How to Build an Employee Experience That Rivals Your Customer Experience 01-29

Image credit :  Shyam's Imagination Library.

The marketing landscape is evolving rapidly. Hardly breaking news. There are new companies and
products constantly popping up that enable more efficient and effective work across all channels. The teams that achieve the most success are the ones that are constantly up-to-date with these new tools.

Finding new products is also a lot easier today than it was in the past. Today, there are far more thought leaders, newsletters, and blogs sharing the latest trends and ways in which companies are taking advantage of them.

Moving forward, the landscape is going to continue to morph and expand, which is truly saying something when you consider the number of martech options that were available in 2017 as per Scott Brinker's infamous chart. And if you can't read it here, and who can blame if you can't, you can see the full version here.

Here are 5 ways that tech is going to change marketing in 2018 that you should be on the lookout for:

1. It Will Be Easier To Find Customers

There are inbound leads, like site visitors, and there are also outbound leads, like a group of Sales VPs that get sent an email. Tech is making it easier to find and sell to both of these groups.
For inbound, technology has enabled marketing teams to find out more about their website visitors. Companies can run reverse IP lookups to match a visitor with the company they work for. Different services are also making it easier to capture emails. Emails are more valuable than ever because enrichment products can tell you everything about a person once given an email. Plus, that data is becoming more accurate as time goes on.

Outbound leads have also become easier to find. Marketing teams can take advantage of lead generation services that offer unique targeting of
audiences. The customization that companies will be able to do to gather leads, and the quality of those leads, will also increase in 2018. This is, consequently, enabling companies to spend more time figuring out who their target audience is, instead of actually gathering their information.

2. There Is Better Customization

Once you know the visitor's title, location, company and/or industry, anything about their site experience can be changed. This could be the images they are presented, the customers or testimonials they see for social proof, and even the messages sent by a chatbot. This customization, and the functionality for it, is going to improve dramatically in 2018.

The early movers are also going to get a huge bump in conversion rates. They will be able to target messaging and pictures to fit the psyche of each company and visitor. Instead of needing a catch-all site, companies can segment their audiences. Mark Rabe, SVP of Art Concrete Solutions told me, “We have 2 very different customers. One group are potential franchisees for our concrete repair business. The other group are consumers who might purchase our DIY concrete repair bucket. We have to segment our visitors and show them relevant info or they’re gone fast. We can display the best option given data we have on the visitor. That, inevitably, will increase conversion rates.”

3. There Will Be A Greater Push For Immediate Sales

People have many distractions today, and that will only increase in 2018. They are constantly flooded with emails and content, as well as spend a significant amount of time on social media. Therefore, in 2018, marketing is going to move further towards quick sales. E-commerce sites are trying to capture the sale upon a user’s first visit. They are already offering discounts for immediate buys and will likely continue to do so. Email follow-ups about open online orders will also continue to emerge as the norm.

Implementations of blockchain technologies, like PureGold’s new gold-backed payment gateway, will enhance consumer access to e-commerce using cryptocurrency. Being a brick and mortar company with gold ATMs, gold minting factories and storefronts, PureGold also offers many offline ways to provide instant transactions for consumers. Whether mobile, desktop, or in person, maximum flexibility is offered.

The recent emergence of chat-bots like Drift and Intercom enable a site visitor to schedule a demo with a sales rep in seconds. Being able to do so prevents the need for back and forth email exchange. It also takes advantage of the currently attentive visitor before they become distracted or overwhelmed with other things.

4. No Excuse For Poor Web Design

Engineers have become better and there are new tools enabling novices to design quality-looking sites. In just a few clicks, developers and designers can now easily build content-ready, production sites for their products. Landing pages are critical components of a brand’s image and will largely determine the effectiveness of a company’s funnel. This trend is putting a greater emphasis on people that can design, build front-end sites, or even navigate a CMS like WordPress.

5. There Will Be A Greater Emphasis On Data (if that's even possible)

Marketers can look at more metrics than ever. These include open rates, time spent on pages, and how people interact with a page. This data can drive better decisions and keep marketing people from guessing. There has even been an emergence of machine learning in marketing. Machine learning can qualify leads and determine customer projected value.

Companies like Repux are using data and artificial intelligence to help businesses maximize their potential. On the Repux platform, businesses can sell anonymized data to developers for use with machine learning algorithms. Once optimized as intelligent applications, the applications can be sold back to businesses for better business decision making.

Larger brands will likely put more resources towards their branding, images and messaging because they can. Smaller brands do not have the budget or time for that. In the past, this meant that they were less effective. Now, though, smaller brands can test a handful of approaches quickly.
Then, they can use that data to inform their decisions.

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How to Understand and Measure User Experience 04-11

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User experience is the foundation on which customer journeys are built and, fundamentally, a huge factor in how customers perceive, understand and trust your company.

Endless (electronic) ink has been spilled on different UX designs, challenges, opportunities, opinions, and methods. There is no one perfect approach. People are emotional creatures, and part of their reaction to your online presence will depend purely on aesthetics. Good user experience fits both the emotional and the transactional needs of your users. In this ocean of choices, therefore, the real question becomes: How do companies measure or quantify the success of their user experience?

What Exactly Is Good User Experience?

There are many different approaches to user experience (UX). Some companies, like Apple, create a “walled garden” or immersive approach, tightly controlling the user experience and forcing people to follow a specific set of tasks, without room for flexibility. Others, like Amazon, use a reactive approach, offering different responses and unique calls to action based on a customer’s behavior. There is no ‘correct’ UX and a company’s UX should be tied directly to their business model, their customer expectations, and their long-term strategy.


The ideal user experience occurs when people are able to do exactly what they want when interacting with your company. You fulfill their needs in a way that meets and even exceeds their expectations. Fundamentally, when customers’ expectations are exceeded, they experience a positive emotion, and providing consistent positive interactions with your company is the highest goal of UX design.

Why Quantify User Experience?

Measuring or quantifying UX is necessary for a variety of reasons:

• It allows you to generate a baseline cohesive strategy for customer interactions.
• It helps establish a foundation for any new initiatives or customer-facing products you produce.
• It lets you benchmark yourself against other companies.
• Hard numbers make UX initiatives easier to communicate and integrate into an organization.

UX is the foundation on which customer journeys are built and, fundamentally, a huge factor in how customers perceive, understand and trust your company. If customers try to achieve something on one of your digital channels and fail, it will lower their opinion of your company and eventually deplete your profitability.

Subjectivity vs. Objectivity in Measuring UX:

The inherent challenge of UX is that it’s almost entirely subjective. As a result, many companies make the mistake of believing that user experience as a whole cannot be measured.

If a company assumes that UX is not quantifiable, then anytime it adds a new digital function, the outcome will be wildly dependent on the unique tastes and preferences of the creative team that designed it. Moreover, in the absence of benchmark information, any mistakes will be difficult to identify.

How to Quantify

UX will never be fully quantifiable. There is always subjectivity when dealing with the opinions of individuals. Furthermore, consumer tastes and general design trends change along larger social patterns and are not always easy to predict. User experience, however, is not totally design-oriented.
If a customer wants to provide payment information but finds no easy option for that action, this is bad UX design. If a customer has a question and there is no FAQ page, this is bad UX design. If a customer’s data is intercepted or otherwise insecure within your system, this is a VERY bad UX experience. UX builds on itself, from back-end fundamental elements to front-facing consumer visuals and this clear construction creates the potential for objectivity.

Simplify the Issues – Make them Granular

The failures listed above are simple yes-or-no switches. If there is no FAQ page, then you are not providing best-practice UX. This is a no. If you do have an FAQ page, this is a yes. If your customers can pay easily, this is a success. If they cannot, it is a failure. You can break down the payment process even further: do customers have to enter information twice? Is the form too long to fit on a mobile screen? By breaking down each touchpoint into a series of binary questions, you can assemble the structure for a meaningful analysis.

What Questions Do You Ask?

The hardest tactical challenge is defining the right set of questions. Centric Digital uses a set of precisely relevant questions when generating the benchmark for your business. We’ve developed a taxonomy of over 2,000 individual best-practice questions that are based on understanding a company’s outward-facing and internal digital user experience. These questions can be used to compare your company to its own previous states, to other companies in your industry and to trends across several industries. Here are just a few of our topic areas to give you an overview of how we construct our hierarchy of questions regarding a typical business website:

We begin with basic mechanics: Is your site easily accessible on mobile?

While you’ve probably achieved the standard of making your site compatible with the main online browsers, today’s crucial user experience challenge pertains to mobile access. Google’s “Mobile First” approach means that the search giant is switching its approach this year. It now crawls your site as a mobile user, rather than a desktop user. If it notices aspects of your site that aren’t effective in mobile (for example, links that don’t work or slow-loading pages), Google will downrank you in its search results. You can look at Google as an external force making quantified judgments about your UX, and evaluate your site along the same metrics.

This change in search ranking was driven by customer trends: Mobile users outnumbered desktop users back in 2014, and the mobile trend has only grown since then. Unfortunately, user experience hasn’t kept pace with this trend, and 45 to 47 percent of mobile users report disliking their experience with websites and apps. This percentage will undoubtedly improve as more websites catch up to the mobile online universe, but it proves that, for the moment, you can get out in front of the pack if you provide a pleasing experience.

Does your code avoid deprecated callouts or functions? Is your HTML optimized?

Although your site will be visited by growing numbers of mobile users, that doesn’t mean you can neglect to update your computer-based experience. Especially in the more developed nations, people expect omnichannel access to the digital marketplace. Even in the fourth quarter of 2016, conversion rates were higher on traditional websites than on mobile sites or apps. These statistics indicate that users may do some browsing on the phone that’s always in their hand, but they often switch to a computer to make the actual purchase.

Once you have evaluated these basic utilities, the hierarchy of questions moves to slightly higher levels: Are your site visitors using search effectively? Do they use the back arrow frequently? Excessive searching and backtracking without conversions are a good numerical indicator that there’s a UX problem with your website.

Does your company use Twitter for customer service?

Social media has become an important element in user experience, especially the use of Twitter as an alternative customer assistance channel. Twitter recently introduced special tools specifically for streamlining its customer support function because so many companies are using it for that purpose.

What does your customer journey look like?

The types of questions become more challenging to answer when you move into higher levels of evaluation because you’re discussing more of the subjective human response. As subjectivity increases, quantification is still possible, but it’s a bit less straightforward. At this level, understanding your customer is key. Your customers may be drawn from a different demographic than those of your competitors, so your user experience may need to be correspondingly different. Your granular and binary user metrics are drawn from a more holistic approach, one in which you map out your customer journeys to give a clear understanding of how, when and why a customer would need to interact with your company – both in the digital and real-world realms – and identifying points of potential success and failure.

Every Channel Should Provide Equally Easy Access

A unified customer service experience provides streamlined access across every channel. Do your customers have quick access to the answers they need? A thorough FAQ page on a website can serve this purpose, while a question menu may be more useful for a customer support line. Is the wording on your FAQ page similar to the wording your customer service representatives use? Consistency is part of your branding, and your company voice should be evident at every touchpoint.

Surveying Customer Responses

With a strong idea of your customer persona, deconstructing user experience becomes much easier and more effective. You are entering the realm of intuition, but intuitive navigation is a real thing and you know it when you experience it. To measure the emotional impact of your user experience, Centric structures questions regarding your customer touchpoints, evaluating interactions across all media. It’s also important to have a large enough sample of questions – having only 50 measures is not as helpful as having 200.

Emotions Are Measurable

As you move into evaluating the subtle levels of user experience and explore the question of whether your customers find your website appealing, you can also seek responses directly from users. Surveys, user testing and focus groups all have a place in evaluating the subjective experiences of users, and it’s possible to gauge responses on numerical scales.

Updating Must Become Routine

Your online presence is never static, and your digital strategy will never be “finished.” Robust testing and continuous development are ongoing processes; you must review, update and snapshot your questions repeatedly in order to maintain value. When building your digital strategy, regularly assess not only your user experience but also your UX measurements – standards and tastes change, and your company must remain agile to stay at the leading digital edge. 


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Climbing Down from the Ivory Tower 08-14

Climbing Down from the Ivory Tower

Nava Ashraf explains why it makes sense for field researchers to co-produce knowledge with the people they study and serve.

In the late 1970s, the Chicago Police Department noticed that the city's crime rate increased when cops stopped walking the beat and started driving around in patrol cars instead. They wondered why, and asked the political scientist Elinor Olstrom to provide some insight.

She realized the problem: Cars negated the ability to interact with people on the streets. As it turned out, cops did a better job fighting crime when they sought input from the public. That had happened organically when they walked their beats. And by sharing their knowledge of the neighborhood, the citizens helped the police to protect the citizens. Olstrom dubbed the phenomenon "co-production."

Since then, it has become common for organizations to treat consumers as production partners. Many high-tech firms hire existing customers to beta-test early versions of products, in order to get critical feedback before creating the final versions. Some companies even base their business model on co-production; Build-a-Bear stores allow consumers to create personalized teddy bears.

"With the growth of customizable technology, there is an appreciation of this co-generation process in many, many domains," says Nava Ashraf, an associate professor in the Negotiations, Organizations, and Markets unit at Harvard Business School.

“ASKING THEM TO APPLY SOMETHING THAT’S BEEN GENERATED SOMEWHERE ELSE ISN'T INVOLVING THEM IN THE PROCESS”

But there's a dearth of co-production in the public health sector, which often depends entirely on faraway academics and organizations to solve local problems. This frustrates Ashraf, who for more than a decade has studied behavioral economics in the context of developing countries. She believes that global health researchers and public health workers should make a point of co-producing knowledge with those who will most benefit from it: the residents of the communities they study.

"The common process of thinking is that from over here in our ivory tower at Harvard, we are supposed to find the knowledge, bestow the knowledge to people on the other side of the world, and get them to apply it and disseminate it," she says. "That seems kind of wrong."

Recognizing the importance of knowledge co-production can lead not only to successful products and services, but also to improved supply chain and delivery strategies. She justifies the importance of co-production in her elective course, Managing Global Health: Applying Behavioral Economics to Create Impact, which she teaches to second-year MBA students at HBS and select students from Harvard Medical School and the Kennedy School of Government.

THE USER'S PERSPECTIVE

The course begins with a case in which UNICEF tries to understand why there are so many diarrhea-related fatalities in developing countries. (Diarrheal diseases account for one in nine child deaths worldwide, according to the Center for Disease Control.) This, despite the existence of an effective treatment called oral rehydration therapy, which essentially involves drinking a solution of water, salt, sugar, and supplemental zinc.

The students soon realize that UNICEF and the World Health Organization have failed to consider the problem from the end-users' perspective. ORT, which provides life-saving rehydration, does not actually eliminate diarrhea, so it's hard for parents to tell whether it's working. The ORT solution tastes awful, like salty metal, so many children refuse to drink it. And pharmacists tend not to suggest ORT to mothers because they don't consider it to be "real medicine," the case explains.

Ashraf believes these oversights could have been prevented if parents and local health care workers had been involved in designing a solution. Indeed, oral rehydration therapy was successful in countries like Bangladesh, where cooperation among field workers, scientists, and mothers led to a very effective program. She cites Atul Gawande, who explained one program's progress in a 2013 New Yorker article:

"The field workers soon realized that having the mothers make the solution themselves was more effective than just showing them. The workers began looking for diarrhea cases when they arrived in a village, and treating them to show how effective and safe the remedy was. The scientists also investigated various questions that came up, such as whether clean water was required. (They found that, although boiled water was preferable, contaminated water was better than nothing.)"

"It's too common to think, we have the technology and we have the systems, and they'd work if only people would use them," Ashraf says. "But in doing that, we're not realizing that they should be part of the process. Asking them to apply something that's been generated somewhere else isn't involving them in the process."

CO-PRODUCTION IN FIELD RESEARCH

Out of the classroom, Ashraf has been walking the talk by incorporating co-production into her own field research.

In 2010 Ashraf was part of a research team that helped the Zambian government with a nascent national program to recruit, train, and employ community health workers throughout the country, which was suffering from a severe lack of health care providers. The goal was to employ 5,000 new community health workers by 2015. The challenge was figuring out how to recruit a talented, dedicated cadre of people who wanted to serve their local communities.

Often, academic field researchers design an experiment among themselves, only going to the field when they're ready to conduct the experiment on members of the community. In this case, though, the academics designed an experiment with the head of policy development for the Zambia Ministry of Health, along with several other local officials. The academics came armed with knowledge of prior research. The local officials had practical knowledge of the community.

Co-production is a tricky endeavor for scholars. It's time-consuming to incorporate everyone's input, especially when working with people who are unfamiliar with standard research rules. It took nearly four years to design the health care worker recruitment experiment, Ashraf notes.

"It's challenging to balance the rigor of science and objectivity with the participation of the people we're studying," she says. "But sometimes it makes sense to have people participate in running the experiment, not only because they're the ones who can benefit most from the results, but because it's better for knowledge. At every step you can say, 'Look at the data. What do you think of this?' And their input is so important. Because in these cases, they're the ones who are the real experts, you know?"

In the eventual field experiment, researchers launched two recruitment campaigns. Each targeted half of 48 randomly selected rural districts across the country. In 24 districts, potential employees were wooed with posters and brochures emphasizing community service. In the other 24, the material emphasized career advancement.

The campaigns drew two distinct groups of candidates. While the career advancement campaign attracted a group that had more qualifications and was more technically knowledgeable, both campaigns attracted candidates with equally high levels of pro-social motivation. The researchers followed the health workers' progress for 18 months when they returned to their communities to provide health services.

It turned out career-focused applicants visited 29 percent more households than did community-focused candidates, and conducted over twice as many community mobilization meetings, while seeing approximately the same number of patients at the health posts. Both groups spent the same amount of time at each household, meaning the career group wasn't sacrificing quality time for quantity. And the employee retention rate was similar in both groups.

The researchers detail their findings in the paper, "Do-Gooders and Go-Getters: Career Incentives, Selection, and Performance in Public Service Delivery." The key takeaway in the paper: "Career incentives, far from selecting the 'wrong' types, attract talented workers to the public sector who deliver health services effectively."

But there's another takeaway for Ashraf, whose current research involves co-producing studies with urban planners in sub-Saharan Africa.

"We show academics that you can actually generate good science while also having impact on good policy," she says, "even though it's a little more labor intensive and might take longer."

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