So how do you get one? Start with marketing. Not good enough? Try personalization. Still not getting results? Perhaps you should run a business that is more customer-centric.

Still falling short? Give customer obsession a try.

Customer obsession is an organizing principle that will cut across every department — marketing, sales, IT, service. Align all departments to build and maintain a relationship with the customer that they will find useful.

“I cannot live without you.”

The most well-known use of “customer obsession” appears at the top of Amazon’s 14 Leadership Principles: “Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.”

Customer obsession is a mindset, noted Tony Kavanaugh, CMO of Insightly, the CRM software platform.

What Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was talking about, he said, was “to go above and beyond what people think.” This is about assembling a high-definition picture of the client, based on the data signals they give off when they shop online, then assembling that data and segmenting it to garner insights.

Then comes the next step. “Engage the customer in a way they want,” Kavanaugh said. “Every customer should feel like they are the only customer, even though you have thousands of customers.”

“Trust me.”

This may sound odd, but obsession begins with trust.

“What do I do to earn trust?” asked Chris Jacob, director of product marketing at Salesforce. A recent Salesforce survey shed some light on this. You have to do four things:

1. Explain what improvement the customer gets in exchange for their data (96 percent wanted this).
2. Ask permission to gather their data (favored by 88 percent of respondents).
3. Be transparent on how the data is used (preferred by 91 percent).
4. Give customers control over their data (92 percent liked this).

Customers can opt-in or opt-out of the arrangement, Jacob said.

In a study released last week, Adobe found that consumers will stop buying if a brand “made them uncomfortable.” They will also track and adjust privacy settings to protect their data as they interact with the brand.

The flip side of that coin is personalization. If a brand gets this right, a customer will be more likely to make an unplanned purchase.

“Historically, we looked at [personalization] as a means to an end — higher conversions,” said Kevin Lindsay, director of product marketing for Adobe Experience Manager. Consequently, shift the emphasis from marketing to customer obsession, and the sales will happen, “if we do it well.”

The machine gets personal.

In a customer-obsessed business,  data trust becomes the pivot point between personalization and artificial intelligence. As a result, if customers trust you with their data, you can then use it to personalize later interactions.

No matter how hard working the marketing team can be, it is humanly impossible to keep up with all the work needed to craft a pitch that fits everyone. Artificial intelligence can fill this gap to deliver a better experience, Salesforce’s Jacob explained.

“AI is a concept that no one fully understands how to figure it out,” said Insightly’s Kavanaugh. We should use it to do the routine work that people used to do, freeing them up for higher-value work. For example, AI can “take the blocking and tackling of sales and do it for them, free up sales to build relationships.”

“AI is not in the mainstream yet,” added Adobe’s Lindsay. “There is dabbling and experimentation all over the place and in specific practices.” Despite recent years of practice in AI, businesses are still figuring out what the best practices should be. “There is no playbook yet,” Lindsay said. “I’m not sure there will ever be.”

“We love you, too.”

Customer obsession is a big philosophical change for a company to undertake.

‘“You are making every single employee buy into that,” Lindsay said. However, you can train sales, marketing, and even IT to become customer-obsessed.

Now extend this mindset to customer service.

Let’s face it. Not every purchase is a happy experience. A service may go awry. A product may expire before its warranty does. This gives the customer a bad experience. And they will call customer service seeking a remedy.

Customer service requires humans to turn a bad experience into a good one.

The service community must be able to deliver “first call resolution,” Kavanaugh noted. The same information sales used to close a deal with the customer should be forwarded to the service desk so that the reps know the customer just as well, he explained. Likewise, there should be no wall between pre- and post-sales, he added.

The service rep is just as important to relationship building as sales.

Beware of jealousy!

One tenet of obsession is to ignore the competition so you can focus exclusively on your customer. The sales will come anyway.

None of the experts we talked to were entirely in agreement with this premise.

“We live in an innovative world,” noted Jacob. There will always be a new way to do something, and the customer will probably do it.

For example, smartphones are now a fact of life that marketers must understand to reach the customer. Voice is probably next, Jacob added. As a result, being customer-centric also means adapting to the technology the customer wants.

Similarly, your brand must maintain awareness of competitors who may poach those very customers you are obsessed with.

In conclusion, as much as the customer loves you, if a better deal comes along, “we may not be there,” added Lindsay. To sum up, customer obsession should be a brand’s North Star to steer by. However, there will always be a competitor on the horizon.

The post Customer Obsession: A Necessity appeared first on DMNews.

Children wrote letters, addressed to Santa, telling him what they wanted for Christmas. The elves worked overtime. The toys were loaded on to the sleigh. Then on December 25th, just after midnight, Santa delivered.

Only now, Santa had good reason to worry.

The fulfillment numbers for Christmas, 2018 were a bit “off”. There should have been a three percent increase in Christmas wishes over Christmas, 2017. But the numbers were flat. Now with Christmas 2019 in full swing, the numbers were down by two percent compared to last year.

What was causing this downturn? The Grinch? No. Scrooge? No. Blame Jeff Bezos. Amazon was taking over Christmas.

Analog vs. digital

Like any large consumer goods company, Santa’s Workshop retained outside experts to figure out what was going wrong. (The firm’s name begins with McK and ends in Y, but we won’t divulge its identity.) There were several reasons why Santa was losing customers.

The first problem was input. Kids had to write a letter—on paper—and send it via “snail mail” to the North Pole. Okay, the U.S. Postal Service was nice enough to ignore the lack of a zip code, or a postage stamp, and delivered the mail anyway.

That approach was losing out to the smartphone. Users were going directly to Amazon, in fact about 149 million per month.  Just search, point, click, and go.

Things get worse from there. About 89 percent of online shoppers surveyed said they shopped at Amazon at least once a month. Cyber Monday, Prime Day and Amazon Prime memberships were entrenching consumer habits.

Christmas? It only comes once a year.

Trust, but verify

The next issue was a bit more subtle. Children today, who are digital natives, stopped believing in Santa at an average age of eight years old. Thanks to a good education in science, math and geography, they become skeptical over whether Santa can jam that much stuff into one sleigh and make all those deliveries in one night. Amazon has Prime Delivery, which can get you a package in two days, and an army of about 750,000 minions to make it happen. (Santa will not disclose how many elves are in his work force.)

Worse, those digitally native kids have probably ordered something from Amazon, or put something on an Amazon wish list, via that smartphone. That consistent performance, delivered over the course of a year, can reinforce belief.

As for going to a department store and sitting on Santa’s knee, those digitally native kids can make the same wish via Alexa and order direct from Amazon. Santa had no way of matching that.

Clearly this problem had a CRM dimension. Santa was using his CRM to move leads to deliveries. What he really needed to do was to nurture customer relationships. Merely believing Santa was real was not good enough.

Be the good guy

The consultant’s report painted a bleak picture, but there was one ray of sunshine. Santa was nicer than Amazon. He didn’t use his data to deliver counterfeit copies of brand name products. Nor was Santa being investigated by the European Union for aggregating data provided by children to promote his own goods. Santa doesn’t cheat. Brands could trust this channel of distribution.

Most importantly, Santa was still a jolly good fellow. He didn’t pal around with Hollywood celebrities and he’s still married to his first wife. People could still relate to Santa, even if they held him in the same regard as the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. 

People seek ethical products made without exploitation. The elves in the workshop were not exploited, unlike Amazon warehouse workers. The reindeer who pulled the sleigh had spacious stables, well-stocked with good feed. This was a carbon-neutral solution, compared to all those planes and delivery trucks burning fossil fuels, all worsening climate change.

With Amazon having a lock on half of all online sales, it’s nice to have an alternative.

The post Will Amazon Take Over Christmas? appeared first on DMNews.

Brands make a big fuss about trying to be customer centric. But they see it as a process. Start at the act of buying, then walk your way back through all your company’s departments and routines, eliminating anything that creates inconvenience or confusion.  

Or you can figure out why the customer buys something, then tailor your process to refit your sale to suit the customer. This is where brands can use consumer psychology to make the sale. It sounds crazy — until you think about it.  

Visibility into the customer journey

Customers are, after all, on the brand radar. Digital connections mean tracking everything the shopper does. Analyze the data and you know what is happening (see “Where Did That Customer Go?“).  “We have the ability to sight the pain points. We can tell you what the experiences are,” said Paul Vaillancourt, SVP of client success and operational excellence at BigCommerce.  

The BigCommerce platform can track browsing, checkouts and shopping cart abandonment. It can build a simulation of an online store, using that to identify process problems that turn off customers. In-house experts can help online merchants improve search engine optimization and web site design, and provide technical support, Vaillancourt explained. 

Yes, all these things can improve an online store and enhance the customer experience, and make a company more customer-centric. Yet “I don’t claim to be a customer psychologist,” Vaillancourt said. “In 2019 consumers tell you what they want and what they stand for constantly. The real challenge for organizations is taking meaning from social and digital data and keeping current with customer expectations.” added Kellan Terry, senior comms manager at Brandwatch. “Brands need to participate and listen to these conversations and then self-reflect about how they are meeting or failing consumer expectations. If brands are failing, these conversations will serve them in righting the ship.” he said.  

Purpose comes before process 

We all know how people shop. Harder to know is why they shop. Answer this question, and you can give the shopper what they want, or better yet, more. If the marketer can create that “hot state” where the customer is more emotional, they may be more likely to buy — and have a good experience.

“We all have goals,” said Will Leach, CEO of Triggerpoint, the behavioral research and design consultancy. You can go online to buy a pair of shoes. Or you can buy a pair of shoes to be recognized as the cool kid on the block. If you can communicate that motivation, then the customer will “buy shoes for an emotional reason,” Leach said. “We’re not wholly aware of what we want.” When people make an emotional purchase, they come up with a reason afterwards.

Getting to “why” via a focus group is the least effective method. Instead, ask questions of the shopper in context. “If you want to find out more about why someone chose a particular brand of breakfast cereal, ask them when they are in the kitchen,” Leach reasoned. You can even ask them via their smartphone during breakfast. What you are asking the shopper may not be directly associated with the item they bought. You may show them a series of pictures and ask them to describe their feelings. Or you can ask them how they would react if a superhero came out of the sky and offered them the product. While these approaches sound off-base, they do reveal the psychology and the motivation of the individual, Leach said.  

Social media can also influence a purchase decision. “Social media is all about social proof,” Leach observed. “Social proof is a trick we use to make decisions easier to do if others do it.” Likes and influencers play a role in creating those “in” groups. “We all want to find our tribe. Only through social proof do we associate with a tribe.” he explained. 

Go deeper

“Go deeper,” said Kit Yarrow, consumer psychologist and author of Decoding the New Consumer Mind. Yarrow’s aim is to understand how people receive information about a product and how they connect with a company. That inquiry will start with data. Yarrow will look for initial insights in various reports. Once armed with data, Yarrow will then shift to interviews. That will involve spending time with consumers, watching them shop and asking them “why”? 

“To me, you sort of start with empathy and understanding being in the consumer’s life,” Yarrow said. “The people I interview understand I am there to understand their lives relative to a brand or a category.”

Those interviews uncover how a brand can deliver some satisfaction or satisfy some desire.  They can also uncover some customer dissatisfaction with a product that the company can then correct, providing the “customer centric” solution, Yarrow explained. 

Even something as routine as buying chicken for dinner can have some underlying motivation. For example, a shopper may prefer hormone-free non-GMO chicken. Studies show that GMO (genetically modified organism) is pretty benign when compared with non-GMO food, Yarrow noted. But for some people, GMO can be a deal breaker. Yarrow pointed out that this buy decision can be emotional. Is the shopper gravitating towards pride? Feelings of superiority? Being a non-conformist? Find the right reason and you can craft your pitch to press the shopper’s emotional button–and make a sale. Just keep asking “why” to find out where that motivational button is.

The post Putting the Customer at the Center appeared first on DMNews.

“It’s still the channel consumers just trust,” said Bruce Swann, group product marketing manager at Adobe. “It’s the ‘steady Eddy’ channel.”

While e-mail gets a lot of personal attention from users, they are becoming more cagey about how often they use it. In 2016, people spent 256 minutes per day checking work email, and 209 minutes per day checking personal email.  In 2019, those numbers went down — to 209 minutes a day for work email, 143 minutes a day for personal e-mail.

Decreased attention to email sets a challenge for brands

Yes, email usage, while broad, has narrowed. This forces brands to be more precise about how they reach consumers. Even here, some brands still miss the mark. About a quarter of all emails are interesting enough to open, according to the study. 

Swann listed the reasons: Lack of personalization, lack of alignment between the offer and the personal interest of the recipient (for example, the offer is irrelevant or the product was already purchased). Forty-three percent complain that they received the pitched e-mail too often. Even misspelling the name of the recipient is a deal breaker, according to one-third of the respondents.

“Email marketers have work to do getting the send time right,” Swann said. They also have more work to do understanding their customers, understanding when is the right time to send an offer and anticipate when they will open the e-mail. 

Marketers will have to combine analytics and testing to surface the reasons why their messages are missing their mark, Swann said. Marketers can also use techniques from contextual e-mail marketing to change the offer to maintain relevancy, depending on the time and place the e-mail is opened, he added. 

Add a human element

While marketers sometimes fumble on personalization, there are ways to get it right. Adding a human element — so that the email and not the brand is speaking to the consumer — is helpful to this end, Swann noted. For example, if one was shopping for a family ski vacation package, the email pitch might include a review written by a family about the package. 

“Email will be front and center, but still part of the cross-channel puzzle,” Swann observed. It still has a role to play, in conjunction with other channels like direct mail, chat and messaging apps. “Brands can increase the likelihood of engaging the consumer if they can reach them via two or more channels,” he noted.

The post New Adobe Study Confirms Email is Still Important appeared first on DMNews.

It could be the result of sloppy customer service, or an errant manager calling the cops in a bad case of racial profiling, or even a second amendment zealot walking into a store carrying a gun.

Sometimes the product fails. Sometimes it’s a tragic and unforeseeable catastrophe. 

Brands can’t stop bad news. But as we’ve said before, firms can implement a strategy for immediate response, to mitigate brand damage as the crisis unfolds — but in fact that’s not enough. Brands must work on their defenses before disaster strikes, then use that preparation as a base for rebuilding brand reputation after the bad news passes. Do that right in the weeks and months following the catastrophe, and you can help make sure the bad news never outweighs the good in the next Google search. 

First, the Storm 

Brand defense begins with brand reputation.  “Look at your web presence as a whole,” said John Gottschall, CEO at the Internet reputation specialists Neumann Paige. “The online brand is what the first page of a Google search result looks like. That is your online reputation.”  

If the brand has already built a major presence on the web, then bad news is likely to feature at least as prominently as good when Google returns a search result. If a web presence is lacking, bad news fills the vacuum.  

Spotting
bad news early helps. “Every brand should consider implementing brand monitoring tools [like Meltwater or Brandwatch], to identify a crisis at its earliest stage.” said Anthony Will, CEO and co-founder at Reputation Resolutions. “By getting ahead of the narrative shaped by third parties, brands can have a strong influence on the public’s perceptions of the crisis at hand.” 

Crisis management is the key. Eric Schiffer, CEO of Reputation Management Consultants, described the process this way:

• Determine the cause of the problem
• Find out the facts, and know if the problem is being driven by your company or others
• If the problem starts with you, fix it. Then communicate the benefits to begin the trust building process for your brand.  

“[The] first step is to determine the facts behind the hit. You must deal with facts.” Schiffer continued. Credibility is gained by being transparent and sharing the facts, because if something is true, it cannot be debunked, he explained. 

Then, the flood 

If the crisis is a flood, then Google is the floodplain. Bad news will fill a lot of space in any Google search. But in the weeks that follow, one can take steps to drain the floodwaters and rebuild the brand. That means getting the bad news off of the first page Google serves up.  

To be clear, you can’t outfox Google, but you can work with Google — if you understand how Google works. 

Google’s search algorithm is multi-factored, taking into account your own web site, news, reviews, links from other sources, user intent, user satisfaction. A search of your web site will return a variety of hits from a gamut of sources. No one but Google knows how many factors are modeled in its search algorithm. Digital marketing vendor Blue Corona estimates about 200, but even then, the algorithm is updated periodically.  

“What you do is, you create content about the brand, and promote that content until it rises to the first page,”  Gottschall said. About 95 percent of the public never looks beyond the first page of a Google search, so pushing bad news off of that first page removes  95 percent of the views,  Gottschall observed. 

Doing this will require sound content strategy, and a team of writers to generate positive content, Will added. Then you need a PR team that can place those articles with sources Google ranks as credible. Follow that with an SEO team that knows how to rank new and existing content sustainably, he added. 

“Generally, a mix of press releases, social sites (web 2.0 properties), interviews, guest posts, and articles published on credible web properties will be enough to take control over the first page of Google and suppress the negative news.” Will said.  

“The crisis is date-stamped,” Schiffer said. “It’s like a storm. At some point, the weather will change.” 

Drying Out 

“Companies must have a crisis communications and management plan in place. If a crisis is not handled appropriately, it can have catastrophic effects on the company’s brand image and ability to generate new business.” Will said. “We recommend clients create a plan involving all relevant internal stakeholders, practice the plan, listen to their customers, and online chatter, and be ready to implement the plan in the event of a crisis.” Of
course, brand defense and rescue will take up budget, time and resources. The cost of not doing being prepared, however, can be consequential.  

Gottschall‘s warning was more stark. “By 2022, all brands must manage their online reputations.” Those that don’t will be out of business, he added.

The post How Brands Should Prepare For and Respond to PR Crises appeared first on DMNews.

Neuromarketing is how to “figure that out”. While part of our brain is conscious and rational, another part is working without our being aware of it. Yes: sight, smell, hearing, touch and taste — knowingly cataloging those sensations, we make sense of our world. But the part underneath is also receiving stimuli, unconsciously, intuitively, sorting out the same inputs…and influencing our purchases. What if you can sway someone at this level? 

There are two ways marketers can dig into this. You can use biometrics: measuring heartbeats, brain waves and eyeball movements to see what material makes an impression on the subject. Or you can craft surveys that can trigger associations in the unconscious minds of consumers, then compile and analyze those replies. Either way, the neuromarketer is gathering data to gain an insight.

“There is a lot of misunderstanding what neuromarketing is,” said Billee Howard, CEO and co-founder at BRANDThro. A recent article in the Harvard Business Review article aggregated about 10 years’ worth of information on the topic. “In 2019, we are reaching an inflection point where we separate the wheat from the chaff and see what neuromarketing is when applied to business,” Howard said. “The wild west days are behind us.”

Is neuromarketing misunderstood? “Less so than when the field was novel, and practitioners, academics and clients were still trying to learn each other’s language,” said Kimberly Rose Clark, co-founder of Merchant Mechanics, Inc. Now there is a “shift from ROI to ROI”, as the practitioner’s understanding of “regions of interest” of the brain gives way to the “return on investment” clients are looking for when they hire a neuromarketing research firm, she added. 

Beyond consciousness

Biometrics can measure many “signs”, but does not get to the “next step,” said Paul Conner, founder and CEO of Emotive Analytics. But asking people directly may not be much of an improvement, since they may not be willing to share their true thoughts and feelings. 

One way to dig a little deeper is through “priming”. The tester will show the subject an image of a product, service or logo, then redirect them to evaluate a different image. The first image “primes” the subject to activate a thought or feeling, while the misdirected image uncovers an implicit, often nonconscious thought or feeling, Conner explained. That misdirected image is usually something abstract, like a Chinese pictograph (if the subject does not know how to read Chinese), or a Rorschach-like abstract image. 

The measured positive and negative associations about a product are presented to the client as a series of bar charts for each attribute Emotive is measuring. “It’s the automatic/implicit that we are trying to measure,” Conner added. “There is something about association that I am not conscious about.” One utility here is that negative associations with a product can be uncovered, even when people are not conscious that they are revealing anything negative.

“There is no such thing as a strictly rational decision,” Conner continued. “Emotions and feelings always have a say.” 

Personalization is personal

So what is neuromarketing all about? “It’s going beyond personalization to get commercial intimacy at scale,” said BrandThro’s Howard. “You know the person at a deeper level.” 

In BRANDthro’s case, the approach is the one-to-one survey, done online. The data is then run through an algorithm that feeds an AI/machine learning set-up. The end-point is a personal understanding of the target, Howard explained. 

BrandThro’s online survey only takes 20 minutes, and can run anywhere from 30 to 50 questions. The wording of the survey questions matters, since particular words connect to primary and secondary emotions, Howard continued. Understanding the positive emotions that attach to a brand should create trust, and in turn brand loyalty, she said. The survey is not done statistically. Using a non-equilibrium model, BRANDthro can get to a conclusion with about 100 subjects. After a while, profiles can be categorized. The goal is to give the client a “nano database” of about 750 respondents that can be segmented and queried, Howard said. The result should create scalability, but still be deeply granular, she added. 

You have to look at the experience as an “ecosystem” that is infused with language, Howard observed. You are not selling on the promise of inspiration or purpose, but the value the product can deliver. That  utility and promise has an emotional basis.

One can do neuromarketing with biometrics and EEGs, but “the ability to use that model has scaling issues,” Howard said.

The body shows many signs

Then again, maybe those biometric measures should not be discarded. They provide strands of data that can be weaved together to produce a tapestry of insight. “There is no silver bullet,” said Clark of Merchant Mechanics. “Data obtained from the brain and body work in conjunction with traditional self-reporting behaviors.” One can “triangulate” the data obtained from biometric sources obtained from larger crowds against “traditional measures” of consumer interest provided by smaller groups.  “This allows for greater possible inferences and generalizability of responses.” 

“Analyzing online actions such as time on screen and clicks can’t tell you what eyes on information can.” Clark continued. By observing the online shopper, one can figure out how much information the shopper must process before buying, and observe this in real time. One can track their gaze on the screen, check how their brains are processing information via EEG, even measuring heartbeat intervals to see what excites the shopper. “This kind of in-moment information allows us to build models that decode attention  and engagement that occur upstream of clicks.” Clark said. 

“Having biometric data, such as eye-tracking data,  you could tell where the visual attention goes, what distracts user, causing the behavior different from expected. Using the camera for facial coding could also help identify key pain moments – when consumers are irritated, confused, or happy.” said Dmitry Gaiduk, CEO at CoolTool. 

“You know that gaze movements tell you about the level of visual attention, but you should apply this into the more practical way – e.g., how noticeable is your ad or product’s package against competitors.” Gaiduk continued.   “Measuring brainwaves (EEG) is useless unless you can convert them into actionable findings of attention or interest corresponding (with the) timeline of your ad. And even speed of reaction could tell you how strong is an implicit connection between your brand and consumer needs or category entry points.”

To get that biometric data, one can set up a lab. But every digital consumer has a desktop, laptop or smartphone with a camera. One can use these sources to measure eye tracking, facial expressions to gauge emotional reaction, and of course deliver implicit tests to measure implicit connections. These are more inexpensive, scalable solutions, Gaiduk noted. 

It all comes down to something as simple as…figuring out how the brain works. 

The post Getting Inside Your Head appeared first on DMNews.

Another online shopper just disappeared. And with that departure goes another sale. Online merchants really hate that, but sometimes they only have themselves to blame.

The online customer journey can be as straightforward as the sales funnel, but it can also resemble a meandering path through a sales thicket. To guide that customer journey towards its meaningful end, online merchants will have to be savvy operators, prompting that shopper with the right message at the right time to keep them on the path.

Or you can wonder where they went…after they abandon the shopping cart.

There are many metrics that outline the problem. Shopping cart abandonment is the easiest to measure. Close to 80 percent of all online shoppers walk away from completing their purchases.  The reasons why  paint a very discouraging picture . Even seemingly unrelated factors can contribute to failure. 

We spoke with a number of people who are deeply involved in helping clients optimize their online stores.  There are many reasons “why” shoppers fail to complete a sale. 

How many clicks should it take to buy a light bulb?

As few as possible. Checkout is where sales are made or broken. According to the experts we spoke with, if checkout is poorly designed, the shopper will be likely to drop out. The mindset of the shopper at checkout is “I want to buy this”. Any other step that gets in the way of that final click can prompt shopper flight. 

 “The more steps it takes for a shopper to go from click to ship, the higher the abandonment rate you’re going to see.” explained Gurjit Sandhu, Marketing Manager at Yes Marketing.

“They don’t want to come up with a password and register an account. They just want to shop.”  said Pawel Ogonowski, COO and co-founder at Growcode. “The user doesn’t want to create an account. They want to check out as a guest.”  

One tool shopping sites should use to reduce inconvenience is the “pre-fill”, noted Meghan Stabler, VP for Global Product Marketing, BigCommerce. Put in a zip code? That should generate town/state information on a pulldown. How about that credit card? MasterCard, Visa and Amex all have different grouping styles for card numbers. Inputting your number should  result in the card type popping up, rather than making the customer click a card icon before inputting the card number. 

“The adding of steps comes from bad programming, and a lack of understanding of the psychology of [the user] or the shopper’s journey” Stabler continued. “What can we do on the back-end to take away complexity?” Fix the problem with a little more coding on the front-end or back-end, and “the user will be grateful,” she said.

Not all who wander are lost

Online shoppers are goal-oriented. They are looking for a specific item they want to buy. Yet their  path from search-to-sale can be anything but a straight line. To follow the trail, look at how people move from screen to screen., and where they click.

“The funnel model can be a useful way for marketers to think about acquisition, but this linear model doesn’t really describe many customer journeys. Customers move between channels, and between different sites as they research, compare prices, and finally decide to buy.” said Graham Charlton, Editor in Chief at SalesCycle.

“[I]t’s important to look at behavior [of the shopper] that might not match this general flow, such as circular paths and rage clicking. Those are indications that something is confusing or not meeting expectations.” said Janelle Estes, Chief Insights Officer at UserTesting.

“Behavioral analytics platforms help you understand the general flow of site traffic, how many follow the most direct path, and most importantly where people are falling out of the funnel or abandoning the experience altogether.” Estes continued. “It’s in these meandering moments that sites need to provide contextual help and gentle nudges via links, suggestive content, or even customer chat, to get them back on track. “

Meandering may not be a sign of confusion, however.  “This is especially true when there are incentives like extra discounts or free shipping that encourage shoppers to browse for more items.” said Blake Morgan , author and customer experience futurist. Any step where the shopper wavers is an opportunity for retargeting, Ogonowski added. The flick of the mouse shows the shopper about to leave? Deal a pop-up that offers a discount or a coupon. Offer another discount in exchange for shopper’s e-mail address. Even if they abandon the shopping cart, they can be prompted again by e-mail to resume the transaction. (Editor’s note: BigCommerce recently published survey results attributing a significant quantity of cart abandonment to shipping issues.)

All these prompts keep the customer on the purchase path. Serving up prompts to guide the online shopper should be limited to no more than needed, Morgan cautioned. “Extra screens can be useful and helpful if they include deals or relevant recommended products, but once they monopolize the experience…it becomes too much.”

“Twenty-percent of buyers say the purchase process itself is most influential in their decision to buy with a new retailer,” said Sandhu, citing a Yes Marketing study. “ Intrusive ads, non-intuitive design and even now lack of recommendations are sure ways to send customers to competitors.”

It’s all about me

Other less obvious factors can deliver delight or dread.

Online shopping has to “be surrounded by one thing: personalization,” said Stabler. A decade ago,it was enough for the online shopper to search for the item, buy it, and have it shipped.  Now, the online store has to be friendlier. “The site must recognize me when I shop there,” Stabler said.  

“A strong search function helps customers find exactly what they need, which can lower shopping cart abandonment,” Morgan observed. “Poor search functions that yield too many choices…can lead to shoppers adding more items to their cart, but then ultimately abandoning those items when they second-guess their decisions.” User frustration with the web site can also kill a sale. Note that search, selection and checkout each take a screen. “A critical thing to consider is the time it takes to load the page…in order for the customer to interact.” said Ian Pham, product manager at GTmetrix. A customer may walk away from the site  “if each step is preceded by a 2 second blank page or a spinner gif endlessly rotating.” he said. This can be quite galling to the online shopper during an online sales event or promotion. “This is due to the fear of inventory running out and/or missing a window for a sales event – a slow loading site adds even more frustration, as the customer feels it is out of their control and not their fault if they are unable to purchase their desired goods.” Pham said.

Each click is a clue 

As with all things digital, every user action leaves a signal that can be analyzed. Learn from those clicks to improve the experience — or increase sales.

The three-click/three-screen rule may not be the way to structure the shopper journey, Ogonowski continued. “When the user finishes shopping, we learn he spent a half-hour or 40 minutes on the web site,” he said.

“[U]nderstanding and optimizing the experience the customer has before getting to the shopping cart is critical. If someone is frustrated when they arrive at the shopping cart page, they are more likely to abandon as compared to someone who has had a seamless and enjoyable experience.” Estes added.

Another way to gather data is not to ask the shopper for all their information at once. An online site can provide a “preference center” where shoppers can talk about their experiences buying or using the product, Sandhu noted. “Marketers have the opportunity to ask customers about their style preferences and favorite product categories, and as a result, can fine tune their data points and gain valuable zero-party insights to make more informed decisions on future content.” (More on zero-party data here.)

“With new data privacy regulations coming in around the world, web users are becoming more aware of how their data might be used.” Charlton noted.”It’s also important that retailers are now clear about how data will be used, and to sell the benefits of sharing data. For example, adding an email address and some key product preferences can help to make emails more relevant to shoppers, and provide benefits like discounts and special deals. If you’re asking for details where the customer can see no relevance to the purchase or benefit to them, then this is too much.” Charlton said. 

The sum of all viewpoints

One thing all our experts agreed on  is that the online site must offer the shopper a seamless, convenient experience. Designers and retailers should use their own sites, just to be sure. Chances are good that if any feature annoys you, it probably annoys the shoppers, too. “A usable website isn’t one which the designer or CEO thinks is good, it’s one which your shoppers find easy to use and buy from without any unnecessary friction.” Charlton said. 

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The strange is familiar…

Mobile users are already using micro apps, even if they don’t know it. Facebook Messenger, Google Hangouts, SnapChat and AccuWeather all qualify. To the user, it’s just something they use because it works. 

Get under the hood of a micro app and you will see why. The micro app is crafted using HTML. It runs on any browser. It is easily created by any competent IT department. The installation is easy. 

Contrast this with a full-blown mobile app (or native app), which must be written to conform with Apple iOS or Android, plus the app store you get it from. The mobile app’s  features will be many, and will take longer to access. (To the user, any lag lasting seconds is experienced as hours.) Micro apps are an opportunity technology for digital marketers, and there are firms waiting to help craft the solutions they seek.

…and the familiar is strange

It was perfectly natural for digital marketers to try to craft small-screen versions of their full-sized web-based screens, back when smartphones were new. Still, there were limitations given the screen size one had to work with.

“The Web approach restricts what you can do in the web browser,” said Bobby Gill, CEO and co-founder of app developers Blue Label Labs. The layout and the buttons are restricted. “You can’t deliver a high-end experience.” 

“The way people use the app is different from a Web site,” added Viktor Marohni?, founder of Five, an agency which specializes in crafting mobile solutions. The Web site approach can take up to 50-100 different screens to fully implement an online store. Going micro can knock that down to 10-15 screens, he noted. 

But there is another dimension one must take into account, one that really plays well for digital marketers: the micro app “is so granular it responds well to search,” said Praveen Kanyadi, VP of product at SpotCues. A user searching online for a product or service will normally have to view dozens of results before picking the one they want. 

What if the top search result is a micro app? The user can  arrange for a service or purchase a good right away, turning the customer journey into an action immediately. “The micro app is not a silver bullet, but it provides an opportunity to match user interest within the context of a call to action.” Kanyadi said.

“Google is offering a micro-app opportunity for marketers to get in front of the user when thy search.” Kanyadi said. The micro-app “drives conversion from the search.” It can be crafted to take personal information from the user and insert it into the transaction, he noted.

Focus on the familiar

The technology behind the micro app is simple. The application, however, is human. Digital marketers have to view their web sites or full-blown applications as a collection of actions. Expert firms have to guide their clients to this view, focusing only on the bare essentials that deliver. The goal is to design the app around the marketing to deliver the good or service. 

Typically, clients are not tech savvy, Marohni? observed. They may not ask for a micro app solution, but they do know what they want their marketing campaign to do. 

“We rely on user testing to show them how much every feature will cost,” Marohni? continued. The client may be eager to field an app with 10 or 20 features, but they really should focus on just two or three.

Five Agency will typically begin a project with a week-long design sprint workshop, Marohni? said. “We encourage the client to launch a minimally performing product and learn from that.” The app may be completed in one to six months, depending on complexity.

Blue Label does something similar with an agile design approach. In a week-long design sprint,  the client, user experience and user interface people are brought together to figure out the function and the purpose of the micro-app. A rough prototype will result, further refined by a series of two-week sprints over the course of several months. The goal is to get a product to the customer, then listen to their feedback. “Get to market quickly. The customer will tell you how to evolve.” Gill said. 

Telling your phone to do it

It is only a matter of time until voice-activated search makes the micro-app easier to use. “A couple could use Siri to book a hotel. [The micro-app] would bring up the card, fill in the details, and you are done,” Kanyadi said. 

Another dimension is using voice to arrange two micro-apps to interact with each other. Kanyadi gave the example of ordering pizza from a name-brand chain. One could use the mobile app crafted by the pizza vendor, or better yet, rely on a micro-app resident in Facebook (the platform everybody has on their mobile phone), and have that app interact with the pizza ordering app to place an order and indicate the location of the user.

However the solution is crafted, the full functionality of any full-blown application can be delivered as a series of micro-apps. You just have to figure out how.

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Online retailers want to see their brands come out at number one —
in search results. Well-chosen keywords were sufficient when SEO was text-only. Voice adds another dimension to this, as those keywords are now tucked into vague phrases and nuanced queries. Making your brand number one will take a little more effort.

“For most retailers, they are still getting their heads around working with voice,” said John Franklin, associate partner and strategist at OC&C Strategy Consultants. “There is a lot of opportunity and optimization for companies to think about.”

“There is no significant difference between voice search and text search,” said Scott Ludwig, VP of professional services at Skyword. Still, brands have to be cognizant of how searches are uncovering their products, and take steps to make sure their good comes out at number one.

Layers of screening

First, understand that the voice feature will be sitting on top of a search engine, and will be optimized to work with the underlying platform. Alexa sits on top of Amazon. Microsoft’s Cortana resides above Bing. And Google Voice is placed on top of …. well, Google. Optimizing a brand for one platform may not make it optimal for another. And the voice assistants will show their strengths and shortcomings as a result.

“Take Amazon. It is clearly focused on retail,” Franklin said. Any online vendor selling through Amazon will try to optimize for selection, he noted, since you win the sale on the search. The online goal is to score the Amazon Choice listing, a bump up for products that were well-reviewed by customers. That will mean paying attention to fundamentals like product quality, warranty, return rates and customer service. If the retailer is thinking about the same journey as Amazon, they should align their effort so that the product ends up in the basket (reorder). They should offer customers a choice, and make sure they come in at number one on the search result, Franklin explained.

“You want to employ the largest search engine,” said Shane Barker, SEO expert and digital consultant. “I don’t see Google disappearing anytime soon.” Google is optimizing for voice and mobile, given its lead in these spheres. Cortana/Bing also offers possibilities. It is easier to index on a smaller search engine, and there may not be as many competitors, Barker noted. But his advice goes back to the top: “Optimize for Google.”

Layers of meaning

The search engine that lies beneath works pretty much the same, whether you input by voice or text. As for the voice layer on top, now you’re talking.

People can be very imprecise doing a search by voice. They naturally pause, using filler words until they can find the right words to fashion a query. Understanding the question falls under the label of natural language processing.

“The degree of vagueness matters,” Franklin said. In one recent study, about 30 percent of online shoppers were less than precise in their queries, so the voice-activated search had to interpret the request in the best way possible. But when that interpretation is successful and the search result is presented, then 85 percent of those “vague” shoppers bought the item that was recommended, he recounted.

Then there is the learning curve. Right now Google Voice is 95 percent accurate in English, Barker noted. “It will get smarter over time,” he added, as it will learn to conform with the user’s way of speaking. A  voiced question may run 50 words, 40 of which are about context or just filler. Natural language processing should filter out the filler and focus on the core words that are in the question.

Eventually, the platform will learn to ask the user “what did you mean”, added Ludwig. This represents the beginning of personalization, he added.

Sadly, it is going to take a little more effort for some voice apps to learn the quirks of their users, ranging from the tech novice…

…to the tech pro whose accent keeps his question from getting through…

Layers of structure

The foundation of online selling remains the same: what you sell has to match what the user is looking for. There are ways to make that match more likely.

Start with the questions. Look for the most frequent queries and figure out where those answers can be posted in a structural way, Ludwig said. One helpful starting point is AnswerThePublic, a free visual keyword search engine. Typing in a word  will show how frequently used are terms like “how”, “are”, “will”, “can”, “where”, “which” “what”, “who”, “when” and “why”—
the building blocks of a question. Again, look for patterns and frequencies, using that data to figure out how to differentiate your product and what the page priorities are, Ludwig explained.

Customer service is also a good source for query data. Once examined, e-mails, chat and phone calls will reveal patterns of inquiry that can be used to understand what content should be prioritized on the retail web site, Ludwig added.

Do not ignore the mobile dimension. Even offline retailers that have a web presence need to list their correct address, city and state to work with apps like Google Maps. “It’s not a search engine, but a wide supplier of business services,” Franklin observed. Be sure to describe what your business does and make sure that information is accessed by the search. Include business hours and prices.

“If anyone does a voice search, make sure your information is there, Barker stressed. If someone driving around Sacramento wants to find the nearest pizzeria, or the best one in town, that information should surface. “Make sure your information is correct.” he said. If the retailer is a chain or a single location, a Google ad spend should bump up the search response to the top five spots, he said.

Regardless of whether the business is online or offline, or whether the search is done by voice or text, the real foundation is making sure the information in the retailer’s web site is always correct, complete and up to date.

The bottom line is the same: just make sure you have all your stuff together.

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Online retailers are investing in AI to glean that last sliver of insight from their data. Or they can entrust an intelligent agent (IA) with that mission.

IA? AI?

“The agent approach focuses on the objective and the action, as opposed to data collection and prediction,” said Matt Gershoff, CEO of Conductrics, which provides an intelligent-agent based platform for A/B testing and optimization.

AI relies on machine learning, which has to plow through massive amounts of data to acquire expertise. Even then, the data has to be “cleansed”. Duplicated entries have to be removed. Scale must be consistent. And a human has to revisit the AI to make sure it does not go off course. No one wants to replicate the Microsoft Tay disaster.

“IA is really just reframing the optimization problem. One still needs to deal with any and all issues around automated systems.” Gershoff said. IA faces the data, instructed to “take the best action in a given situation.”

One way to think of an intelligent agent is “weak AI”, explained Gershoff. “It is not machine learning. It’s more a way of framing a problem.” It’s an interrelated three-step approach: 1) data collection; 2) prediction; and 3) action.

“Data collection”  for an intelligent agent is how it perceives the environment it operates in. The agent can predict the best action as it makes the optimal choice, but it also needs to take the action to see if the choice was the best one. If it wasn’t, it learns from that experience to make a better choice the next go round.

Applied to marketing, an intelligent agent can examine in incoming stream on online visitors. Based on user attributes, the agent can randomly serve one of three offers. The intelligent agent keeps score of which offers scores the most conversions, and will rate that offer as best and serve it up more frequently, Gershoff explained. 

Down to earth

Firms are already applying intelligent agents to solving practical problems.  NeuraFlash is a Salesforce partner, crafting bot solutions that rely on Salesforce’s Einstein AI platform. The firm is using the intelligent agent approach to  craft chatbots for customer service.

“A lot of companies have a lot of data,” noted T. Brett Chisholm, CEO of NeuraFlash. “They have millions of conversations saved in CRM every day.”

“We, as a company, focus on how to leverage existing data to create the initial model,” Chisholm continued. For NeuraFlash, the approach is to examine and analyze that company’s customer service data, looking for patterns of frequently asked questions, like order shipping status. One could craft a list of 10 to 20 FAQs that the chatbot can answer, relying on the intelligent agent to pluck the relevant information from the company’s data. Such a solution can be up and running in 3-4 months, yielding a quick return on investment, Chisholm added.

In practice, the customer should be able to ask a routine question in plain language about an order status, price of a good, or its shipping cost, and get an answer. Do this successfully and the customer is delighted, Chisholm noted. But get it wrong, and the customer will be frustrated.

“A lot of automated systems are not integrated, so they get caught in a loop.” Chisholm said. “If the bot says the wrong thing, it can be very problematic.”  When the agent-driven system senses the customer’s frustration, or knows the right answer was not delivered more than once, then it automatically switches the query to a human for direct intervention.

“The nice thing about an intelligent agent is that it brings you to your destination, Chisholm said. But the solution using the agent has to be focused, and right now that means taking care of routine “high runner” problems. “If you build too many things, you are looking at an overlap and it makes the model worse,” he said. After all, the goal for the intelligent agent is to handle routine “high runner” problems so that a human is freed up to resolve more complex issues for the customer.

Answers are not decisions

Globant is another company pursuing the intelligent agent/chatbot approach. The enabling tool, however, has been a recent ramp-up in natural language processing as the input for the agent, noted, J.J. Lopez Murphy, technology director for AI at Globant.

That combination of natural language processing and IA technology is yielding a “chatbot with brains” that can interact with the customer, Lopez Murphy said.

One example Lopez Murphy gave was for an intelligent agent acting as a legal assistant. A user can ask the agent to look up a price in a contract. The agent-driven bot would search the contract and retrieve the answer. As contracts can run tens or hundreds of pages, being able to search the document using a voice input can be a time-saver. The intelligent agent “can extract the answer without previous knowledge,” Lopez Murphy explained. The task is as simple as 1) select content, and 2) extract answer.

The agent provides information, but cannot make a decision for you.

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