Sitecore: Web psychology and customer experience

Nenhuma nota no slide

Can I ask does anyone look at this and have a good experience?
Ok does anyone have a bad experience?
So can I assume most people don’t feel any experience?

And this is what happens most of the time. People view website content, open emails, see banner ads and they don’t have any experience. They just have a memory.
An experience is a lasting memory and it beats content. Content is certainly no longer king. It’s all about how you feel and fundamentally DID YOU LIKE IT?

From our earliest years, we prefer things that are just for us – that recognise and treat us as individuals. My little daughter is a the perfect example of how early on these things form in our minds – year round, every trip to sainsburys ends with her scoping out birthday cakes, deciding which one she likes, changing her mind from Frozen to Despicable Me to Hello Kitty and back again

But when her birthday rolls round, a personalised cake, with her name, shaped in the number of her age, with her favourite moshi monsters on it wins hands down (I didn’t bake this, by the way). In fact, she’s had them for so long now, that if she got a shop bought number in a couple of weeks time, when she turns 7, she’d be actively disappointed

And it’s not just kids who love this stuff. Look at NOTHS – a business that didn’t exist 10 years ago has thrived in the recession – capitalising on personalised gift-giving. Because we all secretly or not so secretly are delighted by things that are about individuality. UNDERSTANDING your audience’s psychology, communicating persuasively and selling with integrity are the key to digital success.

And the prize is that doing this adds significantly to the bottom line. Take coffee – the mark up in taking it from commodity, which costs 2-3c a cup to an all singing, all dancing coffee EXPERIENCE, as served up by various niche coffee shops all over London, is astounding by anyone’s standards

Not every business sells coffee, of course, but the truth is that better EXPERIENCE means a better psychological effect on the customer, which can attract a premium price

This table shows the broader impact of this thinking in business – Watermark consulting map focus on customer experience against stock market performance and the results every year are stark. CX leaders outperform not only laggards but share performance in general. Leaders see a greater return even than a market which has risen sharply – while Laggards, even in this climate, post losses

So, what does it take? Well, naturally, it all starts with understanding your customers – before you can communicate. Nowadays, of course, the challenge is knowing which data and attributes to focus on, not where can you find suitable data. Your digital visitors are literally leaving you millions of clues every month – what they’re interested in, what they aren’t interested in, where they get stuck, when they like to visit, how often, via which channel….

Only their mums know them better

And excitingly, thinking is now starting to turn beyond the idea of data as just a commodity, like oil – we’ve all heard that phrase

Instead, smart businesses are thinking about using the data they have to GROW and NURTURE ideas and relationships with their customers, which improve not just their experience but also create positive business outcomes. And of course, everyone’s a winner in that scenario

However, all this can only start with the realisation that one or more big piles of data are just the starting point. Head scratching about where useful data might come from has long been replaced by head scratching about how to navigate the absolute sea of data that businesses hold – often housed in multiple systems

And that tends to be the issue – I ran a workshop recently where I asked delegates to list out what was preventing their organisation from creating targeted, personalised experiences for their visitors – and more than concerns about privacy, or executive buy in, or anything else – top of the list by far was disparate, unconnected data, in silos created by various business areas over the years to solve their immediate concerns, rather than putting customers at the centre

“Technical debt” is the phrase we hear a lot

[ Speaker notes: Reframe: First Reframe or unrecognized need, : establish credibility, by “reading their mind”, demonstrating empathy, and showing you know their business. ]

Companies and their customers have become Disconnected.

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As you have added in more systems and processes to deal with all this new marketing technology.

Yet the more you put in additional marketing systems to solve these issue, the more you increase this complexity.

We know there are over 947 identified marketing technology offerings out there, and it’s doubling about every 18 months.

Everyone’s in an arms race to add more technology to solve the customer experience, yet not realizing that simply adding more point systems, is compounding the problem.

Why?

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Because almost every time you add a new delivery system, you add another data store. Your creating all these pockets of data about your customer’s experience – in pieces all over the place.

As you put in additional marketing systems to try to solve one set of issues, the more you increase this complexity, and the more disconnected your customer data becomes.

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And you’re getting disconnected from your customers.

Most companies consider data the most important area for delivering an integrated customer experience. – Econsultancy / CACI - (63% say it’s critical)
Most agencies consider data the most important area for delivering an integrated customer experience among their clients. – Econsultancy / CACI (70% say it’s critical)
Yet marketing systems are increasingly complex and your customer data more and more scattered.

And along the way you are losing sight of the actual people trying to do business with you.
And Marketers know this. They know they need to improve. However:

Only 30% of respondents have a single view of customers across online and offline touchpoints.
– Sitecore CX Maturity Model Survey – and that doesn’t even ask if they are using that single view to deliver a unique customer experience….

Research by CMO Club found: 85% of CMOs say their efforts at implementing an omni-channel marketing strategy are being thwarted by a lack of access to data and inadequate tools/technology. – CMO Club

So, the first step is to start collecting and connecting as much of your data as you can and linking it to digital data

This aggregation leads to you being able to define new relationships within the data, and to see an increasingly complete view of your visitors

Then you can analyse and drive business decisions that support the positive experiences you want your customers to have when they interact with you

What people do naturally gives you the clearest indication of who they are – and in Sitecore we capture every interaction and store it at visitor level. This gives you a complete view of every visitor at micro level. We capture a contact card of information and combine this with a timeline so you can visualise in absolute detail how every visitor interacts

Obviously while this is great, once data volumes get above a certain level, how much you dig around in here is going to be limited. but

Given Sitecore started life as a CMS vendor in 2001 it’s a given we have content creation and management nailed. These are the key additional area’s or clients require to create amazing customer experiences

Here’s another great example – main reason its all down to Sitecore. 100% attributable to our DMS
No design change, no UX change
Just Personlisation based on a couple of key spots for first 6 months

To go back to the original point, then, to truly put psychology into practise, just like in the real world, you need to start with the individual – get to know them, build a picture, adapt. New evidence to update beliefs – skating very close to Bayes theorem there. But in any case – you need to lay the foundations right to capture as much as you can.

Sitecore: Web psychology and customer experience

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Sitecore: Web psychology and customer experience