative thing, in the optional, absolute sense.

And I think Beer is a really good example because I might come in with a new product and you came to have beer, and I might charge you $5 on the shelf alongside space and line red and, I don’t know, Stein Lager. Heineken. And actually, the motivation to purchase might be quite low. I might not sell very much, but flip that on its head, charge $10 for it, and put it on a craft beer shelf, and suddenly, motivation might be quite high. We might sell a lot more of a product.

So thinking of this in a digital situation, be aware that the items you’re selling, we’re not selling these items purely in isolation, we’re selling them in context. So what’s the context? Are there ways that you can structure the comparison group, either against different products, or a good, better, best situation, which might be how you view the image on the right, bottom right, or in terms of the category that it is pairing with? Sometimes it’s a very simple solution to, increase people’s motivation. The second example would go through. It’s around immersive drivers. And I feel like when I talk to people, this is something that we kind of intuitively get.

But often there’s an overlooked opportunity that might help get your customers or your users to end the journey. So, the x on the left, there’s a bog standard $34 x. And it’s only being sold in terms of its features. On the right, you’ve got this premium x, and there’s a whole story behind this around how they’ve chosen the steel and so on. Now, we’re the price difference. But actually, it’s not that much harder to include some more emotive terms for the 30 fours, like, acts on the left, which might actually increase people’s motivation to continue.

Because ultimately motivation is just a signal to us that there is something important, something that’s useful that has some utility to us. That we might need, and should respond to. And I think if you think about some of the restaurants you’re visiting, you’ll see this, huge variation, and real life. Some people sell you a slab of meat and say at stake, some people will tell you about the providence of it. They can sell it for exact same price.

Chris:

Classic stuff. Yeah, I’ve got another example here, and this one’s quite an interesting one. Again, that to a product page, but for this one, effective journeys come into play a little bit differently when you’re kind of a new brand, because you don’t need to just sell people on buying this particular product SKU, right? A lot of the time, if they’ve never heard of you, they’re not a regular customer, they haven’t bought from you before, there’s a big question of why should I trust you with my money, right?

So the example here is from the brand. So it’s a great example as well. And it’s kind of fun. It’s got a little Mandalorian Grogo on it. But also, they’re not just focused on selling this product per se.

In fact, they even hide the product’s detailed descriptions inside a recording menu and kind of like the imagery, sell the product. But for the most part, when you scroll down further on the page, the content that they have is focused on selling you the brand. Why buy any hoodie from Hoodie? They put great effort into promoting their value proposition, what makes their garments different from everyone else’s, what are the top 6 reasons to buy from them and why trust them, and who else trusts them. And they put a lot more effort into that than most other brands.

And you don’t kind of see this type of example on, say, just like a mass market, huge marketplace because, you know, those merchants try and cram as many skews as possible into the sites and they kinda can’t do justice to the brand storytelling, but, when it comes to building a brand from scratch, you gotta sell people on the products, but ultimately people buy from people, right? They want to know why they should trust you with the money. And, yeah, that brand storytelling is an important part to do even on these product pages even if you have some of that content elsewhere, like, on the homepage, that’s where a lot of people just leave. And I’m kinda here to say that you wanna test some of that here is well below the fold. You can go on their side and check out some more examples of that.

They do a lot of AB testing themselves, and they’ve, yeah, done a really good job on making that journey efficient, but also what really stands out to me in this example is when you scroll down, no matter how far you scroll into that brand storytelling, it’s easy to get back to the product because they’ve got this little sticky add to cart bar that just follows you around. So at the moment you are kind of sold on the brand, you can just hit add to cart and and buy the product. And so that’s kind of a really important follow-up.

Cole:

Sorry. What we’re gonna talk about now is, why there are times when you might not actually want to reduce the friction or you might wanna add a little bit. So I think the first thing I wanna cover is that there’s not just friction, in terms of physical friction. There’s actually cognitive friction as well. And I find that people are often quite willing to talk about how to reduce the time to, complete, a journey or a transaction or reduce the number of physical steps, the number of clicks required to complete, but actually, and then there’s a lot of, I’ve got them.

There are a lot of opportunity lists on the table in terms of making it easier for someone to think. Well, Chris is going to talk about default options very shortly. I think Netflix has quite a nice example here. Whereas somebody who’s coming in, they’ve made it very easy for you to decide which option to choose. Which is convenient enough as their premium option.

That doesn’t mean that you can’t change it, but it just means for somebody who’s proved it’s a little bit easier for them to get to where they need to be. But equally, friction isn’t always a bad thing to talk about. And it’s a Skyscanner, which will come up any moment now. They’ve taken a very different approach. So in this case, a Skyscanner is only a useful site.

If you’re aware of the value that it’s bringing to you, you know, its value is around the fact that it will search for all these other sites to bring you the best options, to bring you different options. And it brings you to give it into one screen for you to search through. But what I’ve done is I’ve slowed down the experience with, say, you know, we’re checking through 12 or 30 providers for my proposed trip to London in a couple of months. It has managed not to tell you about all the airline websites it’s searching through, and it’s deliberately slowing you down so that you’re actually aware of the value it’s bringing you. Clearly, this is something that is working for customers.

Taking a few extra seconds in someone’s life is actually beneficial because in the end, that customer is walking out feeling quite secure and quite content that they’re getting the best, the best options on offer. So friction has been baked into the experience with content.

Chris:

Nice. This is a great example, Cole. I think the last one in this kind of a series of examples is one of it close to home. This one is from Soupy, a kind of local online supermarket, and is just another example of making things easy for your customers. So, back to back to some earlier points.

We’re really about trying to gently guide people to the point of birth, you know, efficiently and as smoothly as possible. We want to do as much of the thinking for them so they can kind of just, breeze through. So one of the ways to do this is just by doing a really good job of presenting some default options, in an e-commerce context, this is kind of like, you know, your popular categories, right, instead of sorting alphabetically sort by what is the most purchased for you, if someone’s gone to the site before browsed, purchased, having options surfaced to them based on that behavior, those needs. It’s all quite standard stuff, right? There’s nothing, nothing groundbreaking, but when you’ve got a massive inventory of 100s and 100s of products the real question comes down to what do you show users first?

There are so many products you can put on your screen. Right? So, Soupy does a great job of this, but the other thing that they do a good job is at a kind of a brand level talking through the social proofing, why buy from them? You know, when you’re a challenger brand, you’re up against quite established players. You don’t often see this kind of social grouping in, like, say some of the bigger brands out there because they don’t need to, right?

But if you’re a smaller brand, you need to kind of prove your way at every step, right? One way to do that is customer testimonials before you even get to adding products to the basket and checking out. The other way is, leveraging some of that good publicity and putting the logos on your site for where people have heard about it before. It can go a long way through, helping, you know, quell any objections before they get raised, especially when it’s a high-trust transaction. I need to be able to trust that they’re going to deliver on their promise. This is just one of the ways to, you know, settle that before it even becomes an issue.

So one of the next sessions that we wanna talk about, just briefly, is on neurodiversity and inclusion. And, you know, we’re not kinda inserting a slide for the sake of tokenism here. It’s actually quite an important topic to cover if we’re optimizing, especially if you’re kind of a bigger, more well-established brand and you’ve already checked a lot of the basic boxes. Yeah, so one of the key points here is that all your customers are a little bit different. About 10% of the New Zealand population is dyslexic.

But about 20 to 35% of the business owner population, you’ll see, as you’re managing directors, they think quite differently. A lot of them are dyslexic too. If you’re a B2B brand, that’s a huge chunk of your customer base. So, you generally want to make things as easy for your customers as possible, right? And there’s just some, like, real simple usability rules to help give them a better time, right?

Using clean typography. I put this example in here and everything in all caps, but you want to avoid that it’s less readable, right? Don’t underline text, try and align things to the left as much as possible, just have things you know, large enough to read, and don’t cram the site with thousands of words when a few sentences would do and that kind of applies a little bit to the population who is a little bit hard of out of sight, a huge chunk of Australia and New Zealand uses, prescription glasses, and contact lenses.

And you know, maybe they don’t have them on for reading, but, it’s always a bit of a pain someone has to zoom into 150 percent, 200 percent to kind of read the content on your site. So, always make sure that readabilities and, ease is right up there. And you will see improvements in conversion rate for sure from doing some small tweaks to how easy it is to navigate through this content. So just when it comes to actually delivering on some of these concepts we’ve talked about.

That’s all, it’s all well and good at a theory level, but, to actually prioritize and deliver consistently on a good experience, it’s a process. It’s research-heavy.

There’s no small amount of creativity included. Brands who want to deliver in-brand experiences need to look beyond just the short term or how many people make it to check out, how many people purchase, you want repeat customers, right? And so that sometimes means optimizing for more than just a transaction KPI. So, to get that 5-star experience, customers go and want to come back. Right?

So it’s completely about delivery as well. What is in the box? Are they surprised and delighted? Are you over-delivering on that promise? Is it then easy to come back and buy again?

Kind of leads a little bit into the next step, which is, how we design the customer experience framework and how we manage it. There are a bunch of different metrics if you are trying to optimize your customer experience that you’d be looking at. You know, different brands will have different levels of challenges so they’ll be running some of these metrics, as a priority. But pretty much you just pick 1 or 2 and try and focus over an extended time. Right?

So a lot of optimization programs will have a range of work that run for 6 to 12 months and then try and improve some of these key metrics. At the most basic level, you’re gonna be looking at click-through rate, just making sure more people are getting to the right parts of the site and conversion rates, making sure that overall, people are making it to the checkout and buy-in. More mature brands tend to focus on things like revenue and returning on ads spend, but that’s not really the be-all and end-all either, because at the end of the day if you’re not making a profit your margin might be different on different products and you want to take that into account as well. And also, the customer lifetime value is really the key, right? For if some people buy products that are lost leaders, but then go on to, you know, spend thousands with you over the course of the next year or 2, that’s still a really, really valuable thing, and you can optimize it as well. 

So, the next slide is just talking through our assumptions, right? Sometimes analytics data is good and really helpful for us to understand the customer experience. But sometimes it needs to be, you know, drilled into a little meter. You know, one of the examples that we found with Dose and Co was, you know, what the web analytics data was saying was actually not what was really going on.

We had to dig deeper and only through, like, extensive history and the experience do you really kind of find out what is true. Cool. So one last thought to kind of finish up on is the idea that customer experience is never a static thing. It’s always just viewed through the lens of your customer, then those preferences and that perception will change over time, based on what your competitors are doing and just based on what the industry is doing in general.

So your experience does need to change even if it’s optimal for today, it might not be a few months from now. So continuous testing and continued learning might help well establish your brand as can always benefit from testing and learning. So cool. So what have we covered about delivering a customer experience that returns value to all parties, branding, and customers? Well, you know, it starts with an actual understanding of how customers make decisions and to use this knowledge as guardrails for future design choices. You need effective implementation, the right combination of tools and tech, creativity, and good design.

And lastly, a good idea is only that until it’s proven. So you wanna build out the ability and the culture of testing to ensure that only the ideas that work, are retained and everything else is kind of put to the test and discarded if it doesn’t deliver the value that you want. So, that is us for now. Thanks guys.

Muthulakshmi:

So if any of you have any questions, I’m just gonna enable the chat window. I am gonna unmute everybody. So if you want to chat please do. And, there are a couple of more polls as well. Like, I realized that the question that popped up might not be the best.

So we have a couple more questions. I’ll make that available now as well. So please continue asking us anything you would like to ask. Please stick around.

Cole:

Happy to answer any questions for those who are still here. Just while we’re waiting for any questions to come through. I guess the thing to say is that all of these ideas that we’ve talked about are, I mean, by understanding the way that people make decisions, they can set you on a train of sport and a design path, which is more likely to bear fruit. And this is where I think sometimes, you know, new insights, don’t necessarily need to come directly from your customers. If we understand this is how people in general think that can open up a whole another trade of thought.

And that when you pass it across to someone like Chris, means that they can come up with some really great, creative execution, which can then be put into a testing environment. And that’s where I think it’s really quite interesting because it’s where good solutions come from a combination of good insight and good execution. So poor insight can’t be made up by good creativity. You can’t execute something that is poorly designed or poorly thought out in the first place. But equally, if you had, if you don’t have a skill set of creativity to execute a good insight, again, you could end up in a course situation.

Chris:

Reminds me, there’s Sun Sue Court, right? Tactics without strategy. 

Cole:

Yeah. I don’t wanna know.

Chris:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. It’s totally true, though.

You know, I’ve talked to a lot of people who’ve run CRO programs and demise their digital experiences. And, you know, it’s a real mixed bag as to how many tests actually pan out. Like, some people have said, you know, maybe only one out of 3 of the tests have, had statistically significant results. And, yeah, it always surprised me a little bit. But partly that was also because I was coming from an approach of, like, you know, doing robust research first and building a really strong case and trying to test the things that have a lot of data behind them backing them up, and you can usually drag your success rate right up, and have a whole lot more winners identified just by doing that background homework and, leaning on some of these, behavioral economics, insights are key as well.

Goes a long way to help in trying to understand how customers think And, well, generally, oftentimes less is more too. Like, we experiment a lot with, well, why don’t we just delete these parts of the user journey and yeah, find what’s working for customers that way, and that can generate some nuggets of insight in itself. Excellent.

Muthulakshmi:

I think this will be the last question for the polls. And, again, just to reiterate, if any of you have questions, you can drop them in the chat window or you can always reach out to us later as well after the webinar. And you will be getting a recording of the webinar as to this agenda. But do give it a date. It’s like a long video.

So, you know, it will not work. And, that’s about it. From us, for me, at least. Chris, Cole  any, closing remarks?

Chris:

I just like to thank everyone who showed up today. It’s nice seeing you all virtually. It’s not quite the same as a real-life experience, but I think we’ll be stopping by, you know, a few events once they start kicking off again. So it’d be great to see everyone out and about in the real world in the subsequent months.

Cole:

And in the meantime, for anyone who’s got any questions, feel free to reach out to one of us. We’re more than happy to have a chat, and maybe just fill out any of the details, which we’ve had to skip over quite quickly.

Muthulakshmi:

Alright. Great then. Again, thank you so much to everyone for showing up, and staying through it till the very end, and thank you so much, Chris for a great great presentation. I hope to have all of you back soon. Alright?

So thank you. Have a good rest of the day.

Chris:

Cheers. Bye.

Cole:

Bye, everyone.