Statements of Intent

~ This transcript is automatically generated so may contain some errors ~

what lots of people have seen of late is conversion going down and people are like, oh you must fix the conversion rate It must go up and and yes, it could go up.

But actually Uh, you need to understand the reasons why it's gone down and where it's gone down and what that behavior indicates and how you could then manage for that behavior.

Welcome to Statements of Intent. In this 20 minute episode, we're addressing how eCommerce has lost sight of the people at its very heart. You, the customer. It's a chat that's optimistic, it's casual, it's probably slightly ranty in places, but that's okay. But it's a place where I talk to senior eCommerce marketers.

And share their statement of how they're looking to change the status quo of eCommerce, adding more care, being more considerate to those very people that they're selling to - the customer. I'm your host, David Mannheim, the founder of Made With Intent. And we're going to jump right into it. Have fun

Hello, everybody, and welcome to Statements of Intent, the one place where we get together senior e commerce professionals and we share our, well, perhaps a little chip on our shoulder about how people are treating customers online. Uh, and today I have the self confessed, grumpy, your words, not mine, Sienne, the self confessed, grumpy, and cynical Sienne Veit.

Uh, Sienne, your experience is vast. Would you mind telling people where you've come from? What do you do? And why perhaps?

Um, I'm a chief product person, um, which means what I do is I build things that customers love and I help large businesses like Kingfisher, so the home of B& Q and Screwfix and Castorama.

Or John Lewis or M& S or Morrison's or Sony or a whole range of other businesses help grow their businesses, make them commercially successful by making customers happy digitally. That's what I do.

Sounds like you've used that phrase before. You sound very well versed in it.

I often had to say, I don't sell sofas.

I'm not that product person.

What do you mean you don't sell sofas, you're not that product person? What does that, like, what are you trying to insinuate with that statement?

Um, so when I tell people what I do, they're like, well, what you actually do? Because the, the stuff I do is largely invisible. If, if you notice what I do, then I probably haven't done my job.

If you don't notice what I do, then I am doing my job really well. So you shouldn't notice technology. You shouldn't notice customer experience. You shouldn't notice strategy. You shouldn't notice well educated digital professionals, CEOs and boards making the right decisions. Those you should not notice.

You should notice that the share price is going up, uh, that the business is successful, that customers are happy, that they can buy the things they like, um, and that the people making the things, the employees, are really happy doing what they're doing and they feel listened to. And if all those things are happening in my team and in the businesses where I'm making tech stuff, then I'm doing my job.

That sounds like, again, it sounds like you've, that's a well versed statement. Uh, so thank you. That sounds like you've said that before. I'm curious, you said that, um, if you're doing your job correctly, people won't notice it, or I'm guessing the end user, right? So therefore, how do you measure that? It feels like an intangible.

thing to measure rather than I'm sure what the businesses that you've worked out before demand some level of tangibility. How do you balance that? Those two things.

Um, it's really interesting.

So I'll start with probably the thing that we're both deeply opinionated on that. Most people think you measure that stuff in e commerce omni channel land.

Through conversion rate or through something even worse NPS. So conversion rate to me is a lag metric. And it means a number of people have, have gone about their shopping journey and been successful in my book. You, you know, you can have a ton of grumpy customers that have kind of. Fought their way tooth and nail through your website to get what they want because they want what they want and They are not going to let you win.

They're gonna fill out that form. They're gonna pay They're gonna use five different payment methods if they have to to get the thing they want There's even more customers You don't see who tried that and failed and just gave up or maybe they only had five seconds and your journey was gonna take Three minutes and that was just too long And that's why I think conversion rate is a really bad metric.

So I think better metrics are metrics, um, throughout a customer journey, whatever that journey looks like, that are allied to their mission. Um, and that are in the moment so that if those metrics go south or they indicate something's wrong, a team can go and fix them because they know where to look. So what I'm talking about are help customers find stuff.

So what is your findability metric? Is it success from search, on site search? Is it navigation success? Um, is it got to a product detail page? Other success metrics would be buyability, so did you have the thing they finally got to? Was it in stock? Could that, could you actually get it to them? So was it available in the route that they chose?

And that could be, I went to tomorrow. I want to click and collect. Uh, I don't want to pay any charges, so I don't care how long it takes, as long as it's free. So for the route that they selected, could you get it to them? So viability, um, if you're in the business of content, do they bother to read your stuff?

Do they share it? Do they like it? Do they save it? Do they do anything with your content? Uh, cause that's an indication that they're actually enjoying what you put out there. Um, and then finally payment, if you're in the business of selling stuff, um, and all of those, yes, you can get to an aggregate score potentially of success along the journey, but each one of those individual measures is probably a better measure of ease for your customers than an aggregate or a lag metric like conversion.

It's interesting, like I, so I too am on the side of the fence where conversion rates, I, I don't feel is the enemy, but I feel as though it's so aggregated and retrospective and rare that that means all our solutions before it also become aggregated and retrospective and retrospective and rare that Not necessarily rare, but have limited, limited impact because they are indeed generic.

Why, you've worked in such a variety of different maturity of organizations, I assume that they're all wedded to conversion rates as a, as a metric. And if they are, why is that? Why, why is that so entrenched in, in society? It's a deep question.

I, I suspect that many of the businesses that I've worked in are, well, not suspect, I know they have been legacy businesses.

And so the data that has been available in largely a physical world of retail, um, is, is really what happens when a customer gets to a till and pays or someone walks through the door. You know, door counting and till counting are the two certainties in physical retail, but the world has moved on and there's a lot more stuff that you can measure.

I think also, um, revenue speaks at board level. So financial measures tend to, to overwhelm all other measures. But the fact that they are lag means when they go down people think oh We must push that measure up and the classic one here is conversion So what lots of people have seen of late is conversion going down and you and I were on a thread Commenting about this very thing and people are like, oh you must fix the conversion rate It must go up and and yes, it could go up.

But actually Uh, you need to understand the reasons why it's gone down and where it's gone down and what that behavior indicates and how you could then manage for that behavior.

Uh, one of the key factors we're seeing is. Most of our customers are now shopping with us on mobile, and that means they don't necessarily complete in that session.

They might complete somewhere else in another channel, or they might come back another time because they happen to be on the tube just between, you know, Angel and Farringdon. And that was the end of that session. Um, so understanding that and being able to manage for that is probably a far better indicator of success than conversion rate.

I think the other thing is. Conversion is, is really simplistic. So maybe it's easier to understand cause it's a single metric rather than a, a funnel or a journey or a, a customer cohort measure, which seems a bit more complicated, I think lots of businesses like a one number that they can manage to, but I think that's too simplistic and especially in the age where you've got dynamic data and you've actually got teams on site that can go and fix the dynamic data.

When it's kind of trending in the wrong direction. So by the time you're looking at that data, it should be so out of date that it shouldn't matter because a team is already aware of the issue and fixing it. Um, and I think those. Those factors are, we have boards that need a bit of education, we have businesses that need to fundamentally ask why they're measuring what they're measuring, and what that enables them to do.

So it should enable businesses to look into the future rather than into the past, because it's quite difficult to fix the past, but you should absolutely be focused on fixing the future, because that's something that can. lead to growth and then think about what the better measures for their business would be.

So predictive, not retrospective. I like that. Uh, better, not worse. I don't know how to like compare the two, but your statements of intense, Yen. Is reinventing customer journeys and metrics. I think that's beautiful. It like suggests everything that you're talking about right now. Does one come before the other?

Do you invent the metric first in order to be able to reinvent the journeys? Or do you reinvent the journeys to impact a new metric? Or do you do it simultaneously? What's your viewpoint on those two attributes?

Um, I think it's always easier to start with the journeys and you can nudge those journeys into better behaviors.

So if there, if there are more profitable ways that you want to do things, you have to encourage customers that to do those things first, um, rather than create the metric and then hope that the customers are going to do what you think they're going to do.

Yeah, that makes sense. So then once, once you were able to do that, do you think there's a, almost like a golden metric when you talk about reinventing customer metrics, is there a customer metric that you have in your head of that's the one that's the, that's the one that I want to, I want to champion throughout my journey.

Uh, what are your thoughts on that?

I do like a single metric. I think it's probably one that you should strive for, but it's probably isn't relevant to every single team. But I think a metric that I really like is customers who, so. Some kind of measure of lifetime value because customers who come back to you again, customers who come and spend more with you, uh, and customers who come back to you more regularly.

So any mix of those that lead to lifetime value, um, is a, is a good metric.

Um, in my world, uh, probably a wacky one is customers who have your mobile app is a, is a great indicator of, um, Of a customer who has real intent because nobody bothers to download an app and do and shop on it unless they really love you and um I suppose that's a call to arms for people to make sure their apps are really amazing And the reason I particularly like apps Apps is in my world of retail, they're the one thing that crosses the boundary between online and in store and gives us even more data about what customers are doing along that journey.

So they are the perfect end to end journey data capture, uh, device. If you can get someone to download and log in and then use it. That means that we have an obligation to design really awesome apps, um, so that customers will bother and don't get frustrated. Um, and I say, this is someone who's regularly frustrated by apps.

Why are you regularly frustrated by apps? Bring out the grumpy CN, the one, the one that you spoke about. That's

terrible. Um, you know, they, they don't do what you want them to do. They don't allow kind of easy login. The fact that they know who you are. seems irrelevant. Um, the badly designed for usability.

So from a small device, I mean, when you're designing an app, you know, the size of the device is going to be used on and you can manage for that. It shouldn't be a mystery. I think in mobile web land, you know, some of these design decisions are a bit of a mystery, but on an app, they should not be. Um, and I think that those, you know, data entry.

Use of your personal data, uh, use of your kind of frequent journeys. These should just all be part and parcel of the app because it's possible. Um, and then not having decent payment flows really winds me up because it's 2024 and we can do these things now.

We could do them a while ago. It's just for some reason we choose not to.

Um, I guess let's, let's dive in on that a little bit more. Why do we choose not to? Why do we choose not to, in your example there, optimize payment

flows? Okay, I'm going to go in a little bit of a sort of a sideways journey here. My brother used to work for Boeing and in Boeing, the, the teams that designed all the various components, and there were thousands of different teams, only got a two week period where they could physically go and test their thing on an actual Boeing at Boeing field in Tacoma.

And if you'd lost out to a bigger, better resource team, you didn't get all the testing that you needed, which is why occasionally the overhead lockers wouldn't close well, or you'd get a drip on your head when the airplane decompressed because that team. Lost out to some other team that had more time.

And I think the same is with, with apps, is the customer app team often has lost a budget war with some other team. Or a finance director has said, but you've got a perfectly decent website, Cian, why do you need an app as well? I mean, you know, it's 2024 and we have to cut costs. So that's the cost we're going to cut.

Um, and so I think the apps team often lose out.

So, so it comes down to prioritization then. Um, I'm curious though, CM, because the, the metrics that you really like, the number of users that download an app, customer life, perhaps less so LTV. Um, they are those intangible metrics. The one that is probably harder to go and quantify to your financial director to say, we're doing this because of this, how do you overcome that?

How do you overcome the, we need to do this to make our customers. Do I, do I want to say happy? Satisfied? Give them value? Delight them? But over here, this is, you know, we're gonna do this and prioritize this because that's where the ROI lies. How do you balance that discussion?

I think by understanding who your best customers are and how this locks into a best customer strategy.

So how, how does this make your most valuable customers more valuable? Um, to show how. Uh, the apps fit into your ecosystem, uh, of channels. So in particular, the point I made earlier about omni channel data, that, that the apps are the one thing, if you have stores, that a customer can take with you, with them into a store and engage with, and that can have.

Real benefit to you and it can also offset other costs. So when a customer has a really great app in a store, they can do a lot of stuff themselves that you would have to pay an employee to do. And then that employee who's released from having to find a thing for a customer that they could find themselves can go and do something else that can make a customer happy.

I think the other thing is in, you know, in a world where we want more direct traffic and we want to know our customers, um, we can show the value of apps to a financial director. And I think that that money not spent on marketing definitely is something a financial director will listen to.

Yeah, maybe it is, or maybe it's the brand, the age old brand versus conversion debates that you know, people like Robbie Sutherland talk about.

Um, but perhaps it could be slightly more updated. To today's or e commerce online world, which could be the more direct versus indirect, the more, uh, immediate value versus, um, longevity value. Um, there's, there's, there's certainly a balance between the two. And I, I personally, for one who sells, dare I say, am I, I'm the software, um, sorry, the sofa salesman that you spoke about earlier, um, who sells software to.

To e commerce companies, I often find it hard to taper that balance between this is the value you're going to get immediately, but being honest, our software helps you nurture customers, helps you understand their levels of intent and nurture it later down the line. And that balance is really difficult, at least for me.

What, what advice might you have rather selfishly for someone who is going to collect some budget at an e commerce company that needs to balance those two, those two narratives?

I think it's always a very hard conversation, but I think if you think about it, the, the money now is not certain and it is, um, as we've all seen, the future is uncertain.

So having things that enable you to manage and predict an uncertain future, I think are things that we all want today. And so we can't not invest in what I call horizon two and horizon three. I think you have to have good predictors and good kind of twins of journeys now, so that in an uncertain future, you can redirect, nudge and manage, uh, performance.

Um, it's as simple as that.

I like that. I like calling them horizons as well. Uh, I think it gives you, or the recipient of that information and understanding that, look, there's things over this hill that we need to prepare for. Uh, we're going to war to some extent, usually against Google and Facebook. Um, but yes, that's the, that's how I describe it.

Uh, CM, thank you so much. Is there any last words of wisdom? If your statement of intent is about reinventing customer journeys and metrics, how would you. How would you summarize your feelings, or if you were to get on your soapbox for one minute, what, what is it that you would say to the audience, the listeners, people?

I would say, don't go with the obvious, uh, in your face metric. Go and have a look at what really matters to your customers and based on what they do and use those metrics. Track them for a month and you'll see a big difference.

I love that. Sian, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

There we have it. Thank you so much for listening. Please do like, subscribe and share on whatever platform it is that you're listening to on today. This show comes from the team behind Made With Intent, the customer intent platform for retailers. If you are of course, interested in being more profitable, whilst being more personal.

And please feel free to check us out at madewithintent. ai. Thanks again for listening and joining us on our mission to change how eCommerce sees, measures, and treats their customers. I've been your host, David Mannheim. Have a great day.