During a recession, businesses look for ways to streamline, cut back and maximise what they have. A crucial area to look at is your existing customers.
The end result of optimisation is a better customer journey where people get what they want in the way they want it, meaning more likelihood to come back and recommend to others. Doubling down on retention speaks for itself…
- A 2% increase in customer retention is the same to profits as cutting costs by 10%
- Loyal customers spend 67% more than new ones
- 89% see customer experience as a key factor in driving customer loyalty and retention
- Existing customers are 50% more likely to try new products
While investment in customer acquisition is essential, by improving retention you reduce the urgent need and cost to acquire large volumes of people to generate revenue; slowing down the flow of water from a leaky bucket, so to speak.
Here are 4 simple, quick steps to get started…
1. Review your experience and define problem areas
We get a lot of clients coming to us saying: ‘I don’t know what’s wrong, but I need to improve my CX’. That can feel like a huge, intimidating task to tackle but it doesn’t have to be that way. You don’t need to boil the ocean and fix your end-to-end journey in one go. It’s a process.
You can run different types of assessments to identify your biggest problem areas:
- Conduct a heuristics evaluation of your site, app or offline experience, likely run by a User Experience specialist. This should look across key stages of the customer journey: consideration, evaluation, purchase, product usage & ownership and re-purchase.
- Run qualitative research with customers to understand the points of frustration or challenges they have when using your site, app or offline experience. This is actually a really important step because if you jump straight into A/B testing or forms of quantifiable data, you’ll know what your customers are doing but not why
they’re doing it. And this will restrict your ability to come up with effective solutions. This is then used to validate the heuristics findings & recommendations.
- Look at data and analytics, to understand current performance across metrics like: bounce rate, average time on website or page, number of views, number of visits, total conversions etc.
If you don’t have the capability to conduct a heuristics evaluation, qualitative research or the people to surface the relevant data & analytics from your reporting suite, agency support can be sourced; either specialist agencies in each respective area or a cross-functional agency. VML Commerce offers all three as part of an integrated offering.
2. Define your Optimisation approach and set goals to align
Review your problem areas and discuss possible solutions to improve them. Depending on the volume of things you discover, you may need to prioritise, shortlisting those that you consider high priority. You can prioritise according to:
- Potential (value to customer)
- Importance (value to business)
- Ease (effort, cost, complexity to implement)
Once you have your prioritised list, set clear goals and outcomes that you can measure. OKR (‘Objectives and Key Results’) is an effective goal-setting framework that helps communicate what you want to accomplish and the milestones you need to meet in order to accomplish it. Miro offers a helpful OKR planning template here.
3. Review team & process
Optimisation solutions can be very far-reaching and require input from different teams to execute. It may well be that you need to make changes to UI design and front-end code, TOV, or SEO; product images or offers may need to be tweaked with Trading teams, Fulfilment & Logistics may need to be adapted, Operations may need to create new processes. As such, you need to allocate the right resources to help you implement these changes.
This is where having really clear evidence, objectives and desired outcomes can help when interacting with different teams.
Likewise, the gold standard of Optimisation is that you have an established, cyclical process:
- Define desired outcomes
- Define current state
- Identify gaps
- Select focus areas
- Implement
- Evaluate & adapt
Over time, as you start to scale your Optimisation capability, look to embed this process cross-functionally, holding relevant teams to account, seeing this process through end-to-end and facilitating a culture of experimentation.
4. Implement, measure, analyse, adapt
Hit the big red button! Roll-out your designed solutions, targeting high priority problem areas. You can monitor performance in one of two ways: qualitatively through customer research, testing new solutions with customers to collect feedback or quantitatively using A/B Testing (CRO) to measure more exact conversion rate change.
Ask yourself:
- How much did it affect allocated objectives?
- Did any of the KPIs see a notable increase?
- How much did it positively impact conversion rate?
- How much did it affect revenue?
Based on what you see, either repeat the same test with some alterations based on what you’ve learned and to help you get to your desired outcome or move onto the next focus area. Remember to share and circulate results or positive uplift to illustrate the value of ongoing experience optimisation – evidence is power!
