Multichannel Success Podcast Season 3 Episode 2 - Transcript
Why your conversion rate obsession is obsolete - or is it?
Hello and welcome to Episode 2 from Season 3 of the Multichannel Success
Podcast. I'm David Kohn and I'm here today with my regular companion, Mark
Pinkerton from Prospero. Hello. And with our special guest, Abi Hough from
UU3. Our subject today is why your conversion rate optimisation obsession is
obsolete. Or is it? Abi is a specialist in this area. Why don't you tell us,
Abi, who you are and what you've done in this area?
Abi Hough [00:00:50 - 00:01:39]
Hello there. So, I'm Abi. I have been a consultant for, gosh, about 20 years
now. And my focus is basically trying to find things, for want of a better
word, that affect your conversion rate or hinder some of your users on your
website. So, it covers everything from usability to accessibility,
opportunities that are not being taken advantage of, a whole plethora of
different things. But my primary focus and the thing that I'm most interested
about is users and what makes them tick and how we can build relationships
with them. So, a whole host of different things. In fact, all the things that
make up optimization are in my wheelhouse. So, that's kind of my focus.
David Kohn [00:01:39 - 00:01:44]
Fantastic. And Mark, tell us a little bit about your background and how it
helps with this topic.
Mark Pinkerton [00:01:44 - 00:02:20]
Yeah, so I started in I think what would broadly be called the CRO world in
about 2005 with an optimisation agency called Logan Todd and I spent seven
years there as the whole process of CRO was developed. I think we were fairly
close to the cutting edge of CRO at the time and then carried that over for
four years in the same team within PwC, so I've had 11 years in this world so
that kind of underpins an awful lot of my thinking and the way that I approach
things even as I take a more strategic view on things now.
David Kohn [00:02:19 - 00:02:31]
Fantastic. Okay, so you both obviously know a lot about conversion rate
optimisation. So why don't we start by getting a definition of what is CRO
today? Abi.
Abi Hough [00:02:32 - 00:02:52]
It's not what it used to be. If we, you know, if you want a CRO, conversion
rate optimization, then I guess in the early days, it kind of all focused on
exactly that, right? Getting people through a funnel to make a purchase. That
was the only thing that mattered. The conversion rate of the website.
Mark Pinkerton [00:02:52 - 00:02:54]
Absolutely.
Abi Hough [00:02:52 - 00:03:36]
Absolutely. I think it's it's probably changed a lot from that. And we see a
lot of banter on LinkedIn about what the terminology should be. But in my
view, it's definitely a lot more than just conversion rate as a single metric.
It's about understanding who you're dealing with, who you're trying to sell
to, making that journey as easy as possible that you can for them. And just
generally, you know, trying to understand what makes people tick. So it's not
just about one single metric on a website. There are a whole host of other
things that you can look at in order to optimise. So it's definitely had its
own evolution, I would say, from where we were 20 years ago.
Mark Pinkerton [00:03:33 - 00:03:35]
Yeah.
Abi Hough [00:03:36 - 00:03:41]
Even five years ago, I think it has changed considerably.
David Kohn [00:03:41 - 00:03:47]
Thank you. And Mark, what have you seen in terms of the way our understanding
of what CRO is has changed?
Mark Pinkerton [00:03:47 - 00:04:38]
I think having a conversion rate focus in the early days was very important
because it showed the potential for the website to an audience, all of whom we
were all learning on the job at the same time. So clients were learning in
terms of their e-com platform making it work, and we were learning as analysts
and CRO specialists in terms of what worked and what didn't work. As time has
gone on, that knowledge has been shared broadly, therefore there's kind of a
base layer of understanding, one hopes, within the industry. However, when
people talk about conversion rate as a focus, the easiest thing to do in the
world is to improve your conversion rate just by turning off all your ad
traffic, and then you suddenly...
Abi Hough [00:04:37 - 00:04:39]
Just keep the organic stuff, right?
Mark Pinkerton [00:04:39 - 00:05:21]
Yeah and then your conversion rate will jump. However, that's not in the long-
term interest of the client or even the short-term interest of the client. So,
you know, it's about understanding holistically how all this stuff works,
particularly in an econ world where you have a very good metric as a
conversion, you know, your sale is your conversion, but you can clearly,
conversion rate optimisation has gone much wider than purely econ. And it has
morphed into this general understanding and driving to change and improve
things. So performance optimisation is where it's at in my head. How that
differs from experimentation, I think we'll come on to later.
David Kohn [00:05:21 - 00:05:55]
Yeah, cool, okay, so thank you for those definitions and giving us a little
bit of the history. I guess, you know, we put a deliberately controversial
headline onto this podcast. I guess, from my perspective, I look at CRO and I
think, hasn't all the functionality been done? You know, don't we know how to
build a good website nowadays? The days when you could change the color of a
button or change the way the product page is, hasn't that all been done?
Aren't websites all pretty good now? Abi.
Abi Hough [00:05:56 - 00:05:56]
No.
David Kohn [00:05:57 - 00:05:59]
Okay, that's blunt.
Abi Hough [00:05:58 - 00:06:48]
That's blunt. If you want the blunt answer, I think we think we know what
we're doing but actually we don't. Part of my work is auditing websites to
understand where the opportunities are and I can tell you every website that I
audit there will be at least 100, 150 different things that are broken, are
stupid from a usability point of view, do not make any sense, are confusing
and you know it's I still can't believe that I am still in the business of
doing this which obviously counters your point that people know what we're
doing because we don't. There are still many many examples of where we have
fallen short of the mark on so many different areas.
Mark Pinkerton [00:06:49 - 00:07:29]
Yeah, I completely agree. I completely agree with that. But I think one of the
causes of that, or the multiple causes of it, one is that it's actually much
harder to take an overview of the digital estate now than it was. Things are
far more complicated. They're more technical. And also, you've got this whole
thing of, you know, when we grew up, there were one or two people who actually
had an overview of the whole website, webmasters they used to be called. And
now you've got a whole world where people specialise in SEO or PPC much
earlier in their, or e-com, much earlier in their career. But it means that
they don't see the whole picture because they focus too early. Indeed. I think
we're...
David Kohn [00:07:28 - 00:07:35]
I think we're back into needing to see the bigger picture.
Mark Pinkerton [00:07:30 - 00:07:31]
Siloizations. Yeah.
David Kohn [00:07:35 - 00:07:46]
Probably in the old days, conversion rate optimisation was a very specific
discipline. But I guess now it has to be seen as part of the wider picture. Do
you see that, Abi?
Abi Hough [00:07:46 - 00:09:09]
Yes, I do. And I think probably the advantage of having somebody like myself
come in and look at a website, it does give you a fresh set of eyes on
something. So, you know, if you're dealing with one website, you are looking
at that website day in and day out from, you know, perhaps many different
facets. And much like banner blindness on websites, you get the same thing
with your own product, right? You don't see the problems. You develop
shortcuts to do things on your own website because you're using it every
single day. But what you're not doing is viewing it from the point of perhaps
somebody who comes onto that website for the first time and they're looking at
it and they're thinking, I have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing here. I
don't understand what is being sold. I don't understand how I find what I'm
even looking for. You know, what is this checkout? Do I even trust it? So I
think when you're working on a website for a long period of time, you get a
degree of complacency about what that website should be doing in terms of you
to optimise it or to, for want of a better word, increase your conversion
rate. But let's avoid that for the time being. So I think it's important that
you do have people come in and make you accountable for the thing that you
have created.
Mark Pinkerton [00:09:00 - 00:09:00]
Yeah.
Abi Hough [00:09:09 - 00:09:13]
Because nine times out of ten, it is a Frankenstein.
Mark Pinkerton [00:09:13 - 00:10:02]
But if you look at, I don't know, fashion websites for example, then there's a
large degree of commonality across fashion websites. And then if you have a
site that works in a different way, it stands out. If you look at something
like Paul Smith, which has just gone onto the Centra platform, they've carried
their design over, but some of the way that it works is unusual and that has
standout, but whether or not that helps from a conversion rate optimisation is
a completely different guess. One would have to have access to the data to
know. I guess my point is that people tend to follow exemplars of people they
think are successful and ape the layout of those websites without necessarily
understanding what drives performance.
David Kohn [00:10:02 - 00:10:42]
Absolutely. Well, I think, and I always think, Abi, your point about getting a
fresh perspective. I remember when we first met, we did a piece of work at
Heels. We were obsessed by a particular piece of functionality and really
wanted to test it. And when we presented our product page to the customers,
they barely touched the piece of functionality, this complex thing we'd
created. They were all about the product carousel. And if I hadn't seen it
with my own eyes, I would never have believed it. And it completely changed
the way that we looked at our product page design. So I think I can vouch for
getting a fresh pair of eyes.
Mark Pinkerton [00:10:39 - 00:11:06]
I think I can vouch. The one thing that working in this world taught me was
that no matter how much experience you think you might have, you know nothing.
You will be wrong. And that is a fundamental difference, I think, in the way
that people who come up this way think. Whereas if you haven't been in this
world, you're going to think you know what you're doing.
Abi Hough [00:11:02 - 00:11:02]
Yeah.
Mark Pinkerton [00:11:06 - 00:11:11]
I know that I don't know what I'm doing, but I think I have a better starting
point to learn.
Abi Hough [00:11:11 - 00:11:32]
And often times I will get, somebody will say to me, you know, I've got this
thing and I want to improve it, but the higher-ups are not interested. They
say it's a waste of time, but I've got all this research and my one piece of
advice to them is to plonk them into a user testing session, like, you know,
observing it.
David Kohn [00:11:30 - 00:11:31]
Hmm.
Abi Hough [00:11:32 - 00:12:15]
Because really for me, that is the best part of the job is getting somebody to
realise that there is a real problem when they think there is none. And a user
testing session is absolutely the best way to do that. Practical examples, I
have sat in client meetings where they have insisted there's nothing wrong
with their mobile experience. And then we give them an Android phone, because
of course they're all iPhone users, and say, okay, you accomplished this task.
And of course they can't do it. Yes, I've set it up to a degree, but to get
them to have that realisation, to experience that struggle for real life, it's
a big game changer, I think. So that's a top tip for people to take away.
David Kohn [00:12:15 - 00:12:37]
Thank you. And I think I think where we've got to so far is, okay, the
obsession with conversion rate itself, I think we're saying, you've got to
you've got to look at a broader picture. And we've said that CRO has evolved
probably into something called performance optimization. So I think we're
probably agreed that it isn't obsolete.
Now, I think it's inherent and the value of CRO underpins the way that you
think about
Abi Hough [00:13:31 - 00:13:35]
things. If you're getting to longer term metrics away from conversion rate
onto customer lifetime value or profitability or some other KPIs, then that's
well and good, although customer lifetime value is really hard to test
against. One of the things, and because I've come up this way, one of the
examples I just want to mention to listeners is that on the Prospero website,
we have a performance gap model where people can play with their funnel and
end up looking at their profitability of their business, what the impact of
the CRO changes would be in terms of profitability. From our point of view,
that's a useful tool for converting the high ups to the value of doing this
sort of work. Excellent.
And that's a big selling isn't it? Yes, it is.
Mark Pinkerton [00:13:33 - 00:13:36]
Yes, it is. And we spent quite a lot of time building the tool.
David Kohn [00:13:37 - 00:14:01]
Very good. So we've said it is important and it's changed and you Abi started
talking about user testing. I mean one of the things a lot of people look
straight to do is they look straight to get into experimentation. Is that a
good idea? Is that what our listeners should be thinking? Let's run loads of
experiments tomorrow.
Abi Hough [00:14:00 - 00:14:01]
How much traffic have they got?
David Kohn [00:14:01 - 00:14:02]
Yeah.
Abi Hough [00:14:02 - 00:15:07]
How much resource do they have? You know, how open are they to be proven
wrong? What is the appetite within the company for it overall? Are they trying
to do a hard selling? Do people understand what it is, you know, and how it
might challenge assumptions, business assumptions that have been there for
years and years and years? These are all questions that they should be asking
before they even start to think about experimentation, because it is a big
undertaking. I think to do it properly, it's not just a off the shelf
solution. You know, there is a lot of areas that you have to focus on and
research that you have to do, and making sure your setup is correct from the
first outset before you even, there's no point in experimenting on data that
is poorly collected, for example, right? You're proving absolutely nothing. So
it is a huge undertaking, and many of the companies that I deal with, they're
not necessarily in a position to do testing, right? They haven't got the
traffic to do it, or the resources. So...
Mark Pinkerton [00:15:08 - 00:15:10]
Yeah, you can do it on your homepage, but not much else.
David Kohn [00:15:10 - 00:15:35]
So I guess the question, Abi, is, you know, I come from a relatively sort of
small, medium enterprise background, and I completely concur with you that the
resources are not always available to run loads of tests, but where do you
then start on this journey to improving your performance? Is it analysis? Is
it user testing? What's the focus?
Abi Hough [00:15:36 - 00:16:15]
I like to say it's called getting your house in order, right? And if you can
get your house in order, then, you know, if your traffic grows, you might well
be in a position to start running an experiment. For me, it is basically
fixing and finding, primarily, finding all the things that any CRO agency will
come up as your first prioritization list, right? When they when you first get
engaged with them, they'll come up with a list of 10, 20 tests. And nine times
out of 10, these things are not necessarily things that need to be tested at
all, right? They are usability improvements that you should just be doing.
Mark Pinkerton [00:16:15 - 00:16:15]
Hmm.
Abi Hough [00:16:15 - 00:16:38]
You know, if you have a button on a page that nobody can see, you don't need
to run an A B test to just, you know, increase the contrast on that. So people
might click on it. It is a waste of time and a waste of resources. So there is
a whole library of things that, if necessary, and are applicable to that
website, you can start to improve. And then you measure it over time.
Mark Pinkerton [00:16:38 - 00:17:07]
One thing I'd like to add to that is that you need to make sure that the data
that you are getting from your analytics is as good as you can reasonably get
it. It's never going to be perfect, it's an imprecise science by its very
nature, but it needs to be solid and better than most setups in order to then
start using it to drive other things. Thank you.
Abi Hough [00:17:07 - 00:17:12]
Yeah, so you've got to be tracking the right things in order to measure the
improvements over time.
Mark Pinkerton [00:17:11 - 00:17:12]
Yeah.
Abi Hough [00:17:12 - 00:17:21]
So that is what I would include in the housekeeping part, is to understand
that that is all as good as it possibly can be before you start working.
Mark Pinkerton [00:17:20 - 00:17:49]
So I would give an example here of a large supermarket we've done some work
with where they have the Adobe Analytics and they had not set Adobe Analytics
up to record page speed. Because it was being monitored in the technical tool,
therefore their view was they didn't need to record it in Adobe Analytics.
However, that meant that any behavior that was driven by page speed was not
captured in Adobe.
David Kohn [00:17:49 - 00:17:52]
Thank you for that. I think we'll take a break now.
Mark Pinkerton [00:17:53 - 00:18:18]
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David Kohn [00:18:33 - 00:19:05]
Welcome back. I think as we've tried to do with all of our podcasts, I think
you've come up with some very practical suggestions there, which is start with
the bug fixes, start with the obvious things. And then there's some things
that you simply don't need to experiment. What are the things where you think
experimentation is worthwhile? Let's say I'm an SME. What are the
circumstances in which it is going to be worth my while going to the trouble
of designing options and putting them into place and testing with my user
base?
Abi Hough [00:19:05 - 00:19:39]
I'd probably put them into two categories. Number one is it's a critical
function of the website. For example, a checkout, I don't know. I would
probably, if I had the chance and the right amount of traffic, I would be A-B
testing changes in critical areas. The second would be if it's a particular
bone of contention, something that negotiation and meetings have not resolved
through the normal methods, and you need to make a decision either way.
David Kohn [00:19:39 - 00:19:40]
Yeah.
Abi Hough [00:19:41 - 00:19:54]
That can be quite soul-shattering for people if it doesn't turn out the way
that they expect, but it's a way to put it to bed. So you've got the data
there, it is proven statistically.
Mark Pinkerton [00:19:49 - 00:19:53]
Yeah. It's a proven statistic.
Abi Hough [00:19:54 - 00:20:12]
That would be another area, another reason why I would be looking to A-B test,
I think. But for the smaller companies, there really has to be a good reason
behind it instead of just willy-nilly pushing tests out for the sake of it
because somebody thought something was a good idea.
David Kohn [00:20:11 - 00:20:12]
Yeah.
Abi Hough [00:20:12 - 00:20:18]
But yeah, for those two particular reasons would be why I'd be running an A-B
test.
David Kohn [00:20:18 - 00:20:32]
Yeah, I think the bone of contention, certainly from personal experience, is
probably the area where you can't get organisational agreement. Some people
think A, some people think B, and then some people think Z.
Mark Pinkerton [00:20:32 - 00:20:40]
Then you're into our favourite HIPPO acronym, Highest Paid Person's Opinion,
which Avinash
Abi Hough [00:20:39 - 00:20:40]
Yeah.
Mark Pinkerton [00:20:40 - 00:20:52]
used to promote many moons ago, where basically the chairman's wife has
decided that the look and feel doesn't work when they're not the target
audience.
Abi Hough [00:20:50 - 00:20:55]
Yep. I've had a few of those as well.
David Kohn [00:20:54 - 00:21:00]
Fortunately, in my experience, it was normally me, so it made things more
straightforward.
Abi Hough [00:21:01 - 00:21:04]
It changed your thinking, right? Absolutely.
David Kohn [00:21:03 - 00:21:05]
Absolutely
Abi Hough [00:21:04 - 00:21:31]
So you went from having this opinion that you really, really believed in, for
whatever your reasons were, to being presented information and evidence to
suggest otherwise, right? And that's the whole point of optimisation, is to
try and get people to challenge themselves and their own biases about things,
and be open to the, you know, possibilities, you know, differences that they
weren't expecting.
David Kohn [00:21:30 - 00:21:35]
Well, I think that's a great place to build on here.
Abi Hough [00:21:31 - 00:21:32]
I think that's it.
David Kohn [00:21:35 - 00:22:06]
So, again, Abi, when we were talking earlier, you talked about the importance
of understanding your target user and knowing that you were talking to them in
the right way. How do you go about understanding their emotion? How do you go
about understanding how they make decisions? How they grow to love your brand?
How they make a choice between different products? How do you actually go
about it? Because it's pretty complex getting into these emotions, getting
into the brain.
Abi Hough [00:22:07 - 00:23:38]
Yes it is indeed and I've found that yes you can run user surveys and goodness
forbid you should get AI to you know extrapolate the findings of those user
surveys. I wouldn't recommend that to anybody. You have to go much deeper than
that and yes you can run some sessions to get to know your users but the thing
especially in the digital world the best tool that I have found is to go
underground basically. So the internet is full of all sorts of different
communities right and if you can find the communities that your potential
users are residing in of which there will be several and if you sit and
observe and listen and read what they're saying within these communities you
can really start to get a grasp of who your target is and what you know from
the customers that you already have what makes them a loyal customer and once
you establish these sort of themes you can then work on that within the brand
to push those through in order to figure out who you're going to market to,
why they're going to stay with you and to sort of tweak the brand and make
sure that that understanding comes through in the advertising that you're
promoting. So that's another really good tip.
Mark Pinkerton [00:23:37 - 00:23:43]
So you're sort of being, you're effectively doing underground digital
ethnographics study.
Abi Hough [00:23:42 - 00:24:05]
Yes, exactly that. Yeah, I was trying not to use clever words, but yes, it's
exactly that. And I have taken it steps further than that. So if you can think
of the old, you know, secret shopper analogy, right, where you go out to a
store and I've done this. I was working
Mark Pinkerton [00:23:59 - 00:24:00]
Mmm.
Abi Hough [00:24:05 - 00:25:12]
for a company who was selling plants. I went to every single garden center in
Oxfordshire and I observed the people that were buying plants. They didn't
know who I was, what I was doing there. As far as they were concerned, I was
just in the garden center on a Sunday, you know, doing my thing. But I struck
up conversations with these people. I mean, these were a particular type of
plant that they were buying. I was just asking them questions like any other
Joe blogs. You know, they knew nothing about me or why I was there. I was just
trying to understand who these groups of people were and the amount of
learnings that I got from just being out in the wild in a natural environment,
having casual conversations with people in terms of fruitfulness for the
company. It was it paid dividends, you know, just for me taking time to walk
out from my office, get some fresh air and go and speak to these people. And
it was so very different from the sort of sessions that you'd have where you
recruit potential, you know, people that might be coming in to buy your
product.
Mark Pinkerton [00:25:12 - 00:25:23]
Yeah, I've got a friend who is a professional panel attendee on any subject
because he's got a friend who's a recruiter.
David Kohn [00:25:25 - 00:25:31]
It's probably something slightly unethical about that. But yes, I mean, I have
to say, just taking your points on Abi, at Heels,
Mark Pinkerton [00:25:27 - 00:25:29]
Yes, I mean I have to say...
Abi Hough [00:25:28 - 00:25:29]
That's the thing.
David Kohn [00:25:31 - 00:25:56]
the head office was next next to our biggest store on Tottenham Court Road. So
if we had a particular bone of contention, it was pretty easy to get out on
the shop floor, accost a customer, even get them to look at a website page,
say, look, what do you think? Or can you can you see can you see how to
choose? Can you see the information you want here and get instant feedback? It
was it was fantastic.
Abi Hough [00:25:57 - 00:26:22]
It's great and enlightening, and I would recommend it to anybody because the
closer you can get to a natural environment where people are on this purchase
journey that they're going through, the better. And sitting in a room with
somebody staring at you whilst you try to perform a task, it's not naturally,
you know, you're not going to get the real feelings, I don't think. It doesn't
matter how good the moderator is. It's not raw.
Mark Pinkerton [00:26:22 - 00:26:37]
If you're a larger corporation, then clearly you are going to be more remote,
but there's a lot to be said on the whole sort of back to the shop floor
piece, whether it's even back to the digital shop floor versus back to the
retail.
David Kohn [00:26:34 - 00:26:41]
Absolutely. Your customer service department will give you plenty of feedback
if you bother to ask for it.
Abi Hough [00:26:40 - 00:26:43]
Yeah, if you bother to ask her. Oh, they will. Yeah.
David Kohn [00:26:42 - 00:27:31]
I just want to move things on a little bit here. One of the reasons I thought
the conversion rate optimization may be becoming obsolete is there's so much
tech that you can put onto your website now that will claim that it can do the
job for you, whether it's personalization, presenting everybody with their own
personalized banner, whether it's search, whether it's merch, all of these
tools would claim to be able not only to present your customer with the thing
that's most likely to attract them, but also to optimize it automatically. In
that context, and particularly with AI looming and apparently able to do
anything, is there still a role for the CRO professional, the CRO process?
Mark Pinkerton [00:27:31 - 00:28:13]
I want to answer that one first because I think that there is a, there's
clearly a role for the CRO person to play because AI is driven by data but
the amount of data that you need to feed an LLM is huge and there are only
very few companies that have the scale to be able to do that for their
customers. Amazon is clearly going to be one, most of the big supermarkets and
so on will probably have enough but actually for the average organisation it's
going to be really hard so you're going to end up applying a generic AI
understanding into your business which is when it starts to go wrong.
David Kohn [00:28:12 - 00:28:19]
But that may still be more effective than having humans looking at things.
Mark Pinkerton [00:28:16 - 00:29:05]
Yeah, I agree. I mean, there are places where, you know, for example, in
merchandising tools, where a good merchandising tool will outperform the best
human merchandiser by about 25 to 30 percent. And I've seen that so many times
that I believe that to be a rule of thumb now. Clearly, trying to do that for
ad banners on your own website or offers on your website, the machine will
give you access to far more variants than you could possibly have. But it
means that the machine has to make a decision about which offer to offer to
which human. So the management of the e-com team are then no longer have
control. Arguably, that is a good thing or a bad thing. I think the jury's out
on that at the moment.
David Kohn [00:29:05 - 00:29:15]
Abi, what do you think about the rise of the machine? I mean, are people like
yourself going to be out of a job in six months' time, or will the nature of
the job change?
Abi Hough [00:29:16 - 00:29:26]
Um, what can I think about AI? Well, I'm still not convinced it can get the
right number of fingers on people when it's creating art, so...
Mark Pinkerton [00:29:26 - 00:29:28]
Where is that?
Abi Hough [00:29:27 - 00:32:05]
I don't fear for my livelihood at the minute, and there's a couple of reasons
for that. Number one, AI is, like Mark said, it's only as good as the data
it's getting to learn things off. There's a whole different podcast about
privacy, how much access to data we have. If it hasn't got a good data set to
work from, then what it produces is not going to be optimal. And the only way
that we can get around access to people's data is to build enough trust for
them, so that when they come to our website or app, they are logged in, and we
have their full permission for that data. The amount of times I kill cookie
banners and reject everything now is, you know, it's economical. I probably
spend too much of my time doing that, but that's just the sort of person that
I am. The other thing about AI is it is an AI, right? It's not human. There
are circumstances when humanity is needed in order for a person to get from
being a browser to being somebody who actually does the thing that you want
them to do on the website. Chat, sorry, chat bots, who are there supposedly to
help, invariably just send people in circles of confusion. And I know from my
experience- And rage. Yes, and rage. And from my experience, I tried to find a
trap door in order to get through to a human, whether it's speak to human,
human now, whatever it might be, I'll spend 10 minutes trying to figure that
out rather than going in circles. And I think people seem to forget that if
people, if somebody is reaching out for help on your website or for your
service, they have got to a point of critical mass, right? Whatever the
problem is, they need it resolving now. And my banking app is a great example
of that. I sent it a message and it said, yeah, don't know what you need. You
obviously need to speak to a human, but that's going to take three days,
right? And what is banking, right? I don't want to wait three days for a
response to something. I wanted to speak to a human. Another example of that
would be, I was making a birthday present purchase for myself. It wasn't-
Happy birthday, by the way.
David Kohn [00:32:04 - 00:32:06]
Happy birthday, by the way.
Abi Hough [00:32:05 - 00:32:07]
Yeah, thank you very much.
David Kohn [00:32:06 - 00:32:08]
Thank you very much.
Abi Hough [00:32:07 - 00:32:55]
It wasn't an insubstantial amount of money, okay? For this, it was a piece of
jewellery that I wanted to buy. And there wasn't enough photographs of the
jewellery for me to understand whether or not I liked it from the side, if it
was too high, whatever it might be. And this company actually had a phone
number on the website, right? And when I rang it, somebody actually picked up.
It was a human. And within 15 minutes in my inbox was a whole array of this
ring in different angles and different lights on a human hand. It was the
pinnacle of customer experience. And they got the four grand sale out of it,
right, for this ring. I bought it. If that auction had been an AI, it wouldn't
have been able to do that.
David Kohn [00:32:55 - 00:32:56]
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Abi Hough [00:32:55 - 00:33:08]
Yeah, absolutely. They wouldn't have got the sale. There's no way I'd have
bought the ring off the website as it was. I did point out to them they needed
more imagery on their website because I'm an optimizer, what else am I
supposed to do? But AI is not going to cover everything.
David Kohn [00:33:08 - 00:34:04]
No, no, certainly. And again, speaking from my recent experience with heels,
putting human live chats onto our website was the single easiest thing to
measure the improvement in conversion and customer satisfaction. So I'm fully
on board with that. I think the other, put my two penneth in, I think even
when you do a CRO exercise of the traditional sort, you do need creativity.
It's rarely a simple matter of saying, move this here or change this colour.
It normally requires what I would describe as human creativity to think about
the customer, think about their emotion, think about how they make a decision,
think about what's important to them and then represent it in a form that you
can actually test it or you can actually implement it. And I've yet to see
anything that will deliver that automatically.
Mark Pinkerton [00:34:05 - 00:34:27]
Yeah, I mean, a human is going to have to generate a hypothesis that you then
test. I have not yet seen AI generating hypotheses, because you have to have
this broader, holistic understanding of the interconnectedness of all this
stuff in order to generate a viable hypothesis in many cases. Very good. OK.
David Kohn [00:34:26 - 00:34:32]
So just, we're approaching the end of our time here, so it's the sort of
classic final
Abi Hough [00:34:26 - 00:34:27]
Yeah.
question here, which is, we've got listeners out there, they've listened to us
talk about
Abi Hough [00:34:51 - 00:36:13]
CRO and how it's changed, but just give them, just give them one thing that
they've got to take away from this, they've got, you've got to do this after
you've listened to this podcast.
Know your users. I'm going to say it because I think it's the most important
thing, because unless a brand can align who they're trying to sell with and
understand them, they have got no chance of retaining those customers. And the
way that I truly believe that retention is the way forward, right? We talked
earlier about competition in the market and what the differentiators are. And
for me, it's that it's the salience between a brand and who your potential
customers are. So truly understanding their wants, needs and desires, how they
operate on your website, how you can make that much better for them. I think
the key to all of it is really trying to get those customers and understand
who they are and making sure that what you're selling is what they need. For
whatever reason it is that they they attach themselves to you, hold on to it
as much as you can, because with acquisition costs going up, I can't
necessarily see a better way forward and actually a more important way forward
for companies to operate. And I think a lot of companies miss out on that.
It's all about the big bang buck at the end of the day, right? But that's
quite a short term view as far as I'm
David Kohn [00:36:12 - 00:36:14]
As far as I'm concerned.
Abi Hough [00:36:13 - 00:36:15]
concerned. Okay, super. Yeah.
David Kohn [00:36:14 - 00:36:25]
Super, yeah, and I think just taking on your point from earlier on is what you
think you know isn't what actually is. So I think that was a very valuable
point earlier on. Mark, what would you say? One single thing.
Mark Pinkerton [00:36:26 - 00:37:15]
I would say against CROe, don't focus on the conversion rate, focus on
profitability and what it can do for you, what that focus can do, because it
means that you can look at a broader range of things, but it means that you
need to look at all these things and it means that you then have to make a
choice about prioritisation. It may come back to the fact that your problem is
your conversion rate funnel, but I think that would be fairly rare in these
days. I think you'll find a broken customer journey somewhere or an edge case
somewhere which is actually really quite important to a specific group of
customers and by understanding that, you can then improve your performance
overall. Thank you.
David Kohn [00:37:14 - 00:37:17]
Thank you. OK, well, we've reached the end of our time.
David Kohn [00:37:17 - 00:37:24]
I'd like to thank you, Mark, for your participation today. Thank you. And
obviously our special guest, Abi Hough from UU3.
Abi Hough [00:37:25 - 00:37:27]
Pleasure to be here.
David Kohn [00:37:27 - 00:37:30]
Thank you very much, everybody, for listening, and I hope you've enjoyed it.
Mark Pinkerton [00:37:35 - 00:37:42]
Thanks to our sponsor SWEFT, helping you get products launched online faster
and more efficiently. Find out more at GoSWEFT.com
Other similar Episodes in Season 2:
Episode 3 - Understanding headless and Compossable
Episode 2 - Strategy and Planning
Episode 6 - Optimising physical and Digital
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