Craig Sullivan, Keynote Speaker at GPeC Summit: 6 UX tips useful for any companies
We asked Craig Sullivan to offer the GPeC community some UX tips useful for any companies, particularly startups and here is an article writter by him. You will have the chance to meet Craig at the GPeC Summit, on November 15th, when he will keynote about “GROWTH OPTIMISATION AND A/B TESTING FOR A MOBILE WORLD: GETTING IT RIGHT”.
At all stages of growth, particularly in the early stage, you need an easy and cheap way of understanding your consumer usability, psychology, behaviour – what they *feel* about your experience. You might not have enough traffic to AB test or experiment but you need to get the growth that will make that stuff happen, right?
The great news is that you are already sitting on some amazing information, if you go looking for it.
(1) Customer Service & Sales
Here are some questions to ask your Sales and Customer service teams, without their managers around and with plenty of beers to get them speaking the truth :-)
Customer Service questions:
“What are the top problems customers have that they tell you or complain about? What would you do to fix them, if you had the chance?”
“What are the 3-5 things if fixed, that would make large amounts of costly contact disappear?”
“What stuff would you most like explained to people, so they can avoid calling in the first place?”
“What 3-5 things would you change in the product, that would help you improve your service – this includes stuff in the call centre, not just the website.”
Sales team questions:
“What are the top 5 objections customers have to buying the [product/service]? How do you answer them and why do they work? What do people say afterwards?”
“What are the 3-5 things that would make it easier for you to sell the product, if they were changed?”
“What are the top reasons for people not buying from you again, or leaving – when you engage with them? How do you think we can solve this?”
(2) Exit Survey or Abandonment email
You could also be asking people for an exit survey or sending an email to abandoners. Please only show these to people that have CLEAR INTENT to purchase from you. For example, asking people who added to their basket, but didn’t check out – not asking ‘Everyone’ the same question. Look for signals that show you there is intent but that they don’t complete.
You can ask some questions like these:
“What would’ve convinced you to complete the purchase of the item(s) in your basket?”
“What was your biggest worry or concern about purchasing from us?”
“If you didn’t make a purchase today, can you tell us why not?”
“Do you have any questions before you complete your purchase?”
“Is there anything holding you back from completing your purchase?”
(3) The thank you page survey
Another good place to ask is on the ‘Thank you’ page when people have transacted with you. Ask them one question: “Was there one thing that nearly stopped you from purchasing today?”.
What you learn from this one question is people that almost didn’t make it. And the customers who didn’t do the checkout (but nearly did) probably look a lot like these people who *just* made it. That’s why asking them what nearly stopped them – helps you work out how to get the other group over that line!
(4) The reverse engineer
Spending time with you customer cohorts that are delighted, high value, repeat customers – is gold. What to do is spend time doing UX interviews with people who are insanely happy with you. What you learn from this, you can use to reverse engineer delight for other customers who don’t feel it (yet).
These are only a few unusual examples – there are SO MANY places within your company to go looking for the ‘Voice of Customer’. You can also use these kind of tools to learn more about customers on your site:
(5) Web based tools
Exit Surveys
Onpage poll or survey tools
Session Replay tools
Regular customer Surveys
Net Promoter Score surveys
Post sale surveys
Google Analytics data
These are very useful sources for my work and are free or cheap to implement on your site. The startups that I worked on, that have grown to be large companies, all had customer satisfaction strategies, however small they were. This is my last point…
(6) Get a Satisfaction Programme
Use surveymonkey or surveygizmo to build a regular customer survey. Include a Net Promoter Score question in this survey and also ask people for service metrics. These are the ratings for the parts of the service – the support, the packaging, the delivery, the call centre – the individual parts that are most helpful to measure the whole experience (not just the website).
Even if you start as a small company with a survey and some open-ended text feedback, you have now created a feedback loop which will last forever. If you keep improving your satisfaction survey and collecting more data, you will eventually realise why you started this in the first place.
I once watched the MD of lovefilm do a presentation and he didn’t know I was in the audience. He told them that two important things I put in place when we had 16,000 customers, was a satisfaction programme – and a second one that measured our competitors satisfaction at the same time. This was one of the key things that enabled us to grow year on year – we knew what was good, bad and most importantly, we knew where to spend our money to get maximum return on effort.
Those service metrics can tell you where you are right now, but also how much effort or cost it will take to improve them. You also learn how to clean experience glitches out of the entire product, that are costing you money.
This helps the business understand the cheapest and fastest ways to improve delight – whilst working on the other stuff for longer term. It is VITAL for growth so start surveying people and using Voice of Customer – today, regularly, forever. Keep iterating.
You won’t get the survey questions right first time and I would expect you to improve it over months or years – don’t let that put you off getting started! The problem is that most companies never do the first survey and never get to feel how useful this data becomes (because they go out of business).
Learn how to push your customers delight buttons through a simple survey and I hope that all these tips were useful!
Craig Sullivan
