Experience Optimization In Uncertain Times

Hi Utkarsh, how’s it going?

Utkarsh:

Everything is going great. I hope you’re maintaining social distancing and staying put at your place.

Ashwin:

I have not stepped out of my house. I’m doing good, I think.

Utkarsh:

Amazing. Today, we’ll be discussing the importance of experience optimization in an uncertain time. And, during this presentation, we’ll be discussing, various ways in which businesses can sustain in these tough times we’ll be covering some of the VWO examples, like, what our customers are doing, to stay relevant, or what time of test or optimization practices they are following here during the during the COVID 19 situation. How are they ensuring that they don’t have the absolute amount of business continuity? And apart from that, we’ll be covering a little bit about how businesses who are kind of facing the heat in the summer situation that, you know, how they can basically allocate resources, plan better in terms of ensuring business continuity.

And what kind of value can they offer to their customers with every transaction they come with that happens on their platform or website? So, before starting the conversation, I just wanna mention that this is a recorded session. And we’ll be sharing the recording with everybody who has registered for this session. So, no need to take note, we’ll be sharing it at the end of the presentation. Apart from that, if you have any questions during the session, You can ask us, at any time.

We’ll be taking them at the end of the session in the Q&A section, the section which we have specifically defined for the session. Apart from that, you can also ask questions on Twitter. We’ll also be responding to them over there. Alright. Let’s begin.

Ashwin:

Awesome.

Utkarsh:

I think most of the people who are attending today must have already heard a lot about what’s been happening around COVID-19 and what kind of business impact there has been around this situation, which we have recently brought up, due to the pandemic. I was in the conversation with a lot of customers in terms of how their business has been impacted. A few of them reached out in terms of what we can do to offer them in terms of support and all sorts of those things. So, just before we kind of understand what these businesses are doing, let’s quickly understand what different situations these businesses are in.

So, this is one report we pulled out from the Business Outlook Survey, which states that about 15% of businesses have seen a positive impact. And when I say positive impact, it means that they have seen growth. They have driven profits. You must have been hearing a lot about Zoom and other SaaS businesses who have made money or have driven their businesses in a short time. But in the other half, there are 67% of businesses who have lost revenue or lost it to a drastic level that they either have to shut down their operations or lay off some good chunk of their employees. So, let’s start the conversation around discussing these 3 business segments.

Ashwin, what’s your take on that? 

Ashwin:

Yeah. I think what’s important is understanding how you have been impacted in this situation. So, certain businesses have been impacted directly. If you’re looking at your funnel, for example, travel industry, travel and hospitality. You know that the people who are coming in, they’re not converting.

And you don’t need to build massive dashboards to really understand that you’ve been directly impacted and you need to figure out how you would navigate this situation going forward. Then as you said, on the other side, there’s been a headwind on certain kinds of businesses. One industry that I could definitely think about is online work collaboration. So, tools like zoom, Google Docs, and stuff like that. The kind of surge in users that you have seen is unprecedented. They have used the situation or this use this situation has helped them to create momentum that’s never been seen before.

But I think there’s this middle ground as well. Where businesses have been impacted, but they’ve not been impacted to the extent as you would see on either side of the spectrum. You know, they have seen their numbers going up and down; they’re not sure what part of their business has been really impacted. And it’s kind of hidden. You know, it’s probably not showing up in the dashboards right now.

Maybe a couple of metrics are going here and there, but you still do not know exactly what kind of impact your business is having. And that’s where you have to kind of go back to the fundamentals. What actions are users taking, why are they taking those actions, and who are the people who are taking those actions?

You have an inherent understanding of these questions, but you just start answering those questions again. Because of unprecedented times, the behavior has changed. It’s weird. It’s different. And you need to capture that.

One thing that would be important for businesses that are not on either end of the spectrum is to really unpack their funnel, unpack the steps that the users are taking, and even reevaluate who the users are, who are coming in at this point of time and understand why they are coming in? So, looking at the data with a different lens and re-evaluating the business.  Once you figure out what parts of your funnel, where people are getting stuck, where people are losing interest, or where people are not able to move forward. That’s where you need to kind of customize your strategy going forward. So, yeah, this data is in line with what I’ve just discussed.

Utkarsh:

That’s great. You mentioned this part where businesses need to look, take a step back, evaluate what has been happening, understand what their customer expectations are, and everything. 

But you also see that 67% of businesses, most of them, are either on the verge of getting out of business or are just having a very tough time in terms of sustaining or just maintaining day-to-day activities. I don’t know what sort of runway they have to maybe exist, let’s say, for a year or 2. 

What would you suggest overall, something like the key pointers for them to do in such a situation, first of all, to ensure there’s this good amount of feedback coming to them to ensure that they reposition or adjust their existing growth strategy. And second, on the perspective of how they allocate resources, or what type of activity they should be doing right now?

Ashwin:

So, there are a lot of layers to that question. I’ll start by understanding if there’s a massive drop in your revenue, you need to understand why there is a massive drop. For example, the travel industry. There’s a temporary change of behavior because you cannot go out. There’s a travel ban out there. If someone is coming onto your website, there’s a new piece of information that they’re looking at. The travel advisories that people have or the countries have, the internal governments have, and you’re looking at this new piece of information, the way you are taking calls, on when you need to travel has completely changed, it needs to be absolutely essential. For either, your personal or professional reasons. And then because this change is temporary, once things go back to normal, it would, you would have people coming back to travel, across the board. So that’s something that’s a behavior that has a temporary pause attached to it.

But there are behaviors for example, like again businesses like WeWork. Now that people have started testing out remote work, this is a forced test of remote work. Where does a business like WeWork stand even after COVID has passed because there’s a different behavior that has kind of been invented because of this situation and how would you tackle that behavior? So, in certain cases, your product-market fit has to be kind of redefined from scratch. And if that is the business that you’re in, and you expect the behavior to be permanent, you need to start preparing for that as well. And, you’ll probably not know, the couple of examples that I’ve taken are still extremes.

Now if you’re right in between, maybe even the behavior of how people go to restaurants and how often they go to restaurants may change. And if that changes, that again, if your business is based on people going out, certainly, if the if this drop in the engagement, or the number of times people go out in a week, how does that impact your business? And that needs to then be understood from a product-market fit. Is your business still viable? If there’s, let’s say, an 80% drop in, that behavior going forward.

So, that needs to be reevaluated. You need to keep on looking at matrices and be optimistic and conservative at the same time. Conservative in the sense that certain behaviors continue even after COVID. What would your business do?

What can your business do right now to make sure that that does not continue? So, one example I would give is this kind of business called ClassPass, which is a networking website in the US that helps you connect with people, over coffee, for professional networking. Now obviously, they would have seen a huge drop in the number of interactions that are happening on the platform. But now they can look at online meetings, probably build on top of Zoom, and kind of reimagine how the product-market fit would happen there. So, you really need to look at behavior.

Keep a close eye on the change of behavior whether it’s temporary or permanent. You know, have some way of understanding that and also be an optimist and a pessimist at the same time to navigate this situation because, you know, it can go in either direction. Maybe once you know, post-COVID, the travel industry will get an insane boom. How would you manage that? You know, are you ready for it? Even if it happens in 1, 2, or 3 years, So, yeah, scenario planning basically to get this right from multiple facets.

Utkarsh:

It’s interesting that you took the example of the restaurant bookings and table bookings because, you know, we see that a lot has been happening from that perspective. Like a lot of businesses, they realize this new expectation that you know, there’s a lockdown situation. People cannot step out. So, most of these businesses have either adapted to the new realities, which is, like, you know, they understand that they cannot, say, deliver or, like, bring people back to the restaurant. They have started maybe, you know, teams around or maybe started supporting social causes.

There was this one marketing campaign, which I was seeing, where there were businesses, who basically book tables like in India, we have businesses like EazyDiners or Zomato doing that. But what they’re doing right now is just to have that engagement with their customers, just to have that their customers are still engaged and are coming back to the platform, and have a good number of active users, they are resorting towards social causes. I see that there’s a lot of good activities happening around, like having hunger hostels where these people are offering meals, to people who have either lost jobs or are below the poverty line and for all of those people and areas. Apart from that, there was another campaign that I saw around if you are going out to a particular restaurant or you like a certain cuisine. I like Mediterranean cuisine a lot, but I know that first of all, Mediterranean food is a niche in the Indian market. And it is very difficult to sustain that as a business. So, a lot of these businesses were working towards supporting these restaurants by maybe, you know, either booking a meal in advance or, like, you know, building experiences which we can redeem, say, 6 months down the line. Because, at some point in time, we know that we’ll be stepping out of our houses. We know we will put an end to all this that we’re experiencing right now. So, they are thinking long term.

They are currently working towards getting more and more users getting that engagement mix and all sorts of things. What did you comment on the strategies between businesses who are adopting along these lines?

Ashwin:

The businesses that you have talked about are looking at this change as a temporary change, and they’re looking to provide value to the end customers in whatever way possible. So, the traffic that is coming into your website or coming onto your app, and this, the users that are coming in, how do you provide value to them as quickly as possible? And if you have to redefine value itself, how do you do that? So if you look at Airbnb, people come in there for new experiences. Obviously, travel is a big part of it, but now since people cannot travel, they have introduced online experiences. So one way of looking at it is, right now, they’re not probably focusing on bookings. What they’re focusing on is engagement on the platform. So when they’re looking to optimize, suddenly the optimization metric has completely changed. They’re looking to provide new value, see how people react to it, and iterate on top of that.

And this new behavior is something that they would like to probably in full learn a lot about right now. And then, once you get this right along with, when things go back to normalcy, it’ll kind of combine with the bookings business and expand Airbnb’s business a lot more than it is right now. The other thing is also looking at what is the purpose, of what are your objectives right now. If you want to have brand awareness at this point, make sure that your brand is out there, people retain your name, they’re reminded of who you are, again and again. So, you begin doing certain activities, like, helping the government, people and the frontline and stuff like that.

That again is a strategy of making sure that this brand recall at the end of the day when this is over. So, understanding the changing objectives, during these uncertain times is important, then how do you optimize for those changed objectives? And maybe you have to keep hold of revenue for a while. So, there’s this whole idea of having potential customers whom you can monetize later on.

So, one of the examples that I’ll give you is, Notion, for example, just recently started with an absolutely free plan for one person to organize their notes online. It’s a no-holds-barred plan. You have access to all the features of the platform. So the idea is to have as many users try out Notion at this point. And if they find value in it, once things go back to normal or even right now if they want to collaborate with the wider team, a certain percentage of these free users would convert into paid customers going forward. So, what they’re doing is they’re building up a pool of potential customers that will start paying them in 6 months or 12 months or 18 months down the line.

And businesses that have very strong cash flows right now can exploit that. You know, they can exploit the situation. For example, in enterprise B2B Businesses, you have people who do not have budgets to run the tools that they want to run, or if they’re not essential according to the business, you have to let them go. At this point, can you figure out these people who are in limbo right now because they don’t have a tool and provide, let’s say, 1-year freeze-free product and services to them, who have left your competitors?

Now that’s something that would come out from having a very strong cash proposition. You first fall you need to be in a position to take that kind of a call. But if you’re able to take that kind of a call, it leads to that increase in potential customers going forward, and you can monetize, at a point when the customers are ready to monetize. And the situation is ready to monetize.

Instead, you can focus on the engagement metrics and figure out how to make sure that these customers realize value as quickly as possible. You’re retaining them through the cycle, and they’re engaging with your products. Once they’re ready and become active, and it comes to monetization, you can convert a decent chunk of it and recover revenue as quickly as possible, once things go back to some sort of normalcy.

Utkarsh:

Alright. So, focusing on acquiring more and more users and ensuring that you invest in them from a long-term perspective is what’s going to be your advice for businesses who are perishing right now or who are trying to just sustain or stay up on their feet. And then let’s quickly talk about the segment where businesses are in a space where we have not seen a drastic change in revenue. And what sort of experience would they be working towards? Would they still rely on whatever has been happening for them because they have not been impacted greatly?

Or do these businesses also should resort to the new expectations, or is there a new expectation for the customers or businesses?

Ashwin:

See, you have goals, right? You have goals on how you want to grow the business. And I think those growth objectives need to be dissected in detail. So, for example, if you have a business that is dependent on referrals, like Loom, where you create a video and a link, then you share that link in the email. Other people look at that link, get exposed to Loom, and obviously want to try it out and see what’s going on. There’s this virality built into the product. So, if you have something like that, and let’s say people are not working or a lot of people have been laid off, that impacts the virality component of your product itself.

So, if you’re looking at the growth targets, let’s say a 4x or 5x increase in the number of people who would have invited others onto the platform, maybe it’s only 1x or 2x or 3x. So, what do you need to do? I’m just giving an example. Maybe with Loom, they’ve seen very high engagement, but in certain cases, what you need to do is really unpack, as I said earlier in the webinar, where is your funnel being impacted? Is it at the acquisition stage? Is it at the nurturing stage? Is it when you’re trying to convert them into customers?

Based on that, you need to figure out your strategy. Right now, for example, if the paid marketing channel is not working for you, and certain channels have completely gone down to 0, then you need to figure out how you’re reallocating budgets, how you’re finding new channels that could work out for you. And that means you need to understand the changing behavior, even if there are new customers coming in. If you keep staring at your dashboard, I think this is the worst time to do that. Dashboards only give you insights because they are lagging  in nature.

What you need to do is talk to your customers and really understand where they’re struggling, what the behavior change is. Even some of our best customers have been able to navigate this situation. They’ve been reacting to understanding the customers from a primary standpoint. So, doing user interviews every day, having your leadership talk to the customers on a daily basis, understanding what is changing behavior, and reacting to it.

I would sum up this point with an example of Domino’s. Domino’s obviously, food business being impacted because of COVID, one of the things they did really well early in the game was understand they would be mistrusted because of COVID. So, they had zero-contact delivery, and the way they marketed it or highlighted it was to realign the trust again with customers. It has worked really well for them.

Understanding what is being impacted and how you react to it would be an important component.

Utkarsh:

Yeah. It’s interesting that you mentioned the reaction part, and how the overall journey of a customer has been impacted. What are the things which the customer is handling at its personal level? Another example which comes to my mind with my recent interaction with customers is how banking and insurance customers are looking into building experiences that, initially, when businesses, especially banks, used to offer personal loans, they used to market it around millennials or people looking to buy their favorite bike or gadgets and all those things when it comes to personal loans.

But with this recent pandemic coming in, a lot of people losing their jobs and all sorts of things happening from a family point of view, most individuals are looking at longevity. Most of these individuals are looking towards securing the future of the family. So, now the overall marketing or the overall experience with these businesses, especially banks and insurance companies, is around how you can take your family’s future, how you can invest from a perspective of education or upscaling yourself because, with more and more people losing jobs, a lot of banks can provide loans on upskilling people so that when all of this is over, they are much better positioned to regain jobs again. So, that’s how banks and insurance companies are positioning their products and services right now.

Talking a little bit about the framework of business continuity, and we did discuss businesses who are operating or reporting very low revenue. Then we discussed businesses who are having business as usual. Let’s quickly talk about businesses who are growing. A lot of businesses feel that this is like their moment, a bubble situation where they might be making a lot of profits right now, but when all of this is over, then things would come back to normal. What is the comment there? Is that something which is going to happen for businesses who are currently making a lot of profit, or do you feel that there’s a tectonic shift in habits of the buyers and the people who have kind of experienced things? 

Ashwin:

If you’re experiencing a watershed moment for your business, getting an insane amount of attention because of the situation, the pessimists, taking the same favorite. If I were a pessimist, I would say this is temporary. Things would go back to normal, or maybe they would go worse. You never know. So, if you’re looking at it from that framework, what you need to do is maximize acquisition at this point of time. Making sure you can grab as many users, as many customers as possible during this time. So, you need to start evaluating if the cost of acquisition at this point of time is a lot lower for your business because of the uncertainty in the situation, how do you maximize that?

Maybe the hurdles in that situation would be pricing. The hurdle in that situation would be the demos that you’re doing with the customer in the B2B space. Any kind of human touch point that delays someone becoming a customer, any kind of factors that delay someone becoming a customer, how do you remove that friction completely from the customer journey and make sure that your customers start using the product as quickly as possible?

One way of looking at it is obviously looking from a very product-led approach where your product is doing the heavy duty of making sure that the customers understand very quickly what the product can do. They realize the value very quickly and get into the habit of using the product more and more. So, understanding that would be important in this situation.

Utkarsh:

Alright. And talking from an experience optimization perspective, you talked about talking to customers and evaluating different parts of the funnel. When you say these things, can you elaborate on what questions or concerns we are looking to address in the customer conversations? What metrics or aspects of your funnel should we be looking into while looking at experience optimization for businesses right now?

Ashwin:

So, as far as the funnel is concerned, the three questions that I mentioned are right at the top. What are the actions that the users are taking on your platform? Why are they taking those actions and who are the people who are taking these actions? You have to answer. These are fundamental questions for your business.

But the fundamentals are being shaken in these uncertain times. So, you need to relook at these three questions. And, you know, once you can understand, who are the customers who are using your product or platform right now or who are interacting or who are even showing interest in the first place? The second part, why are they showing interest? This is where the customer interviews come into the customer interactions and understand the behavior coming into the picture. So, having some sort of mechanism to get on calls with the customers and really understand, what got them interested?

What are they looking for out of this? What made them actually reach out to that product or service? What are they looking to get out of it? What are their apprehensions about converting? How are they looking to evaluate if they want to be a customer or not, and what are their concerns?

You know, if you’re going to be able to understand these basic questions, that’s a great start. And as far as from a growth standpoint, understanding and addressing these concerns would be important. You may not be able to really see this change of behavior on your dashboard straight away, because it’s still adjusting. Unless you have a drastic change, it would not show up on the dashboards directly. So, you need to start understanding this behavior and start reacting to it as quickly as possible.

As far as the funnel is concerned, again, you need to unpack the funnel as much as possible. The different channels that the customers are coming in, how is that customer journey right now? Is it the same part that the users were taking before, or have there been added steps? So, as I talked about in the travel industry, people are going through advisory websites or, looking for that additional information, before they convert. So, if the additional steps that people are taking in the funnel, how do you address that, through the product? Even in Domino’s example, they could understand that people are probably coming in, but they’re not converting, and they’re probably looking at the products, but they’re not adding anything to the cart.

Now if you’re able to play around, maybe after talking with the customers, they understand that there’s a trust issue. So, if they were able to address that, and use that to convert them to the next step. That worked out really well for them. One thing is obviously to understand these changing evaluation criteria, but the other part is obviously changing behavior as well. So, using something like, VWO Insights from that perspective, and understanding how these people are going through these journeys, going through these funnels, visualizing it, and understanding what the major differences in the way people are navigating your product, or your website, would again be a key criteria.

And once you understand these two aspects, That’s where you need to adjust your growth strategy. How would you remove the points of friction? How would you address concerns? If there are new customers coming in, do you need to tweak your messaging, your website, and your product to address that? And, if you have to be cost-effective, what are the parts that you’re removing?

So, this is especially useful in B2B Businesses. There was a slow trend of B2B Businesses becoming product-led but now there’s a huge acceleration in that zone. And it’s not just about making a product free. It’s about making sure people realize the value of your product in a self-survey as quickly as possible. So, if that shift has happened, making sure that you are measuring the right things again would be important.

So, your growth strategy would then also feed into what you’re looking at and how you’re looking at it or how you’re measuring it in this uncertain time.

Utkarsh:

Alright. So, Ashwin, I understood your Domino’s example that you have conversations with the customer. You try to understand what are the areas restricting them to complete the conversion. So, I understand that, you know, people have apprehension around say, ordering a pizza and which could be like, you know, they can get the disease or, like, maybe what’s gonna be the delivery all about and how the food is being cooked and everything. So, I get that.

You can address those challenges and get the conversion. But what do you do in cases of the travel or booking industrie? Even if you address all the challenges, you’re still not getting a conversion. So, what sort of things would they be optimizing for in their experiences?

Ashwin:

So, again, you may have channels that are not working anymore. For example, paid marketing channels probably do not convert at all. And that may have been a big driver before. And even the traffic that is coming in right now, you may have a lot lower traffic than before, but specifically in the travel industry, if the behavior is temporary, the traffic that is coming in, how do you keep them engaged? And I think, from a marketing standpoint, from a content standpoint, the travel industry needs to rethink. And obviously, in certain cases, the cash flows are not there to sustain the staff that people had and they’ve made cuts and streamline their businesses.

But now you are in a situation. You need to keep the users engaged. What kind of campaigns can you run and what kind of marketing can you do? Or what kind of changes can you bring on your product to really keep people engaged? And this may not be directly linked to just bookings itself. Maybe the focus has to go back to engagement once someone is on your website.

How you keep them engaged for the longest time on the website so that there’s some sort of a brand recall. And when the floodgates open, your brand is on top of their mind. You can relook at these strategies, maybe reevaluate what the priorities of the businesses are and look at the situation, reassess the situation from that point of view. And then at the same time, you can also look at what are the different kinds of value you can provide? Is there something else that you can provide to the customer?

So, for example, Zomato is a food delivery app in India. And now they’ve started doing groceries. Because they had the operations figured out. They have the customers, which overlap with the grocery industry. So, they use the skills and the competitive edge that they already had and they use it for a completely different use case.

And it opens up a new market for them. That helps them sustain right now. But once these things normalize, then it’s an addition to the existing business of food. It actually adds to the existing business around food delivery and stuff like that. So, again, reassessment is an important part.

What is important right now? And how that could impact going forward once things go back to normal?

Utkarsh:

Great. It was amazing that you talked about reassessing your business and how you can pivot into, say, complementing businesses or markets with minimalistic effort and investment. This is one example that you mentioned. What could be like a few things that businesses can think about from a contingency plan standpoint and how they should navigate out of this area?

Ashwin:

So, the same thing applies. If you’re thinking about summarizing a lot of the points we talked about, you need to listen to the customer. You may not be really understanding the changing behavior of your customer through the dashboards you have. The numbers are still lagging.

And if you’re not directly impacted at either end of the spectrum, the best way to really understand what’s going on is to talk to your customer, look at their changing behavior, and address that through your growth model or your growth strategy at this point of time. The second part is if you are being positively impacted by this situation, how do you maximize the number of users that get in? And how do you maximize acquisition and retention at point of time of those users and reduce the friction that you would normally have? In B2B Businesses, it’s obviously going product-led. Maybe in B2C Businesses, if you have paid plans, cutting the cost of those paid plans, and making sure as many users can come into the platform and you improve the size of your network as much as possible.

And then you need to again look at reassessing the value that is being delivered and whom is it being delivered to? And you don’t really understand that, you are addressing the changing requirements of value and changing requirements of the customers in the current scenario and really attack that wholeheartedly. And if your previous value does not hold true, what new can you offer to the customers to sustain during this time, that you would have probably not done before?

Utkarsh:

Alright. You mentioned the product-led approach, especially in terms of B2B businesses, to invest in acquiring more users and customers. How does that work for a B2C business or businesses that do not have a free premium plan?

Ashwin:

So, in B2C businesses, they are already in many ways product-led because people go into apps and figure out the value quickly. One app I’ll talk about is called Cult.fit. It’s a fitness app where it connects you to a network of gyms in the city. You can quickly book a time slot even a couple of hours before you want to go and do your workouts. 

Now, they saw 100% of the business model collapsing because of COVID. But what they did was they started with live lessons online. The whole idea was they kept those live lessons free for everyone. They could have just opened it for the members. Instead, they kept the live lessons free for everyone. Now the whole point is okay, fine, we are in a situation where our business has been impacted, but now what if we use a situation to maximize the number of people that get exposed to the idea of Cult.fit. Get exposed to the idea of keeping themselves fit. And once they become the brand that people associate with fitness, once things go back to normal, they’ll see a huge surge in their subscriptions. Because they use this time to build that base in that direction.

So, if you have those kinds of businesses, evaluate if you’re charging, say, $50 or $60 for something. Can you charge 50% less? 70% less? And really maximize acquiring users at a much lower cost. You probably need to look at your CAC, look at your LTV, make these calls, and see if looking at this time as an investment into your acquisition and retention standpoint, and from a potential standpoint, and if you monetize later, what kind of impact does it have on your business? You need to take those calls from that perspective after evaluating those metrics.

Utkarsh:

It was great that you mentioned CAC and the acquisition for businesses like that. Another example that comes to my mind is that if you subscribe to magazines like Bloomberg or The New York Times, The Wired, Magnet, and all that, nowadays, they have started pumping subscriptions at a meager $1 per month. And that’s not, that’s a great way to get more and more people, because most people right now are looking towards building habits and good habits around, you know, maybe staying up-to-date and all sorts of those. So, getting them hooked early on, acquiring more and more users to maybe use the subscription at $1, which is like a silver price for them, and getting that at least for 3 months.

Like, if I talk about the Bloomberg subscription, it’s at like $3 per month for the next 3 months, and then they usually start the regular pricing for your subscription. So, I definitely validate your point on what businesses are trying from B2B around CAC. So talking a little bit about, offering some value in every transaction. Apart from, like, maybe acquiring more and more users at a very low cost, what other values can businesses offer in a whatever transaction? Maybe it may be converting a free trial, or subscribing to one of the services. What other things can businesses do from an experience point of view to basically invest in their long-term goals?

Ashwin:

I think this is the right time to really assess the experience end to end. And look at the funnel from different users that are coming into the business. So, how is an SMB customer behaving differently than an enterprise customer and then in a B2B space? And, can you reimagine the enterprise experience like an SMB experience? That means value delivery being extremely fast. And, what does that mean for the business? You can start doing these anecdotes almost like understanding short term change in behavior through these small changes. And you don’t have to do it on the entire audience. You do it for the small experiments, really trying to understand what are those changes that are happening because of this situation. I would not probably experiment with something that I would want on my website for a couple of years or 3 years because if I experiment let’s say if, you know, across the entire funnel, the behavior has completely changed.

And, what if this behavior is temporary? If this is temporary, then it impacts in the long term, in the negative way. So, what you then need to start doing is look at micro steps in your funnels. Where, you know, things haven’t changed that much and maybe look at getting the most out of that step of the funnel. And, that’s where you need to start unpacking these different aspects.

Again, assessing things as if they are new is an important aspect. And assessing that the right way would be to look at these steps all over again and see where there’s a drop off and see if you can address it right now. I would not look at long term changes. I would look at these short term experiments to really understand what is sticking right on what is not sticking. And based on that, you know, maybe come up with the strategies that we’re talking about.

So, maybe in Domino’s case, it’s trust. Maybe in Cult.fit’s case, it’s keeping them engaged. Maybe, in certain cases, just reducing the friction of pricing. In certain cases, maybe it’s just pausing pricing for a few months. It could be different for different businesses.

You just need to, maybe in certain cases, reevaluate the value proposition altogether that we talked about in the ClassPass scenario. You do things completely differently from that standpoint. Again, reassessing your business is an important activity that you need to do right now and ask the fundamental questions again. And, based on where the gaps are, that’s how you need to start looking at short-term experiments, short-term optimizations to really see what is sticking, what is not sticking, and take the next steps accordingly.

Utkarsh:

Alright. Just to conclude that, you know, we discussed how different businesses, especially ones that are losing revenue, can think about experiences in a much different fashion. Maybe try to allocate and prioritize things more from a customer centric point of view? And then for businesses that are kind of doing well, they still need to invest into understanding the new behavior, the new expectation of their buyers with the kind of move in towards more on the side of sustaining future of their family or or somewhere around that, how they they can kind of think of things, from a long term perspective, is what what we covered today.

In the contingency plan, we talked a lot about the product-led growth and experience in terms of how businesses can use their existing product and experience to ensure that they they can basically invest in their customers or businesses or  in their customers’ prosperity in the future and then bet on, you know, getting that needed revenue with their expecting and especially, you know, doing all that by investing in experiences.

So, with that, I would like to open the session for Q&A. Maybe we can start taking questions. So, for the audience, maybe start writing down questions. I have a question for you – right now, most businesses are saying that we have too little traffic because there are some government restrictions on our business, so we cannot open our restaurants or provide lots of bookings. What would be your advice for these businesses in terms of experimentation?

Like, whether they should, maybe try to test some critical pieces of the website or maybe, all go all drastic with some crazy changes, which are they always thought that, you know, this might not be the right time because they were always too worried about that conversion. What sort of advice would you provide to businesses around experimentation?

Ashwin:

So, this is a complete change in behavior, an upside-down change in behavior. I would not run experimentation from a long-term view, for such kinds of businesses. If you’re seeing drastically low traffic, or you’re seeing the behavior completely change at certain steps of your funnel, I would be apprehensive about running long-term experiments. Let’s say, a particular feature or changing something at the bottom of the funnel that would probably be something that I would like to keep for a couple of years. I would not do that. I would look at it from the perspective of understanding the changing behavior right now, and reacting to it as quickly as possible. So I would probably look at experimentation from the perspective of the traffic that is coming in, how do I retain that traffic as much as possible, or what can I learn about that particular traffic through the process of experimentation? Keep it short-term. Keep the learnings to this scenario. This changing time, and not long term, if, you know, your business is impacted by this significantly.

Utkarsh:

Alright. We are getting one question from Niobta. Niobta wants to know besides surveys and dashboard, what can be a way to understand customer mentality of changing habits or say why they are visiting us?

Ashwin:

Yeah. So, one of the things that some customers have done really well is to actually talk to the customers directly. If there was a right time to talk to your customers directly, this is it. Any of your top customers based on past behavior who have come back to your product again and again, maybe reach out to them. 

This is the time to reach out and really figure out what’s going on, what they are struggling with, what has changed, and have these samples from your most important segments—may be high, medium, and low usage. You can look at these three tiers in your most important segments. And then you can also look at the new segments that have come into the picture. Once you’re looking at your analytics dashboard and you see, let’s say, someone from a new country or a new industry coming in and interacting with your product, maybe they’re not converting right now, but reach out to them. Find a sample size of, let’s say, four or five people in that segment and start talking to them.

It’s really about getting them on calls and talking to them one-on-one. It always works well when you want to scale your free time, but you need to be more granular at this point because it’s a drastic change. When you’re looking to get into drastic change, it’s important to really listen to the customers. Going back to the most basic way of understanding the customer is important, and then you accentuate this with the behavior that these customers are showing on the website. Look at the visitor recordings, look at their heat maps, and compare it to what they were doing a couple of months ago.

You can use that information and accentuate it with the heat map and the visitor recordings. I would use surveys once I have this initial understanding and then want to scale my learnings further. That’s where I would run surveys, but I would not run one survey for everyone.

I would have targeted surveys for each of the segments so that I’m not averaging out my learnings. I need to get specific learnings from these specific segments. Based on the understanding from the direct customer interviews and the learnings from the survey, plus the data that I see, I decide the course of action from a growth model standpoint.

Utkarsh:

Alright. We have another question from Joel. Joel wants to know that we have a decent CSAT and NPS score and we don’t know what’s wrong from our experience point of view. So, how could we improve on the experience part to offer a much better NPS and satisfaction score from our customers?

Ashwin:

So I…

Utkarsh:

I think his question is more on the side of the measures of NPS and CSAT, which they are receiving right now. It’s all coming out pretty good, but there has not been much improvement from an experience point of view. So, what can they do there?

Ashwin:

From an experience point of view, I think one of the things you have to do with your NPS and CSAT scores is react to them really, really quickly. At this point in time, since keeping the customer is a big aspect, whatever feedback you’re getting from distractors, you need to figure out an implementation cycle or an action cycle for your business where you incorporate that feedback as quickly as possible.

Since in certain businesses, if you’re seeing a decline in new customers coming in, retaining customers becomes very important. Now is the right time to even have an SOS team that works on the feedback and ensures that the feedback is implemented as quickly as possible, and then you communicate that with the customer. If there are other customers like that, you communicate this to them as well because there’s only a percentage of users who may have been in a position where they thought they would write to you, but there are many people who haven’t written.

If you can look at the behavior pattern of the customers or the people who raised a particular concern, see if there are other people who have shown the same kind of behavior on your product or your website, and proactively reach out to them to let them know that you’ve made these changes. At this point in time, optimizing experience and communicating those optimizations to the customer is just as important. If you have those mechanisms in place, even if it means you have a temporary setup to handle these things at a much faster rate than before, I would go ahead and do that to optimize the experiences right now.

Utkarsh:

Alright. So I don’t see any more questions coming in. With that, I would want to end the session. For the session, we have a quick session giveaway where you can access the VWO Deploy tool, which we have recently launched in the VWO platform. You can basically use it to edit your website, build small experiences, run a pop-up, and a lot more in terms of all your website experience.

Maybe to showcase your preparedness with COVID-19, if you want to make an update on that, simply do that using VWO Deploy without requiring the involvement of your IT team. Do check that out. And with that, I would want to end the session. Thank you, audience, for attending it.

Thank you, Ashwin, for being a part of the session and giving us great insights. Thank you. Thanks a lot. 

Ashwin:

Thanks! Take care. Bye.

Utkarsh:

Alright. Bye bye. 

Ashwin:

Bye.