Customerland
Customerland is a podcast about …. Customers. How to get more of them. How to keep them. What makes them tick. We talk to the experts, the technologies and occasionally, actual people – you know, customers – to find out what they’re all about.So if you’re a CX pro, a loyalty marketer, a brand owner, an agency planner … if you’re a CRM & personalization geek, if you’re a customer service / CSAT / NPS nerd – you finally have a home.
Customerland
There's a Visual Revolution in User Journey Analysis
The disconnect between the digital experiences businesses think they're delivering and what customers actually receive represents a massive opportunity. In this enlightening conversation, Dave Anderson, VP of Product Marketing at ContentSquare, explores how traditional analytics fail us – with teams trapped in Google Analytics trying to make sense of tables and charts that don't tell the full story of customer journeys.
There's a profound shift happening from marketing-focused metrics to product analytics that truly reveal user behavior. Rather than drowning in spreadsheets, forward-thinking companies are embracing visual analytics that overlay directly onto websites and apps, making insights immediately actionable for everyone from UX designers to CEOs.
The results speak for themselves: North Face increased CTA exposure by 50%, Rakuten boosted checkout conversion by 10%, and one UK bank discovered removing their mortgage calculator actually improved sign-ups by 10-15% (worth £500,000). These aren't marginal improvements – they're transformation stories driven by finally seeing what customers actually do rather than what we think they do.
What makes this approach revolutionary is its accessibility. As one executive notes, "The real test of a new feature is can product marketing use it without any instruction and get value from it?" When analytics become visual and intuitive, teams align around clear priorities without needing data science degrees.
With AI now entering the equation, we're moving toward proactive insights – not just visualizing problems but receiving specific recommendations: "Lift these elements up the page" or "You have more opportunity with this product line." The future belongs to companies who can truly see their digital experience through their customers' eyes.
Ready to close the gap between your perception and your customers' reality? Discover how visual journey analytics could transform your digital experience and drive meaningful business results.
I really wanted to focus on where the gap was, which is everyone is on these things and no one's getting the experience they're supposed to get and everyone thinks that they're delivering a great digital experience and the truth is they're not measuring it properly, they don't really know how to do it and there's a lot of challenges associated with it. So I think it's a super fun time to be in this industry, because AI is going to change a lot of how we approach analytics. I was done with marketing. I was like I've done this for two decades and I'm not doing this anymore. Yeah, right, connected to the product.
Speaker 1:The more I fell in love with the product and product analytics and where the market is going and thinking about it as a product person and how do we solve these problems, then, the more you really start to think through customers and what do they want and what do they need, because you've got to build a roadmap to support them. You can't just go marketing and go like I don't know, we'll just outsource all of this money to an agency and we'll just think it up. Which is go?
Speaker 2:marketing go like I don't know. We'll just outsource all of this money to an agency and we'll just think it up, which is a really brilliant model if you can pull it off. But exactly.
Speaker 1:You just can't. We'll just talk about visions and stuff. But yeah, no, I agree with you. Like I always like product people. I think the product people are like or put someone that's deep into a topic or has been deep in a topic for a long time. Like I interviewed a guy the other day on ai and he does AI services and I was like this is going to be rubbish. And he was like he's working on a breast cancer diagnosis system for AI and he said he's doing it with MIT and this other leading organisation and it's now sitting with the government to be approved. And it's like this groundbreaking technology that has a success rate of about 70% 80% and it can pre-diagnose breast cancer before anyone would have any idea that they have it.
Speaker 1:That's insane, that's and I just yeah, I just went from like I don't really care what you're doing to help people improve efficiency. I just want to talk about the ai breast cancer. Like right, right, he goes. Exactly this is why I Like yeah, we do things for companies, we help them be more productive and save time and blah, blah blah. But he said I go to sleep at night thinking about my contribution to humanity and what we could do.
Speaker 2:Isn't that an interesting idea? That'll take us way off course, way off course. I mean we have no hope of getting back after this one. But I've just recently spoken with maybe I don't know, call it four or five people who had this kind of epiphany moment sometime in the past, say two or three years Wasn't necessarily pandemic driven, it was just like this thing happened. Where they went, I got to do something better with my life. Like you know, these are these are, for the most part, really successful people, like it was. It wasn't a matter of like I got a few more rungs on the ladder I climb and I and I got it made. It was more like you know what, I'm pretty smart and this kind of sucks. You know I'm gonna do something better and uh, and what they've done is, you know, probably not quite as remarkable as this person you're talking about, but still in their own realm they're doing some really cool stuff.
Speaker 1:yeah it's a heart change. I think the same right and I. I had this conversation with the, the guy that invented smart things, because I'm a home automation geek as well, so I love like automated curtains and all sorts of stuff. And I've just moved back to the us. I haven't done any automations here yet, which is my wife is really happy about, because, um, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but, um, he, his wife like he invented smart things, sold it to samsung for, like you know, billions of dollars or something. And his wife's like, yeah, I just, you know, I'm not really passionate about what it is that you do, I just think you can do better.
Speaker 1:His wife said that to him. Yeah, and I'm like guy invented smart things and it got sold to Samsung. Okay, his wife's a bit of a hard taskmaster.
Speaker 2:Yeah right.
Speaker 1:So I started laughing and so now he's moving on to like he, he goes. I agreed with her. I was like, yeah, they're like automated curtains, they're just like okay, that's good, it's like solving a small need, but it's like we have needs in society. We have crumbling water pipes and we have electricity poles that keep falling over and we have toxic chemicals that are getting put into food sources. He goes there. There's an IoT of everything in a city that is going to have significant impact on the world. And he goes. And that's what I'm passionate about now and that's what I'm doing. And I was like, well, I would have retired on smart things, but I'm glad you're like a little more Now I can't, thanks to raising the bar on me.
Speaker 2:You know, I ruined everything, so anyway back to experience and product analytics and how we're changing the world, making the internet better for everyone to buy more stuff um yeah, and, by the way, let's not disparage what you and I actually do for a living, because this is fun stuff and it has purpose, and it has value and you know, and I do think that, like I worked in observability for a long time and I'm just like, okay, um, like I know what we do what we did at Dynatrace was really important, because it's like if the system broke, everything stops.
Speaker 1:But it's a little bit also like I really wanted to focus on where the gap was, which is everyone is on these things, they're like and no one's getting the experience they're supposed to get, and everyone thinks that they're delivering a great digital experience, and the truth is they're not measuring it properly, they don't really know how to do it and there's a lot of challenges associated with it. So I think it's a super fun time to be in this industry, because AI is going to change a lot of how we approach analytics, Completely yeah.
Speaker 1:And it's both super exciting and ridiculously frightening at the same time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well I've. I'm clearly like head in sand kind of a person here with that, like I'm on the exciting stuff and like if I pull my head up, you know high enough to look over the horizon, it's terrifying so.
Speaker 2:I'm just going to go back and look at it over here and through my little rose colored glasses, you know, uh, ended up chatting with some people in your in your booth and, um, if I can be really transparent, like you know, I was. Like you know, it's another analytics tool. And you know like, look, I'm actually an analytics nerd, so I wasn't expecting to be impressed. And then, when I started talking, he's like, yeah, let me tell you how this works and what it does and some of the results. And it's like wait a second, Okay, hold on.
Speaker 2:It's like it was, like it was a hold my beer moment, like, yeah, I have to hear more about this, because this isn't, this isn't your standard kind of analytics package. There's so much more that goes into it and I thought, for me, first of all, it's nrf. You can't have a real conversation there about anything in depth. You just can't. So we committed to and this is now the result of that commitment to try and get together and have a real conversation that's right um, for me, it's mostly about about like why this path to do this particular thing?
Speaker 2:The product is outstanding, it's phenomenal, but like I had to come at it from a certain place of going. I'm going to fix this this way.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then I think you know Laura said you got to talk to Dave, dave's the dude. Anyway, here we are. So why'd you fix this this way?
Speaker 1:I just think that the people I've worked in this space for a long time I've worked as both understanding analytics and a geek for analytics and then at the same time, I struggle with the same problems and I've run marketing teams and we struggle with the same thing all the time how many people are signing up for the free trial and how do we get more people to convert? Sorry, how do we increase the checkout volume and do we have any issues right now? And you can't get a straight answer from a single platform. You're like you ask one team and they're in Google Analytics. They're telling you one thing. You're asking another team they're in another platform. They got another team telling you something else.
Speaker 1:None of these teams have single views as to what is going on with a user journey, because no one's mapping the proper user journey. And then because it's like that you've seen that, like there's a PowerPoint presentation and it has a pathway and the user journey is a different direction. It's like people have worn the path a different way. User journeys are millions of different directions, so an analytics that is needed to summarize it, to simplify it, so you can act on it, is so hard because you can picture a data table is what you might end up looking at. And then you might go okay, there's a line chart of some sort. And then you look at line charts and you go, what is this telling me? Like, all of these people are going in all these different directions and we have all these segments of users and they're coming on different devices and they're going to the website and then the app and they're doing this and that. What are we supposed to do with all of this? That's the answer.
Speaker 1:The content square is giving people that, surfacing it up in a way that makes it, firstly, super visual.
Speaker 1:So it's like you can really visualize the analytics over the top of whatever it is you're trying to analyze. Like I want to analyze the homepage today and I want to understand what are people engaging with and what is the path to conversion. Visualize it for me and it will visualize it for you. So it's not tables and graphs and spreadsheets, it's just like something that a team can rally around and we do it ourselves and go huh, you mean no one's going there, but that's our big AI moment, or that's our new feature we just launched, or that's our brand new shoe.
Speaker 1:And you're like, yep, no one's engaging in that piece of the content and so we give people the answers of like it. It's not just the analytics of numbers, it's like a visualization for people to be able to go right. Okay, and I've learned something and this is what we should do and it's. I can go on and on about this, but but, like for retail especially, I've seen use cases of people learning how people engage with a page and the styles of what they engage with, and that leads to future design of next season's clothes and it is a perfect focus group.
Speaker 2:So when we were at NRF and I'm having this conversation, knowing it's kind of like you know and everybody's aware, like you're getting jostled by people who are just trying to get by and you're trying to have a conversation about something serious and it's just not going to work in that environment, but I was trying to think when my light bulb went off I think it had to do with it, wasn't?
Speaker 2:It wasn't that you guys have have driven me ginormous improvements in click through or or any of the other kind of data points that were tossed out I was like, well, that's cool. But you know, I think for me the light bulb moment was when somebody said here, come on over here, I'm going to just show you what this looks like. Like here's the final output of when you hit the big button over here. This is what it produces. And you know I I can't tell you how many hours, or maybe like weeks off the end of my life, I've lost in google analytics trying to figure out the that very thing. And I, you know I didn't audibly curse, because this is a family medium, but it was like it was like wow this is, this is really cool.
Speaker 2:And but it was like. It was like wow, this is, this is really cool and you know it's, it's. You know it's not a single push button thing, but it might be two or three and it's like, there it is. That's the learning that every one of my clients as an agency person, my internal clients as a marketing person, like, just like, here's the thing, just look at this and you'll see what we need to do. Boom, there it is.
Speaker 1:Yeah and I can. So I think you're referring to like a zoning analysis where and correct me if I'm wrong but? But you would see potentially metrics overlaid over zone. So people would think heat, heat maps. But it's like heat maps on steroids, because it goes down to that's what it was, it's components of a page.
Speaker 1:So for like a product manager, product manager sitting there and they're thinking, oh, we're going to launch the new, I'm going to launch the new asic shoe or, um, you know any brand gopro's coming out with a new camera, or canon came out with a new camera. As an example, it's a new video line of the camera and they stick that on the homepage and, firstly, they can attest almost immediately. Are we getting clicked through? Is that image the right image? Do we need a lifestyle photo instead of the actual shoe? Should we have, like our ambassador for ASICs wearing the shoe running, or should we just show the shoe? Actually, we have one customer great example RM Williams and the brand team wanted to stick brand stories of horses and people riding horses and these people sell shoes. And lo and behold, when they used the zoning analysis, what they worked out is people wanted to engage with the shoes, not the people riding the horses, and so they took rid of the people on the horses. Sorry, brand people that spent the millions of dollars on the brand campaign. They just people came to the site, they just wanted the shoes and then they could work out which shoe is everyone engaging in. But I visually look at it, not like we had 10,1161 people great on this, had 11,741 on that. They look at it and they go, huh, wow, well the path, the revenue on that shoe is a lot higher than the others, but it's so far down the page we should lift that up. So, yeah, the aha for me.
Speaker 1:I had a conversation with a CEO of a telco in Australia. I'm Australian, so very small telco, that wasn't that small. We're not that backwards in Australia, marginally. Anyway, I spoke to this telco and I said what do you do? And he said we're a reseller of one of the major telecommunications companies think of them as Verizon or Telstra and what we do is we cap the data plans because most people don't spend all of their data, so we're a lot cheaper, but we basically run exactly the same thing. I said oh, that's interesting. He asked me how much data do you use? And I said I don't know, I'm on like an unlimited terabyte thing I probably use. I'm always on wifi. I never use enough, because exactly that's why we exist. And I said, oh right, okay.
Speaker 1:So I looked up their website and I started flicking through and I got to the second page and I went oh, that's interesting, you cap the speeds at 4G. And he goes oh, you saw that. And I went yeah, yeah, I wouldn't click through, I wouldn't sign up, because I want the fastest speeds. That's important to me. And I said do you test for whether or not you're losing conversions as a result of that image being there in the user sign up process? And he said I don't know. And he turned around to a product person. He said do we test for that? And they were like I don't think that we test for it. And he said what do you guys do? And I went that's what we do. What?
Speaker 2:What you should ask right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we test and we'll visually show you. And they bought two weeks, three weeks later, once we showed them the demo of how it can improve and then, yeah, it's down to like where should that picture appear? When should it be? What should be featured? So, yeah, it's giving people those visual insights and, really, really importantly, tying it back to that business metric. What are you trying to achieve?
Speaker 2:Is it like sign up? Is it revenue? Is it like whatever it is? So it's. I think I walked away with, like you know, um, you know, and I, I wasn't. I wasn't privy to what it took to get to that particular screen. I don't, you know, could have been two months worth of work. I, I have no idea, but what I was presented with was for a marketer, anybody in the related position, a moment of clarity. And do you know how hard that is to come by in marketing, like that doesn't exist. Marketers are all about obfuscation. This is what we do, right? This is why we get paid.
Speaker 1:Ask a marketer to find an mql and you get a very long winded answer and the impact on pipeline it's like they're not the best. And yeah, we're just. It's this, it's simple, it's visual and it gives people the design direction they can make decisions on it and that's the key thing also is you can focus on the UX that it's. A UX designer needs to understand it, a conversion rate optimization person would understand it, the product manager running that product wants to understand it, the CEO wants to know where the revenue is coming from, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I could go on forever.
Speaker 1:But a simple visual that explains to people like what's happening on their website and apps and what they need to do about it is is immense and it's it's not a long piece of work to get it set up, because sites are usually typically designed by zone, so it's not difficult to set it up. It's not difficult to get people encouraged to use it. It's probably just the only thing I would say in having this conversation with you is the importance of remaining like, true to the simplicity of what people need, and not trying to and and and everything. But we can do this as well. But we can do this and we do this do?
Speaker 2:I appear to be that kind of person to you.
Speaker 1:Don't answer that like no, no, no. You like you just reminded me of, like why sometimes, actually, it's the simple. It's the simple things that people remember you for, and that's why they buy you and and our competition don't do it in the same way that we do, and so it's a really good market advantage and we should be emphasizing it more yeah, here, here.
Speaker 2:So I was poking around on. Frankly, I don't remember where, but either on on the main site or somewhere recently. Oh uh, it might have been one of your pages. This is a quote. If it's attributable, attributable to you, then here you go. The real test. The new feature is can product marketing use it without any instruction and get value from it? End quote was that you?
Speaker 1:yeah, that was me. I wrote it in like three seconds before I go.
Speaker 2:It's a moment of brilliance, because isn't? Isn't that like the acid test or one of them?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and to me it was like but I mean, it's true. Whenever I tell these stories, they usually come from me as a user, because I use them and that's why I actually like what I'm doing. I've worked in the past for companies that are marketing something that I've never used and trying to get my head around it, but it's so easy for me now because this is software that I need and I use. So I'm like, if they're rolling out this new feature yeah, this is true. To me it's like I don't need to do a certification and I don't want a course and I don't want you to explain to me the value of what it is If I can pick it up, start using it immediately.
Speaker 1:And what happened with that was we rolled out this AI summarization of session replay and I logged into our demo environment and I immediately just went huh, yep, I get it. And then I went and I was able to demo it and then I recorded myself demoing it and that's now the demo video. So I spent all of like three minutes with it and I literally then did a voiceover of what it could do, as I was seeing it, sent it to the product manager and said does that work? And he was like, oh my god, that's it could do, as I was seeing it, sent it to the product manager and said, does that work? And he was like, oh my God, that's incredible, ship it. And I was like Really.
Speaker 1:Marketing is the easiest thing in the world when you get given features like that.
Speaker 2:When you have a great product and I think I've heard something like that before right, all right, yeah, amazing. I think we should, just because it's, it's impressive. We should talk about some of the companies that you work with. Yeah, because these are big brands and, uh, they're showing great results. I'm going to cherry pick a few. Maybe you can just kind of tell us the story behind it. Go for it. Uh, let's see, let's start with um 50 increase in cta exposure rate for, uh, north face.
Speaker 1:Yep, I've heard of those guys yeah, north face look, anyone who worked in marketing knows you can't. You work with brands and you're not allowed to say who all of them are. So the companies that we get case studies from are people that are great parts of our community, that are willing to go the extra mile and put their brand on the line to support us. So North Face is a great example of a company like that. And, yeah, things like exposure rates lead to improved conversion rates, which lead to improved revenue. All of our case studies they're conversion rates which lead to improved revenue.
Speaker 1:All of our case studies. They're never going to say we increase the revenue and we're not going to say by how much, but I can tell you all of them lead to increased cart volume and they increase revenue and it's super simple and it's got to do with the exposure rate is a good example of a simple UX visualization, of understanding how people are engaging with a page or a product page or a product feature, and it could be we needed to lift the reviews further up the page. We needed to lift up the like product set or different visualization up the page, and it leads to conversion and revenue. So you'd be hard-pressed to find a retail brand, an e-commerce brand, that isn't working with us in one way or another, and I'm continually shocked by some of the brands that I hear or we get to work with. It's an incredibly proud moment to work with, and offline I tell people who some of these brands are, but when I'm talking with you, I'm ring-fenced to some of the great brands that we have on our website.
Speaker 2:That's okay. That's okay. That's okay. Go to the website, which we'll put a link for. The other thing we should do here is I would love to get a screenshot of what that page, that results page, looks like, because we're talking hypothetically. You know it's an audio medium and, like you know what are these guys talking about. But that was, that was the moment of clarity when I looked at this thing and went wow, hours and hours of assembling data from google analytics and here it is right here with, and, and not only that, but you knew exactly what to do with.
Speaker 1:It is that yeah, it's so obvious and you can play with it like you can. Like. Another true test can product marketing just pull it up out of a Chrome browser extension, overlay across the site and do it in two seconds? Yeah, I do it all the time, like our CEO still does demos in the same way. He'll just pull up a site and then he'll show them and he'll go look, you can look at it by revenue, you can look at it by conversion rate, exposure rate and eventually, what will also happen which is what we're working on is you'll have an AI that will also analyze all of it and it will go.
Speaker 1:Are you seeing this? What you need to do is, if you haven't already realized, lift these three things up the page, or pull this shoe further forward, or you've got way more opportunity on this product line and that product line. So that's the exciting stuff that's coming as well. So, if it's not visual enough, you're also then going to have an ai that tells you to what to look for and then what to do about it, which is going to be fun too really cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I kind of want to. I want to be the fly on the wall when that gets um, it's happening it's happening.
Speaker 1:We're bubbling away as a product team, so we more to come, but there's definitely like those proactive insights are the key right and to your point, it's make it visual. So don't just give me a bullet point and say you should lift section 3, 4 on this page to that and it will increase to that. It's like visually show me what will happen if we do this and where the gap is, and it helps us as humans, trust it.
Speaker 2:It's the easy button in visual form. Yeah, rakuten, increase checkout conversion rate by 10%. Before you unpack that, just for context. Like a lot of people that we deal with in this space operate in the loyalty world and Rakuten is either variously loved and hated because of what they do. You know, I think the people who hate them hate them because they're so good at what they do. Yeah, but the volume of transactions that go through that platform I don't know the number, but I know it's very, very, very big. And to show something that looks like a 10% conversion rate of checkout, because you just you just applied some new insights.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's not uncommon. I know of 20 brands that would start with a checkout conversion, because they start with what's the most important to revenue and then they map a journey from where is everyone coming? And then they get to the checkout page and then what's happening on the checkout page? Is there a slowdown there? Frustration, are people confused? Are they entering the wrong things in forms? We had examples of like decathlon was a great example of a brand that they were. People often, always go to declare decathlon.
Speaker 1:For some reason, particularly in asia, pacific, they don't necessarily get the delivery and people are getting confused about the shipping process. Should I get this shipped and then get a price shut up? What is it in store? Like what's happening. So what we do is we provide the, the ability and same for racket and is to work out like where are the friction points on that user journey? Like, where are the? Where are customers confused, where's the drop off? And a same thing. Visualize it again so they can visually see it and then go oh, wow, what, wow, what the form? We've got an issue with the form. Or like people are having to now log in and when they log in, they lose their cart. That's a terrible experience. That can't happen.
Speaker 1:And so these examples are just like simple examples of let's just watch the user journey through to the cart. Let's watch what happens. Let's see what the baseline is. There's frustration here. We should experiment, we should shorten the form, we should change the checkout process. We should do this, we should do that. Did that have an uplift? Or did I have a downlink that had an uplift? Great, let's keep going.
Speaker 1:And so, like what you start to see now, particularly with these e-commerce brands, is you have people dedicated to certain functions and there's someone dedicated to checkout, and they'll be responsible for continuing to use ContentSquare and experimentation to continue to drive that like reduction in abandonment is probably the best way of saying it and just continue to fine tune. And it could be like another great example. Harrods is a really good example of like a brand that just had an error on their checkout page that was impacting 50% of users. They lost 50% of conversions as a result of having a JavaScript error on the checkout that they didn't know was there and we helped them find it and then they removed that tag. It was literally a tag that was just sitting there and it solved it and it sounds super simple for these some, some of these things, and it is, but.
Speaker 1:But if you don't have the analytics, it's not simple because you wouldn't know until someone. You just never find that stuff. Someone sends an email or customer feedback now or goes on to is it so-called Twitter anymore? Is it? It's called X, but they is it? It's called X, but they go onto social media and they rant the worst experience ever, this brand sucks. And they're like what are you talking about? I don't know what happened and you can replay that session or you can visualize it. It just becomes heaps easier.
Speaker 2:I'm just curious, and does ContentSquare operate strictly in e-commerce, or do you apply that kind of efficiency finder in other realms as well? No, we're very strong in e-commerce. Or do you apply that kind of efficiency finder in other other realms as well?
Speaker 1:no, we're. We're like very strong in e-commerce because it's very easy to tie what we do to revenue, so it's been become very easy to sell it. It's like we can tell you, like, of all these case studies, look at this 10 improvement, 10 improvement that itself pays for the software. Well, and truly, like we can do one small use case and pay for the software for a year just by helping you implement this one thing. But as other brands mature their digital practices, so you think SaaS companies, you know we've got good coverage with them.
Speaker 1:Travel is a really important one because also user journeys for travel, like if you're booking a cruise, it's like typically an older generation that are on various different devices, taking a long time to make a decision. So they have a long time, they have a long journey to optimize. It's not I need a new shirt click, check out, right, um, so they're, they're, they invest a lot in their digital journey, so so they're a good one. And then, like the other one is banking and finance. Like we're super strong with like a lot of the retail banks and commercial banks because it's highly competitive, they're trying to sign people up for savings accounts and mortgage accounts. And actually one of my favorite case studies, which I think is on the website, but it's been public so it's fine.
Speaker 1:But one of the big banks in the UK was really wanting to push a mortgage calculator because they thought people wanted to compare mortgages when they were trying to sign up for their mortgage. And they spent a long time developing this mortgage calculator only to find out that no one wanted to compare mortgages. They were doing mortgage comparisons off their website. By the time they came to the website they were ready to sign up, so they wanted fast sign-up process. They removed the mortgage calculator, they showed an uplift of like 10% to 15% sign-up and then they put a dollar figure on it and that equated to like £500,000 of like an increase as a result of that digital team optimizing that sign-up process.
Speaker 1:And I think there's a lesson there for teams of people that are working in a non-e-commerce segment to put a value on a signup. Like it's really important to put a value on a signup. So then when you show an improvement in conversion you can go to your boss and your management and you can go. I just made us x amount of dollars more and that nat west example is a great example of a of a team that put a value on a sign up and then did it like and then added the added monetary figure to it brilliant, absolutely brilliant.
Speaker 2:I I'm thinking of another half a dozen possible use cases, but like you know, I don't know if they're, if, like uh, an individual level account exists for content square, but like I can see it being like the ux ui person's like secret, don't tell anybody. Like this is how I just optimize my stuff here, like don't anybody look, I'm over here working, you know, on my thing, and lo and behold, like wait, everything I'm doing is optimized. So, yeah, there's a little.
Speaker 1:We only really built it because I think we were helping the software, you know, on my thing, and lo and behold, like wait, everything I'm doing is optimized. So yeah, there's a little. We only really built it because I think we were helping the software teams from the dreaded CEO that came in and said you know, my husband or my wife went to the site recently and this is what they experienced and it was like wait a second. And so the software team's like wait a second, and all alarm bells go off in that software company. And so then we develop software that's to be able to go. Well, let's see whether the wife or the husband actually did have that experience or not. Let's look up that session, let's replay it, and either it's true or it's false.
Speaker 2:So in effect, you've saved their marriage.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, we're saving the world from CEOs that think they know better.
Speaker 2:Or CEO spouses, which is more dangerous?
Speaker 1:yeah, exactly, or, or their cousins or their like or their friends had a sign-up experience. So we're helping product teams remain sane, um, or website teams. But but yeah, to your point, yeah, you can say user sessions. It's a really good use case of, like, actually understanding. Someone complained and they like they had five or six sessions. I tried logging in. I couldn't log in. It keeps crashing on me. Okay, let's look that session, let's check. Okay, yeah, looks like you're using internet explorer 6.5. Um, maybe you know, maybe you could upgrade the browser at this point, or that device isn't your. Iphone 3 isn't supported anymore, right, but but yeah, there are use cases for support tests, to to understand what users are doing and have empathy for their frustration.
Speaker 2:Specifically, I won't name names, but I was working about a year ago with an e-learning company that had developed a really sophisticated platform for a giant e-learning system. They had everything going on there. It was literally the worst user experience I've ever had in my life. Like it was, this was uh, if you mapped out the, the user journey, like literally every step was messed up and to the point where I'm stopped, I can't do anything. There's no option to move ahead in any direction here. And, um, long story short, I ended up writing to the head of that that initiative just saying hey, look, you know this, this is. I'm not complaining, I'm just giving you like a heads up. You may have some issues you want to, you want to address, and here's, here's what my experience was. And it ended up being like this long of like, and so I got.
Speaker 2:I didn't get a response right away. I mean, I was like, wow, you know, maybe I just hit a nerve or too sensitive, or maybe got lost in spam or something, I don't know, but maybe, like I don't know, two weeks later, maybe three weeks later, well, after I thought, like any, any response would have been like dealt with. Um, this person emailed back with the what ended up being one of the most genuine human apologies I've ever received in my life, because he really, you know, you could see that, like I, cared enough and it impacted him as and apparently his entire team, because, like everybody, everybody was cc'd on this thing and, um and I'm thinking in this conversation, how much of that could have been solved Like so much of it, maybe not everything, but a lot of it just by applying the right kind of analytics, understanding and insights and, like here, push the button. Here's ContentSquare's recommendation Go fix it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's not look part of it is software right, like so yes, there is software that can solve this, but the other part is like it's people and teams willing to double down on experience and really wanting to care about your experience, and it's like what was it that you were trying to achieve?
Speaker 1:Were you trying to sign up for a course? Were you trying to take that course? And like, how did you experience this as you were working your way through and then having goals associated with what those experiences are. So a product team would have we want to be able to enable, we want weekly active users. We don't want to see drop-offs, we want it. And then you start to baseline these metrics and then you can start to immediately pick. Wait a second, some people are only doing like one course. This is a problem, and then they're abandoning before they're getting. That's not right, and so it's like mapping out what the ideal user journey is and then just baselining whether or not it's happening, like are we getting those metrics or are we seeing a drop, and then go and investigate why is this? Why is mike and I, like probably 50 other percent of the population, having this issue? What is it? What is it that they were meant to be doing? And then either visualize it, either look at a session replay, look at a zoning of what's the engagement, and then sometimes it's like metrics that you can't see. So sometimes you do need to do a session replay and go.
Speaker 1:Actually, in this scenario, there was supposed to be a button up there that would help them to the next thing. Or, in my case, when I've used peloton numerous times, they do a pop-up banner and the advert is white and the cross to get out is white, which means there's a ux problem where no one knows where the cross is. And it would say the metrics would show nothing. It would just say people are shutting their treadmills down because they can't finish the class because the pop-up happened, but what a replay would show is oh wow, we put a white banner up with a white X. That's not cool. So, yeah, it's like just teams that want to focus on the UX and then they're like they want to solve the problem. It's really not that hard, and this is why I work in this industry, because it's like just teams that want to focus on the ux and then they're like they want to solve the problem. It's really not that hard. Um, and and this is well. This is why I work in this industry, because it's like everyone is differentiating based on experience like you really it will.
Speaker 1:With ai and with all these things coming, it's so easy for people to develop products. Brand loyalty is really difficult and everyone has an expectation that an experience is good and and you just want to retain your customers. It's way cheaper to retain them and people are very quick to complain. So just double down on the experience and make sure that what they get is what they expect, which is hard. We keep saying internally deliver experiences that everyone loves, that they're like and I'm like. Can we just start with getting the experience that someone expects? There you go, just start with the expectation and then move on. I don't want an awesome experience when I'm doing my taxes. I want it to be as fast as possible, and then I want to end Right.
Speaker 2:And same in my HR. Have you just come off of that?
Speaker 1:exercise I relate. Yeah, let's just right and same. In my exercise I relate. Yeah, I just related to you because I had to do an internal hr thing. You know, you got a people management thing and it's one of those pieces of software that was probably developed in the 90s and they've some colors on it made it look good and it's the most unintuitive, annoying piece of software ever, and when you've got like a team of ux experts using it it's yeah, oh yeah 20 minutes like dissecting why it's so bad, before we even finished the task of like.
Speaker 1:So, actually, what are we supposed to do again?
Speaker 2:Right, doesn't matter, let's leave.
Speaker 1:Yeah, right I totally forgot whatever the internal HR process was I was supposed to do, because I'd already solved their UX problem.
Speaker 2:Dave, thanks so much for being here, because it was a ton of fun.
Speaker 1:Absolute pleasure, Mike. I had a really good time and hopefully we addressed the questions appropriately.
Speaker 2:Well, your people will let us know if we didn't.
Speaker 1:Definitely afterwards they're going. Dave, you didn't know the answer to like three of those questions. As my dad said, don't let the truth get in the way of a good story.
