Unlocking Quality Data for Exceptional User Experience

Importance of Updating Your Tech

I think there's a lot of reasons. Part of it can be technology doesn't really tend to go bad by and large, right? It's like a car where you have to replace pieces and parts. Usually, you're not having to deal with those kinds of maintenance things. Though, just keeping up with the maintenance isn't necessarily going to drive the kind of change that you're looking for.

The other thing to keep in mind is you're talking about competitive advantage. So, even if you feel like what you have works and maybe you're getting the same numbers that you were getting before, you have to think about what, potentially, competition is doing. Or even the threat of new competitors if you're not innovating there. If you're not set up properly, you don't even know about the issues that are there.

So, thinking about, am I getting the metrics that I need? Are these metrics correct? So that I can use these to drive the decisions I'm making. If you don't have those, then you don't really necessarily know where you should be investing your time, or if there are issues you don't even know about. It can be tough to make the decisions without having that data upfront.

The Impact of UX

The user experience of finding the product that they're looking for. That's such a huge factor that maybe in the first approach, you just think search is search. But when you come back to it, we've done kind of like redesigns and rethinking of these for a few clients now, and I think that's driven a lot of value. So, thinking about what you're selling, how your customers are buying it, and then driving an approach off of that.

How many clicks does it take to find the things that they're looking for? How many clicks do you take to do these tasks that you're doing frequently? If customers are buying basically the same things often, is there a way we can speed that up and remove that friction? So, adding new features like that for convenience, that's a huge one. And making sure that people can find the things they're looking for.

And the last thing I would say on the user experience front is just looking at checkout. Checkout is like, it's this beast that we are frequently struggling with. Every time we think we've mastered it, there's some kind of change or rethinking. And that's the place where all you need to do is make sure it works right?

You need to remove as much friction as you can, but at the end of the day, it needs to be reliable and you need to not drive people away there. You're already about to make that sale. You really don't want to lose them there.

Why IT Departments Fall Short with Digital

Organizationally, the hardest part for an IT department is, it's not their specialty. Especially when you're talking about building something external facing. An IT department's focus is usually more internal.

Your approach is, you have a project, it has a start and an end. Which can be a little tricky when you're talking about delivering various kinds of digital solutions. You really want to treat those more as an ongoing never-ending project, right? Where you work in iterations. The approach can be pretty tough for some IT departments to switch their mindset too.

You just have to open yourself up. If it's something that you're not used to doing, maybe trying to bring in people who have worked in more of that environment. We would have a team where it's cross-functional. You have project managers. You have the analysts of various kinds. You have quality people and the developers, obviously. They're all working together, making this team. In a company, maybe you might have a team of developers and a team of this and a team of that. Building teams based on the product or the solution that you're trying to work towards, rather than by just specific function. I think that could be helpful.