Scenario: Disparate roadmaps and priorities
Finally—today is the day. You’ve been waiting for this meeting for weeks, and now at last, all the relevant leaders and contributors are together in one room (probably virtual) to resolve the big problems in the checkout flow.
You’re painfully aware that the site has become cluttered and confusing, and this has directly impacted conversion rates. Now, with all this fire power in one place, your company can fix the problem and live up to its full potential.
However, as the meeting gets started, things go off the rails quickly. A Site Reliability Engineer speaks up first, laying out her vision for putting all efforts behind improving site performance. You watch the Site Navigation Product Manager listen impatiently before he speaks up to disagree and advocate for investing time and energy in Quick Links to bypass existing checkout flows. Just as you’re about to finally get your turn, another engineer jumps in to point out that the real issue is back-end errors, and only after those are fixed can the team do anything about the site itself.
And to make matters more complicated, each stakeholder bases their recommendations on data from a different analytics tool, rather than reporting from a single source of truth. Not only is this confusing from a collaboration standpoint, it raises alarms about redundancy in the organization’s tech stack.
At this point, instead of trying to enter the melee, you’re quietly plotting updates to your resume and finding a company that’s more efficient at cross-functional collaboration and has fewer data silos.
Sadly though, many organizations struggle with similar issues. Digital experience is a complex problem with many component parts, stakeholders, and dependencies. When companies think about it function by function, everyone is reading off of different roadmaps, and nothing gets done to make a difference for the company or its customers.
Exceptions to the chaos
While many organizations are still thinking about these problems piece by piece, there are some organizations leading the way into a new discipline of digital experience.
These companies have clear data, focus on efforts that make the biggest difference to company KPIs and customer priorities, and are able to make objective trade-offs so that all of the component pieces work together, guided by the same map to successful outcomes.
The companies at the leading edge of digital experience have put time and thought into improving their process, organizational structure, and decision-making processes. Perhaps most importantly, they’ve invested in a DXI platform like Fullstory, so that all of these processes, decisions, and stakeholders have one source of truth for objective decision making.
Revisiting the scenario with DXI in place
With Fullstory as your single source for data and tools, your company can avoid nightmare meetings like the one above, make better decisions, and avoid employee strife and turnover. Let’s imagine the scenario above, but at a different company that relies on Fullstory data and mature digital experience processes to make decisions:
Today is the day. You’ve been waiting for this meeting since last week (i.e., not very long). Your company leadership established several cross-functional task forces aligned around established KPIs, and these groups meet weekly if not more often. You’re a key member of the Checkout Conversion task force, and your voice has been heard by the other members.
After last week’s meeting, you ran several Journeys analyses in Fullstory, which confirmed some of your hypotheses: customers are getting sidetracked and confused after adding items to their cart, and even worse, after entering the checkout flow itself. You’ve known for a long time that it’s gotten cluttered and confusing, but now you have quantitative data showing how many people started checkout but didn’t end up on a confirmation page. Furthermore, it’s easy to find sessions where customers are clearly confused and batting back and forth before finally giving up without needing to jump to another tool.
A meeting that no one wishes was an email
You’re not first in the round table updates at the beginning of the meeting, but you’re not worried. A Site Reliability Engineer goes first, and pulls up Metrics in her Fullstory dashboard showing that First Contentful Paint (FCP) times are steadily rising on the Checkout page over the past few weeks. Her hypothesis is that customers aren’t willing to wait.
Another engineer goes next, and he also has Metrics built in Fullstory to show that error message notifications are going up. With Fullstory, he can also see exactly which messages are rising in frequency, and they point to back-end errors that must be fixed. He takes the analysis a step further, pulling up Conversions to show that these error messages are more frequently correlated with friction than slow FCP times, but both are significant contributors to the problem.
After you share your analysis, the Site Navigation Product Manager chimes in with similar thoughts around confusing UX and shares a few Journeys and Funnel analyses to back-up her summary of the issues.
Action-ready insights for everyone
Together, the team looks back at Conversions. There’s no doubt that error messages and slow pages are impacting Conversion rates, but couldn’t we make the baseline even higher? A plan is starting to take shape:
The team will work together to create one Fullstory Dashboard to align all relevant KPIs
The lowest hanging fruit with highest returns is fixing back-end errors, so that will come first, followed by page speed improvements
In the meantime, Product and UX will work together to streamline checkout flows and measure progress vs. established baseline conversion rates
This world is still not perfect, but it’s significantly better for all involved. The company will increase revenue, customers will experience less friction, and employees have a framework and singular source of truth to be able to make decisions and move forward together with one cohesive plan—saving valuable time and resources.
If you want this scenario to take place at your organization, get to know Fullstory. Request a demo.
