Creating a Customer-Centric E-Commerce Experience
I really enjoyed by conversation with Rich Brooks of Agents of Change Podcast in which we talked about the importance of customer centricity.
We talked about:
What customer centricity means for an eCommerce website
How to create a customer centric eCommerce site
The classic mistakes to avoid
The link between your brand and your customer
How to use Social Media for selling and or brand awareness
What customer centricity looks like post-sale
Find the show on Apple Podcasts
Show Notes
Matt, how would you define a customer-centric eCommerce experience, and how would you identify what’s not customer-centric about a lot of the eCommerce sites that are out there now?
It's a really interesting question. And it's a really interesting problem. Because if you go to any eCommerce store, they will tell you that they are customer-centric. But there was a poll done recently by HubSpot which said basically nobody believes that. And it's like, if you have to write that statement on there, I genuinely don't believe that you're a customer-centric business. And let me say right at the start here that I don't believe for one instant that you have to be a solely customer-led eCommerce business, but I do think it has to be part of your arsenal, and I think we have to think about customers a lot more than we have done. So, to answer your question, I would say a typical eCommerce business is either product-focused or profit-focused and forget the customer as a result.
I would say that 99% of the eCommerce businesses that fail, fail because of this point. You’ve seen this sort of thing before - you go to Shopify, sign up to the cheap seats programme for 20 bucks a month or whatever it is, you go to AliExpress or Alibaba or something like that, you find, I don't know, sunglasses or something equally benign, and you buy these things for like two bucks. You put them on your website, and you sell them for 30 bucks. All of a sudden, you become profit and product-driven, but you've not thought for one second about whether or not people actually give a flying flip about the sunglasses that you're selling. Do they care? Do they want them? Is there any demand for them? And so that I think is where we've missed it.
What are the kinds of things that you think we should be looking for if we want to develop a serious eCommerce website that is customer-centric?
Let's take cheap sunglasses as an example. Obviously, people want to buy them - there is obviously demand somewhere. But if you just whack them onto a website, you're like 20,000 other websites all going to Facebook to compete for the same traffic. What’s been missed in that whole process is what is the demand for their products? How am I going to tell the story about that product in a way which is sexy for the person coming to my website? How do we create that? And you only really do that if you think about life from the perspective of your customer because if you don't, you miss the point.
There's a story that I often tell related to this which really highlighted this point to me. It's a story from a good friend of mine, Rich Rising and I give him full credit for this because I blatantly stolen it. He tells the story of how, when he was much younger than he is now, he had a job in a hotel, cleaning toilet stalls with a few other people. One of the questions that came out of it was this - how do you win the award for the cleanest toilet stall and how do you do this week in week out? Because that's what happened to Rich. That's what he did. He continually won the award. And when he was asked about it, he said, “Well listen. Picture in your mind cleaning a toilet stall. You open the door, you wipe the walls, you wipe the toilet, and off you go right? You don't want to be in there that long.” But the one thing that he did which was entirely different to everybody else was, after he’d opened the door, wiped the walls, and wiped the toilet, he’d turn around and he'd sit down on the toilet and he'd clean from where he was sitting. He did this because, to quote Rich, from here he had the most important perspective - the perspective of the user. And I think we get so focused and so inundated with our own business that, without thinking about it, we don't take the time to see it from a slightly different perspective.
What’s a list of things that should be considered when designing a customer-centric eCommerce site?
The best advice I've discovered when it comes to our own businesses, eCommerce sites, and when coaching with clients is a 2000 year-old piece of wisdom, and I can't improve on it. And it is simply this - to treat your customer, to treat this person coming to your website, the way that you would want to be treated if you were them. And it seems remarkably simple, but it's incredibly effective. And there's a great story that I will never forget.
I've recently sold it, but we had a website which sold professional skincare products here in the UK. Over the years it's sold probably about $70 million worth of products worldwide. It was a pretty big business. And we made a real big business shift in 2012 and 2013 where we said to all the customer service guys, “Listen, treat any customer that comes on the phone the way that you would want to be treated in their situation.” And as long as the solution doesn't cost more than X, you don't need to ask anybody's permission to do it, just go ahead and do it. And so there was a guy working with us at the time called Greg, who's a wonderful guy who’s still a very good friend. One time, Greg took a phone call from a distraught customer who was saying, “You know what, I ordered these products yesterday - they've not arrived. They’re for my wife's birthday. What’s going on?” Greg listened to him, and he was like, “Well, what would I want in this situation?” Greg is a married man, and he was like, I would definitely want some help because, you know, if you've not got your wife a present on her birthday, things are not gonna go well for you. So Greg's like, okay - the guy that had ordered it hadn't paid for next day delivery, so he could have just turned around and said, “Really sorry, just wait till it arrives.” He could have just wiped his hands and moved on quickly. But Greg didn't do that. What Greg did was he went to the warehouse, he packed the order himself to make sure it shipped out that day, and he paid for it to arrive the next day before nine o'clock which is the most expensive form of shipping here in the UK. Greg also made sure to wrap the products in wrapping paper. So when the guy got it first thing in the morning, it was already wrapped. Not only that but Greg went the extra mile - he got a birthday card and had everybody in the company, including me, sign it. So we signed this birthday card though I didn't know what was going on. And he sent this parcel out and the chap gets it early Monday morning. I heard about this for the first time when the customer called me. He called me Monday morning like, “I need to speak to the MD - I need to speak to the CEO.” He is literally in tears. This fella said he could not believe how far our guys went, how far Greg went to help him with this problem that he knew he’d created. He said he was rude and angry at Greg, though he knew he shouldn't have been and he explained the whole story.
I calculated the extra expense after I put the phone down. I worked out the sums. We'd lost about 27 pounds on that order, which is what about $45. 45 US dollars. That's how much it cost the business. But you know what, that guy became a customer for life, both him and his wife. And they became some of our greatest evangelists. They went and told 20,000 other people to come shop with us. It’s a phenomenal story. And let me tell you, Greg, just taking that simple principle - treating others how you want to be treated - had clients sent him cashmere sweaters; I mean, the gifts he would get from customers was unbelievable. I've never seen anything like it. It was absolutely phenomenal. So that's what I would do. I’d instil the principle ‘treat somebody the same way you would want to be treated’.
What kind of elements does an eCommerce site need to reinforce the fact that you’re about the customer, and you’re here to serve the customer not just to make money?
That's a great question. And there are so many ways to answer this question because it stems from everything. A classic mistake every eCommerce business makes, especially startup eCommerce business, is their logo. Their logo is massive on the page, right? The only person that cares about that logo is the site owner and maybe the guy that designed it - no one else does. Don't take up valuable site real estate with your logo. Shrink it down. That simple piece of advice is the hardest thing for people to do.
We did this exercise a few years ago. We had a bunch of guys in a room talking about how to become customer-centric and I said, “Let's google accountants,” because accountants are notorious for the logo thing. We picked the first website that came up on the search engine listing. We opened up their page and saw they had a huge logo and their banner image was a picture of their logo on a business card. It was just crazy. The site heading was, “We've been in business for over 40 years.” And I was like, “So what?” I asked everyone in the room to do a show of hands to see if anyone cared. Genuinely, who cares about this? Are you inspired by this in any way? And the answer was no. If you think about your customer, think about what's going to inspire them - just a few simple tweaks, like removing the stupid photo of their logo and changing their headline from “We've been here for 40 years,” to something like, “We can help you get your taxes right, on time, and with more money in your pocket.” It’s the same accountant, but they're now thinking about the customer. The way you display products, the way you do product pages, and everything about your website should be geared towards the customer, towards their story. Picture in your head a very large circle on one side of the screen - that's how much you, as a business owner, care about your business. You care about your history, you care about your story, your brand, your logo, and you care about it a lot because you fought hard for it. If I draw a really teeny tiny circle next to that, that's how much your customer cares about your story, your brand. Next to that draw a really big circle. That's how much your customer cares about their story. I think successful eCommerce businesses are very good at drilling into the customer’s story. I'll give you a great example.
On the Jersey website, we had an average order value of around £54, which when you think about it is a lot of money to spend on skincare. And so we started to drill down, asking ourselves what the story was. You can't see it, but on my wall, there's a big plaque, which says, “What's the story?” It's a massive sign on my wall asking, “What's the story here.” We realised quite quickly that customers from us were buying themselves a treat - they were buying themselves a gift but we’d send their products out in a really boring Amazon-esq brown box. It was very dull and not very gift-like. We made three changes to our packaging: we added a little bit more cardboard, so it took longer to open the box so it felt more like a gift; we wrapped the inside of the box in tissue paper, which was you know, fun and sort of sat well with the brand; and we changed the packaging material from plastic air bubbles to something unique and different - popcorn. Well, before we started packaging our orders like that, no one had ever posted pictures of our packaging on social media unless we really messed up. Afterwards, everybody was talking about it on social media, how they got this sort of gift. They were using phrases like, “My gift has arrived.” After that point, not only we were getting a better social media presence, our repeat customer rate went way above industry standards. And so I can sit here and attest that if you think about all of your touch-points - every place where your customers interact with your website - and ask yourself, “What's the customer’s story at this point and how can I connect with that?” amazing things happen.
You mentioned earlier how the customer doesn't care about your brand, but there are examples where they do. Before we started recording, we were talking about Apple and our love/hate relationship with the brand. Is there then a time and place where our brand story is part of the customer story? If so, how can we leverage that?
Yeah, absolutely. And I'm not saying the brand is not important. In fact, for me, if you're building an eCommerce website, the first thing you have to look at is the brand. But for me, part of the branding exercise is understanding who your customers are. If you're like ME, you think in images. I don't really think in words - images are much more powerful for the way my brain works. When we’re figuring out branding, we’ll do this simple exercise in a keynote document: there's a question on a piece of paper - “Who are your customers?” And we'll go and get photographs of who they are. “Who are your famous customers?” We’ll throw pictures of them on there. “Where do they eat?” We throw in pictures of the cafes and the restaurants where they eat. “Where do they relax?”, “What do they do?", “What sports do they have?”, and “What hobbies do they have?” We throw literally hundreds and thousands of images into these sorts of presentations. When you do, some really interesting things happen, because you start to see common themes like common type colours, which appeal to that group. We, for example, did a re-brand exercise a few years ago, with Jersey. We think we had this problem with Jersey where I designed every website but 95% of our customers were female. Every website was designed by me, but there’s one key problem: I'm not female.
And so, one of the things that I did was I deliberately went to an agency, the one Rich Rising owns funnily enough, and said, “Listen. I need you to get your designers to design my website because they’re female, they're the right age group, they buy these products, and they're going to understand this market.” You know what, when they did the rebrands they used fonts and colours that I would never have thought of, and guess what? It resonated deeply with our customers. And so, understanding your customer, I think, is essential to getting your branding right. And you can really take advantage of that. When customers do come to your site, they resonate with your brand. The way Apple have done their website, for example, is not an accident - it's so that when I go to it, I go, “Oh, this is a lovely website.” They draw me in with that and I can be proud of being associated with their brand because it resonates with me. And so if you're doing something that's appealing to people in their mid-30s to early-40s, you don't want a busy website, you don't want a busy logo, and you don't want crazy colours. You want strong geometric patterns, simple lines, you want blues and pinks and you want sans-serif type fonts. Understanding your customer and understanding their story makes for a beautiful, beautiful brand.
