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«Little white paper» of the online customer experienceAt the heart of loyalty and image issues

Strengths and weaknesses of key sectors seen by internet users

Impact of the merchandising of the French e-commerce sitesInsurance • Food shopping • Household appliances • E-travel • Ready-to-wear • Shoes • Winter Holidays + Market focus UK

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Jean-Pierre Le BorgneDirector of DevelopmentPartner Yuseo

IntroductionCustomer knowledge in a digital world :

data qualification at stake !

Multi-channel and cross-channel are today’s watchwords, at the heart of strategic considerations. In a few years, the multiplication of brand and customer contact points (digital channels or other) has considerably complicated the customer relationship equation.Only ten years ago, the path from customer to product was almost linear and therefore “easy” to follow, pilot and even model.

Today, the customer can implement a range of strategies using multiple channels depending on requirement, state of mind, schedule or location. This multiplicity and the complexity that it infers demand more coherence and complementarity between the different contact points than ever before. Understanding this “new customer path” is a challenge for every retailer; the company’s brand image is directly concerned.

The “digital” era has already overhauled the customer/brand relationship landscape. Digital social media has, in barely two years, amplified this pheno-menon by radically changing the historical parities and, most importantly, our view of the challenges associated with business and image.In a still recent past, complaints from 4 or 5 unhappy customers were limited by the resources at said customers’ disposal. Today, 4 or 5 unhappy customers can find each other on social networks and even create a movement based on their negative experience. In both cases, it remains a dissatisfaction symptom.

With network surveillance tools, a company can quickly spot this kind of si-tuation. It is then a question of evaluating the resources required to provide a suitable response proportionate to the nature of the symptom, whilst first and foremost understanding the causes.

So, increasing attention is paid to customer loyalty: on the one hand a multitude of channels available to the customer and on the other, an essential need to control business fundamen-tals. And in the middle, the necessity for clear understanding about the elements that help create customer loyalty and build or maintain brand image.In this context, and with its tools and strategies for collecting information, CRM should play a central role in operational customer knowledge. There is, however, a downside. With the increased weight of customer data collected via digital channels, he or she as a client has inexorably become “virtual” – lost amid the statistics. So, when exploiting these data opera-tionally, the essential question is one of qualification. For example, on a digital medium who has never provided information that is partially false (address, age, job, etc.)?

To fully understand a customer’s movements from one channel to another, a company must control and above all steer said customer’s behaviour within each digital channel to ensure that it effectively fulfils its mission in terms of customer requirements (direct data from ergo-nomic behavioural research).

As we have observed in most of our behavioural researches and in this new, highly digital en-vironment, traditional marketing profiling is probably no longer the right tool to understand the customer objectively. In the end, the real common and unique denominator about whom everyone in business agrees is the customer. So we need to make sure that the available data about said customer is genuinely qualified and pertinently collected in terms of context of use (difference between what people say and what they really do…), to avoid bad projections and hasty shortcuts.

Qualified behavioural segmentation takes on its real meaning.

While the era of the “conquest” to generate traffic and views may not (unfortunately) be over, eve-ryone has re-embraced the fact that for e-customer loyalty, you need e-customer satisfaction.

Increasingly complex customer relations

A phenomenenon amplified by digital social media

An accelerat transition : from conquest to loyalty

The challenge of custormer data qualification remains at the heart of the debate : behavioural segmentation

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Multisector-based focus : the Internet users’ navigation experience closely examined7 key e-commerce sectors analysed in 2011 ........................................................................................................Navigation experience and user satisfaction .......................................................................................................Zoom on the navigation experience .......................................................................................................................Access to the offer: Merchandising efficiency .....................................................................................................Process / Customer support and information ....................................................................................................Brand image ...................................................................................................................................................................Impact of the navigation on the site’s conversion potential .........................................................................

Sector-based focus 2011Insurances ........................................................................................................................................................................Food and Grocery - Focus «Drive» ...........................................................................................................................Household appliances .................................................................................................................................................E-travel ..............................................................................................................................................................................Ready-to-wear ................................................................................................................................................................Shoes ................................................................................................................................................................................Winter Holidays ............................................................................................................................................................

Ready-to-wear UK .......................................................................................................................................................Focus on the 15 major French e-commerce sites ............................................................................................

Actionable data to understand French e-commerce market

Are you contemplating to expand your business in Continental Europe via Internet, in France for example ?Entering a new market is costly. Hence, no one will argue against the fact of being well prepared to secure the positive impact of the investment. You are probably assessing the logistics issues to make sure the quality of your service is efficient.

As of today, how much information on the French “customer experience”, especially online, have you managed to gather ?Between localizing and translating, taken also into consideration the related cost involved, the dilemma is to find the right balance to make a difference facing a range of new competitors.YUSEO’s “White Paper” proposes a “100%” customer centered review of the experience online of the French e-commerce market.You can then identify the best (or worst) practices currently in place from the user experience perspective in order to know on which topic to focus on. On top of that, we guaranty you qualifi-cation and statistical relevance of the data measured to support your action plan.

Overview of the topics covered

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Why the Observatory ?

Responding to the key challenge of qualifying customer data

Customer data gathered via numerous digital channels can reveal some stumbling blocks (symptoms) but generally lack the operatio-nal ability to qualify them (causes) as they are missing an essential element to decipher, “the behaviour in the context of use.”

Furthermore, in a market enjoying explo-sive growth, the “numbers” race (pages seen, unique visitors, NPS, Facebook likes, etc.) has lead to a few shortcuts that seem uncertain in a market that is intensifying in both competi-tion and customer expectations.

With digital media at the core of many strate-gies, every customer point of contact repre-sents a challenge (risk) for part of the com-

pany’s image (asset). For retailers, the new challenge is the “omnichannel”: inducing a smooth continuity and fluidity of the custo-mer experience in their purchase process.

In the specific case of website, users have to be lead to adequate behaviours to induce sa-tisfaction and develop a virtuous loyalty ap-proach that efficiently contributes to brand image.

Optimise the potential of each visitor

On the Internet, traffic generation efforts have the best impact if they are related to an approach taking into account the “emotional and functional context”: how is the reality of the website experience in phase with visitor expectations, requirements and projections ?

To drive the visitor to “conversion” (immediate or future), online merchandising must be flexible and adapted to the product’s nature as well as customers requirements.

Browsing and generally the overall design of the site (content, products and services) must favour effective user-friendliness to create sustainable satisfaction and loyalty, conside-ring the diversity of the ways customers pur-chase online.

A tried and tested collection method since 2004 All of the contextual analyses carried out with Yuseo’s “Web Behave” tool (V1 launched in 2004) help build an objec-tive evaluation of the customer online experience.

Customer paths measured on the basis of different tasks (identical for each site) help mix and compare the objective be-havioural dimension (manner in which the visitor really behaves in a given context) with the declarative contextual dimension induced by browsing.

An operational and transverse scopeCompetitive snapshots supplied by each Observatory detail the visitors’ ex-periences as they browse the site and provide perspective in terms of their intrinsic projections and expectations (embedded value) of the brand and sec-tor in question. Comparisons between different web-sites are therefore possible in a uniform reference system using specific measu-rements of the customer experience.

Applying the samemethod of data col-lection, this approach provides a clear picture of results that is both long-term (barometer) and transverse (perfor-mance of one sector compared to ano-ther).Less haste, more speed avoiding the

costly «try / error» strategy

The Barometer

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