Improving Conversion Rates. It's about the DATA!

The importance of optimizing web and mobile digital experience is well understood. There is lots of market data to support what is intuitively obvious.  The challenge is in how to do it well.  Do you have the tools and DATA you need to properly understand and manage the user experience on your web and mobile properties? 

Building and maintaining transactional sites that deliver great customer experiences is not easy.  There are many permutations and variables that occur a high volume transactional site every day: device types, network, mobile, user path, country/geography, product selection, configuration choices, promotions/rebates, support, etc. Each of these variables can create different responses that alter the user experience.  Testing is critical, but not flawless.  Having the ability to collect the DATA that enables you to segment and slice user sessions by all these variables and then monitor user experience for each segment is critical for companies that are serious about managing online customer experience.

None of the pure web analytic tools in the marketplace give you this level of DATA. There are a proliferation of tools in the marketplace that give you a variety of different views of customer experience, including heatmaps, link analytics, session replay (usually sample data), and A/B testing. Almost all of them fail to give you the level of DATA you need to segment and subsegment user sessions to monitor user sessions and identify issues or customer struggle points.  Getting the tools and DATA in place is the first step to understanding, analyzing, and managing customer experience.

Once you have the DATA then you can establish a set of business processes that will enable you to monitor customer experience. Linking customer experience analytic DATA to other sources, such as Voice of Customer, surveys, and the contact center will enable you to connect the dots between customer feedback and actual user experience.  The right DATA strategy will also enable you to quantify the business impact of various user experience issues and prioritize those issues that are having the greatest impact to conversion and/or adoption rates.  To get more information on best practices, click below to download the IBM Commerce whitepaper titled: "Five Ways to Increase Conversion and Adoption Rates". 

Customer experience management will improve conversion rates and ultimately boost revenue.  It will also improve customer loyalty and social sentiment.  The first step on this journey is to put the right tools in place, so you can collect the DATA you need.