Top Brands Use These Components to Create an Effective Customer Experience
On this episode of “Salesforce Simplified,” the topic is “Creating Exceptional Online Customer Experiences,” and our guest is AnswerLab Principle Researcher Bob Berry, who has guided Google, Amazon, Facebook, and many others to create new, optimal online experiences.
Episode Notes/Resources:
AnswerLab: https://www.answerlab.com/
Free resources from Bob Berry to create a compelling virtual presence for your customers: https://itstheusers.com/advictoriam
B2B Customer Experiences By People, Built For People: https://bit.ly/3zVgIWj
Creating Customer & Employee Experiences That Resonate: https://bit.ly/3nSseO6
Connected Experiences with Experience Cloud: https://bit.ly/3EualvC
Transcription:
Speaker 1:
This is Salesforce Simplified, the podcast from Ad Victoriam Solutions. Here’s your host, Mike Boyle.
Mike Boyle:
Hello, everyone. On this episode of Salesforce Simplified, the topic is creating exceptional online customer experiences, and our guest AnswerLab principal, Bob Berry, who has guided Google, Amazon, Facebook, another company I’m not allowed to mention and many others to create new optimal online experiences. Welcome, Mr. Bob Berry. It is such a pleasure to have you here on the Salesforce Simplified podcast. How are you?
Bob Berry:
Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me. Appreciate doing this. Looking forward to chatting with you today.
Mike Boyle:
Bob, tell me a little bit about you and tell me a little bit about what goes on at AnswerLab.
Bob Berry:
As you mentioned, I’m a principal researcher at AnswerLab. AnswerLab is a top-end research agency focused on helping companies in high tech and many other industries create the best possible experiences, primarily online, but a lot of offline experiences as well. As you mentioned, we work with many of the top brands in the world. We’ve been doing this for a number of years. Our position that we’ve proven many times with lot of different companies and brands is that effective online experience is really the key to just about any business outcome you’re looking for, and so we, in many cases, have long-term contracts with these companies and work with many different aspects of their platforms, whether that’s websites, software, apps, storefronts, many different ways that they interact with the world to just make sure that their customers, their prospects can be successful. I also have my own work that I do on the side with itstheusers.com to help smaller companies and professionals and individuals learn about this whole world as well and so we do a lot of work in that realm, too.
Mike Boyle:
Let’s just dive in. Creating exceptional online experiences. What are the most important components to doing that?
Bob Berry:
That’s a really key question. I appreciate you starting with that one. There’s a basic principle that I follow that we follow that’s important, I think, for anyone doing business in the world today to understand and to accept and that is that virtually all outcomes that you hope for, that you might include as part of your business goals, virtually all outcomes happen within the context of individuals making choices in the experiences that we provide them, any transaction that you’re going to hope to realize, any business result is going to be based on some customer, or prospect, user making a decision about something that you’re offering in the context of some kind of experience. That is so primary and so essential that a lot of companies, a lot of in individuals look right past it and don’t realize the importance of it and realize that it’s the gateway to everything else. That’s probably the first thing.
The second thing is to actually set aside the technology. Again, whether you’re doing an app, or a website, or a storefront, or software, or whatever you’re doing, is important to forget about that for some period of time and focus on your customers. We do a lot of work with all of these brands to help them develop some deep understanding of their customer journeys. What are the narratives, both the personal and the business narratives of these individuals and these companies that they’re trying to serve, and looking at the real world, looking at how people solve the problems that they have, looking at how they seek out whatever it is they’re looking for is essential before we even start talking about the experience itself, so you have to actually put the experience aside for a while to really understand who those customers are. That puts the whole experience then in a context that is customer, user, prospect-centric, and not focused on your business and what your needs are, it has to be focused on their needs and their desires.
Then we have a whole set of principles that we apply. Probably the four big ones are what I call useful, usable, functional, and seamless. Useful is just the most basic understanding about user experience, about usability, ease of use. There are a number of ways that we test that and design that. Usable means relevant. It’s something that…
Sorry, I got those reversed. Usable is about being ease of use about being something that somebody can engage and understand. Useful is about doing something relevant. Something can be usable, but not useful. It may not be relevant. It may not be anything that your customer needs or wants.
Functional means that everything works. So many times we do testing for individuals or for companies and we find that things break. The technology is just not built in a quality way and they run into functional that they may not discover had they not done this testing.
Seamless refers to all of the touch points working in synchronization. When somebody moves from the website to the call center, to the app, to a phone call, to whoever it might be, that all of those things work well together, the left hand knows what the right hand is doing, and the transitions that a user or a customer might make from one of those touchpoints to another is working effectively, and they can find their way around and they don’t get lost, or the company doesn’t lose them.
Then finally, the most important part of all of this is you can’t verify and confirm that any of this is working without doing testing. That’s what we do. We conduct a lot of research. We do a lot of testing in a lot of different ways to actually engage real customers, put them in front of the software, the website, the app, whatever it might be, and really find out whether or not it works.
Mike Boyle:
Talk a little bit about how a company knows when it needs to make improvements to create great online customer experiences.
Bob Berry:
There are a variety of hints or ways that you might suspect you have some problems. You might see it in your web analytics, for example. You might see it in ways that people abandon your shopping cart. You might see it in drop-offs at places where you think customers may or should stay engaged. You might actually be getting complaints from customers. You might see things show up in your reviews on social media. But the problem with a lot of these interactive virtual experiences is that they are hidden. You can’t see them until you actually test and evaluate them specifically. You can also talk to customers by doing surveys and doing other sites of quantitative studies like that to understand where things may be working or not.
But the bottom line here is that most companies that are successful at this, they don’t wait for any of that evidence. They don’t wait to find out whether or not they need to make improvements, they just assume that they do, they go ahead and test and evaluate and they optimize what it is they that they’re doing. This is something that they do as a matter of course, it’s a business fundamental, and they don’t assume that they’re going to find out where the problems are, they just automatically believe that they’re there, and they go after them, no matter what.
Mike Boyle:
I want to talk a little bit about challenges. How have today’s challenges for online virtual and technology changed the way companies are delivering the best online experiences for their customers?
Bob Berry:
Well, certainly the big one that we all unfortunately know too much about is the impact of COVID. We’re all now, in many ways, returning back to some degree of normalcy, but there’s still a lot of pockets of the pandemic out there, and in the early days and months of COVID, a lot of companies figured out how to do business contactless, go virtual, go remote, go e-commerce. A lot of those systems are going to remain in place, whether that’s in just general online stores, whether it’s working remotely, whether it’s doing telehealth, distance learning, watching movies on your device instead of going to the theater, I could just go on and on about the number of ways that we figured out how to function contactless. There were a lot of new innovations and new systems developed and so our ability to adapt to a pandemic and function as a society contactless is by far the biggest impact recently.
Looking a little longer-term over the last five to 10 years, the transition to mobile is another huge shift that has gone on. When I started doing this two or three decades ago, everything was on the computer, and mobile devices didn’t exist. But today, probably two-thirds to three-quarters of your interactions with your customers, depending on your industry, segment, your products, vast majority of those are going to be done on mobile, which brings up a whole new set of challenges, a whole new way of designing virtual experiences, a whole new way of testing and validating virtual experiences. Artificial intelligence is another one. Devices are getting much smarter, machine learning and everything. Devices are learning a lot more about who owns them and who uses them and being able to adapt to them, so those are probably the three biggest ones that we’re seeing today and we’ll probably be coping with for the near future as well.
Mike Boyle:
I picture somebody out there listening to us, Bob, going, “You know what biggest challenge for me would be? Where to start.” Where should companies begin to improve their online customer experience?
Bob Berry:
I would, again, going back to this process of actually setting the experience aside. Where do you start with experience? Don’t start with experience. Start with who those customers are, understand the narrative of how they operate in their lives. What events, what circumstances, conditions actually trigger them to think of you? If you’re providing consumer products or if you’re providing business services, what happens in their environment that would make them reach for you, and how do they initially find you and interact with you through whatever is actually happening in their life? That understanding of them independent of the experience is step one.
The other thing that we do is we encourage businesses to think of the top outcomes that they’re seeking as a business and the top outcomes that their customers or users are seeking for whatever they need and understand where the overlap is. Hopefully there’s a lot of overlap. What you want to accomplish online as a business, what that might be, selling a product, for example, through an e-com store, and if the customer’s goal is the same, they want to purchase a product as well and they want to do that as quickly and as easily as possible, start with those. Choose the top 10 of what those are and figure out how you’re going to validate and test with real customers on whether or not those are working well for you and for them.
Those are the two most important starting points – understand who they are independent of the virtual thing you’re designing, and then understand then once you move into that virtual experience, understand what are the top 10 things that have to happen for you to be successful and for them to be successful and focus on those.
Mike Boyle:
This is the Salesforce Simplified podcast. He’s Bob Berry, a principal at AnswerLab. I’m Mike Boyle from Ad Victoriam Solutions. Today, we’re talking about creating exceptional online experiences… Bob, let’s talk about simplifying this whole online experience for customers. Give some pointers.
Bob Berry:
The top 10 that I just described are probably a good starting point as a framework. Now, it may not be 10, maybe it’s five or maybe it’s 15, but there should be a shortlist. It’s kind of the 80/20 rule. What are the few things that are going to drive 80% of your business and the few things that are going to drive 80% of what customers are seeking to accomplish? I appreciate you bringing up this idea of simplification because customers encounter systems too often that are way over-engineered and that’s unfortunate because companies spend more than they need to on designing interfaces.
I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of trying to figure out an app on our smartphones that is way too complex, that has way too many features, so again, understanding what are the main things that the users have to accomplish, what are the main things that you need to do to succeed as a business and be successful and focus on those first and make sure you’ve got those right, and then scale up to the next most important things. Again, it all has to start with some basic research on who those users are, who those customers are, and what they need to accomplish.
Mike Boyle:
Another big thing that companies will think about is the time and the money that needs to go into this. How do companies determine how much they should spend and how much time that they should put into improving their online customer experiences?
Bob Berry:
Well, I’m glad you started with how much, instead of asking whether or not they should spend anything at all. They should absolutely spend on this. It’s really essential if for no other reason than your competitors are doing it. This has become a business fundamental and all successful companies focus on user experience and user experience research and optimizing everything that they’re doing in that virtual world, so that’s really important.
But yes, asking how much to spend is a key question. A lot of it depends on where your business results come from. For example, if you are selling products or services online and your business success relies on a certain conversion rate of orders, then research has consistently proven that a small increase in conversion rate, even a few percentage points, can have a significant impact on your bottom line. The ROI on that, a small-scale user research project is going to at most cost five figures, maybe a little bit less than that. You might be able to get away with something in the high four-figure range to do some thorough research. But if you have an online store and you can increase your conversion rate two or 3%, you’re going to pay that back many times over.
Another thing that we’ve seen a lot of success within that I’ve done a lot on my own in working with the companies that I work with is you can actually start doing user research for virtually no cost and you can start to realize some small gains. Again, that can be gains in the upline in more sales, more conversions. It can also mean savings in the bottom line. You can save on costs, for example, your customer support costs. If your website is more efficient, if it’s easier to use, you’re going to get fewer support calls and emails, and then you can save money in that. Start small. Realize some of those financial gains, either in top line or bottom line, and then reinvest some of those gains and continue to scale up and just keep doing that. Over time, this whole thing can pay for itself, plus spin off a lot of additional revenue, new profit, whatever you’re looking for from a financial standpoint, so it’s a very scalable approach, and it tends to have significant ROI if managed from a scaling standpoint.
Mike Boyle:
Bob, talk a little bit about the importance of training employees, which I guess could be part of the time and money thing. Talk about training employees on their role to creating great online customer experiences.
Bob Berry:
A lot of that depends on what kind of employment you manage, what kind of teams you have in place. Some companies are big enough that they have designers, developers on staff. Again, if you’re providing apps or websites for your customers, then there may be people in the marketing department or people in R&D that are creating these, designing these. In some cases, you may outsource those, so a lot of it depends on what you actually consider an employee.
But certainly, those designers and developers, the ones who are putting those interfaces, those virtual experiences out in the world, if you really want to optimize the kinds of experiences that customers encounter, then making sure you have those people well-trained and well-equipped, make sure they have the right tools. One of the benefits of the software development world today is that so many tools exist that have excellent customer experience built-in and so it’s a matter of making sure that those people, whether they’re on staff or whether you’re outsource to them, have those tools in place, and they know how to use them. They don’t have to be world-class user experience designers, they just have to know which tools provide the best user experience, and know how to use those effectively. Again, if you’re outsourcing as well, just making sure that you’re hiring developers or companies that are doing your development that know those tools and know how to put them in place and really know how to map them into your business needs and your customer needs as well. That’s really important.
I mentioned earlier, too, about multiple customer touchpoints about having it seamless, so it’s also important to make sure that those people that are not directly involved in the virtual experiences are tied into the whole process and that customers can make those seamless transitions. Again, that might be people in your call center, it might be your salespeople, it might be people in the marketing department that are running email programs or doing promotions for your app. Just make sure that whoever is doing those direct customer contacts that they’re all working together and that all of those touchpoints are integrated in a way that the customer experience is seamless. Those are really important.
Obviously, I can’t leave out the UX researchers like me, who are essential to making sure, to verifying, testing, to making sure that all of this is working well. Again, some companies might have them on staff, but in many cases, you may be looking at hiring a company like AnswerLab to do that research for you and really help take you through that whole process and uncover where those problems might exist.
Mike Boyle:
Last question I have for you, Bob, is what are the most important metrics to evaluate to determine if your efforts to improve the online customer experience have given a positive ROI?
Bob Berry:
In general, I would tend, again, to divide them into sort of the top-line/bottom-line approach. Some companies are going to realize that ROI through the top line can increase conversions, increase sales, increase revenue, and that’s very important. There’s a lot of ways that as we’ve discussed here that you can optimize that experience to grow that top line to make sure that you can get as many happy customers as you possibly can and repeat customers as well through additional or conversions in sales.
Some companies might focus more on the bottom line, on reducing costs, on making sure that customer problems are a lot less frequent, that their support costs are less, that product returns are less, that, again, happy customers decide to do more follow-on business with you because what you’re providing them is working so well.
Some companies will focus on both. I would encourage you to really think where you can get the most leverage, whether you’re going to do one of those or both of those and how you’re going to realize the best possible ROI based on the kinds of products and services you’re providing and what kind of experiences you’re putting out there to facilitate that.
Mike Boyle:
Bob, thank you. Thank you for joining us today. Creating exceptional online customer experiences, it’s never going to be a topic that we can talk too much about, so I look forward to having you back again, and we can continue this conversation.
Bob Berry:
Thanks, Mike. I appreciate it. This has been very enlightening for me and I appreciate you having me on the show.
Mike Boyle:
For the audience, if you’d like to learn a little bit more about what Bob and his team do at AnswerLab, you can just visit answerlab.com. Before we go, Bob’s got some resources that we’d like to turn you onto. Why don’t you talk a little bit about that, Bob?
Bob Berry:
As I mentioned at the beginning, we also do a lot of education and helping companies of all sizes and professionals in all fields really learn about this discipline, and so I offer a lot of additional on my website. If you go to itstheusers.com/advictoriam, I have several resources there that you can download for free that will help you understand in more depth a lot of the principles that we’ve talked about here, so feel free to go there and download what’s there and learn about how, how to make this work in your company and how to make this successful for your customers.
Mike Boyle:
That’s awesome, Bob. Thank you for doing that. We will put that URL in these episodes notes along with some other resources as well that will help you in this whole topic of creating exceptional online customer experiences. Bob, again, a pleasure. Thank you so much. Look forward to having you back again.
Bob Berry:
Thanks, Mike.
Mike Boyle:
I’m Mike Boyle from Ad Victoriam Solutions. Thank you for joining us for this episode of Salesforce Simplified. Our next episode is just around the corner.
Speaker 1:
You’ve been listening to Salesforce Simplified, the podcast from Ad Victoriam Solutions.
