Active Listening
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This is the third article in a series on post-release best practices to maximize business value from commerce platform investments.
Active listening requires the listener to understand, interpret, count and evaluate what they hear. The ability to listen actively can improve personal relationships through reducing conflicts, strengthening cooperation, and fostering understanding. I postulate that Active Listening capabilities are critical for eCommerce organizations. What have Active Listening capabilities got to do with e-commerce?
During major eCommerce projects, we memorize the mantra – design, build and test. Starting on go-live day, that mantra must change to listen, respond and evolve. No major platform investment goes live today without core technology to measure customer behaviour and experience. Analytics are commonplace, yet, all too often, we see firms stumble with listening to what their customers are saying, or taking timely action to evolve the customer experience. Why?
There are a slew of underlying challenges, but the three we observe most frequently are:
(a) measuring too many things,
(b) an over-reliance on canned, generic metrics and
(c) lack of a working process to turn insights into action.
As a valuable property of the medium, digital interactions are measureable, and measurement costs are very modest. Analytics produce a mountain of data, much of which masquerades as “insight.” It is not worth a dime if you do not have an effective process to make changes based on the information.
Tip: Firms that choose no more than three core metrics, at least initially, tend to have an easier time making informed changes – especially those requiring material investments.
Our clients who experience the most success with measurement can clearly articulate their core metrics, and tier every other measure in layers under these core metrics. The most mature among them determine and achieve internal alignment on their core metrics for success before the platform investment is made.
A couple of examples: One of our research clients fanatically tracks just one core metric – their subscriber renewal rate. A leading hospitality chain measures just two – the percentage of overall chain revenues booked through the platform, combined with a customer experience index.
It is no wonder then that these clients have not just instrumented their platforms, but also designed the business dashboards and processes to filter the millions of data points their platforms capture each day, and systematically transformed them to insight that decisively informs content updates, targeted offers, and platform feature changes.
What are the core metrics that you need to measure? If you have not had that discussion or not achieved internal alignment yet within your organization, then consider doing so now. It may be more valuable than another analytics stream with more data. Understanding, evaluating and responding, or simply – active listening – will lead to a far more focused customer experience improvement, and your customers will thank you for it.
Do share your own thoughts and experiences on this article. Stay tuned to my next article, “Getting on the Same Page,” where I’ll discuss the value of aligning marketing, business, development and operations.
