The Anthropologist
If done well, web and cross-channel analytics are disruptive technologies. I say this because the insights gleaned by tools that combine new ways to measure data and show customer behavior across many action types should be breakthrough. The result is actionable opportunities for improving customer experience, increasing revenues, and exploring the right ways to drive an optimal channel strategy. Analysts who have the chance to bring such technology to organizations usually find themselves between two camps: those that feel an enormous challenge and excitement about cracking open new discoveries, and those unwilling to change.
Anthropology is the mental foundation of a good analyst. Like Paco Underhill and his department store assistants, secretly jotting every step of a shopper’s experience, web and cross-channel analysts can see where customers are going, the pages they are on, the links they are selecting, where they are hitting dead-ends, the browsers they are using, where they abandon, when they choose to call, how long they stayed, and the time since their previous contact.
Using Anthropology to Increase Conversion
For years, retail and web companies alike have had customer and sales metrics, but it wasn’t until secret shoppers started doing data-driven anthropology on shopping behavior that opened up the field of customer analytics. For example, Underhill demonstrated that men are three times more likely to purchase if they go in a dressing room than women. Looking back, it would be insane to “average” the two experiences, but that’s what traditional metrics were doing (sales per visitor, products per sale, etc).
We apply this concept every day in our web and channel analytics team. We see where customers are abandoning and look for clues for behavior. Sometimes it’s unclear as to why customers are not completing a process, so we have to look deeper. A recent analysis of a multi-step application process showed that only 20% of customers that began a process completed it. We identified the pages that had the highest exit rates (the lowest clickthroughs to the next page in the process). It turned out that each of these were form field pages, where the application was collecting information. The usability team identified several design flaws that needed to be addressed: below-the-fold required fields, form labels written in technical jargon, and errors for missing information, which confirmed for us that these form fields were not easy for our typical customer to navigate through. We zoned in on the error messages and found that these errors were not being captured by the web analytics tool. So we worked with the developers to capture the errors in a query string parameter.
By making what was previously invisible known, we made recommendations for the page design, and reduced the number of errors on our highest abandoned pages by 60%, which resulted in an overall conversion improvement of 40%.
Applying the mindset of the Anthropologist was key to making the mental change from “what we think” to “what we know” and “what we can do about it”. And data-driven Anthropology creates more than a fact-base, it creates a dialogue that even those who are resistant to change can begin to identify with.
Concepts in this series are based on the book, The Ten Faces of Innovation, by Tom Kelley, 2007.
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