We equip our client’s advertisement material to display the best experience consumers have ever had. Customers today can order a personalized cup of coffee in 5 minutes, and they have learned to seek the same personalized experience with everything they buy.
The net has created an environment of changing customer expectations. To succeed you need to be testing and learning daily how to improve the customer experience. Change is now occurring on competitor’s sites daily. Customers today expect to be “wowed” from the moment they start shopping on their mobile device or when they step foot in your stores.
The auto industry, like most other verticals, has seen a drastic change in shopper behavior. Ten years ago, the average used-car buyer visited five to seven dealerships before selecting a car. Now, with online research, the average buyer doesn’t even make it to two. While nine out of 10 customers start their experience online, almost all of them finish in store. Auto dealers like other retailers must be omnichannel, focused on interacting with customers whenever and however they want to shop.
Years ago, people “compared one retailers to another”. Now customers are taking the best experiences from one industry and demanding a similar or better experience in others.
That means every channel must be personalized, from the mobile marketing messages to the in-store experience. For us, that requires anticipating customer needs. What are the features the customers is researching for and where do they seek that information? Search and user analytics are great identifiers to discover unique requirements. Based on their behavior, we can use visitor-level data to determine what a customer seeks. Then we can personalize our marketing message.
Customers expect a seamless shopping experience, and we see the mobile device as the bridge between the digital and physical. Synchronized browsing will be an important part of any shopping experience of the future. By knowing more about the customers pre-purchase research, we believe it’s possible to develop a better informed and seamless buying experience.
Another way synchronized browsing could come to life is through pairing mobile devices with iBeacon solutions. If a customer has the mobile device in hand as they are browsing, it can become the guide to understand where they have been looking for research. MVI conduct experiments incessantly, with discovery and delivery going on concurrently. Having a constant cadence of little discoveries is not only a faster way to deliver new experiences to the consumer, but it’s actually a much lower-risk way to deliver innovation to market.
A few years ago, we realized that we weren’t meeting rising customer expectations for product photos. Google Marketing Platform1 data showed that fewer than half of the photos for individual products were being viewed. The client employees often used photographs, but not necessarily the photographs customers wanted. To solve this issue, we used analytics to determine customers photo types most viewed. We learned to, tested and refined a new photo-capture process to improve the images for a consistent experience. Google Marketing Platform also helps us see which photos customers clicked, in what order, and for how long of a duration. This allows us to tell which pictures are most engaging for the consumer.
As a result of our improvements to our photo capture and display process, 20% more customers now look at a dozen or more photos in a series, making them better informed and more likely to purchase. Whatever vertical you’re in, the more you can anticipate customers’ needs every step of the way, the happier they’ll be. To achieve this, it’s critical to empower your teams to analyze and learn as well as test and fail.
At the core of each of our development team is a product manager, a lead UX designer, a business analyst/data scientist, and a lead developer. We never tell these teams how to solve a problem. Just what to solve. The teams develop a hypothesis, run an experiment, analyze the results, and identify if their solution will improve the customer experience while delivering business results. They are constantly iterating as they work toward their goal.