Accelerate Your Digital Transformation Through Experimentation

This guest post is authored by Roopa Carpenter, Senior Director of Optimization at Blast Analytics.

The year of 2020 has had a lasting impact on individuals, families, and organizations around the world. COVID-19 has completely upended what we used to think of as “normal.” As such, it’s safe to say that, in order to survive, organizations will need to focus on how to adjust to the “new normal.” Specifically, while most organizations have known about the importance of digital transformation, understandably so, it’s been a difficult process for many to take action on. Now, COVID-19 is forcing the need to have a strong digital presence and, as a result, accelerating your organization’s digital transformation is a must. 

How should organizations prepare for their digital transformation under the new normal?

First, it starts with an understanding that there are no existing resources or external documentation that will show organizations how to adjust to the new way of life. Instead, organizations will need to rely on their own data for guidance. Specifically, organizations should leverage their data to help create a new baseline for how customers are navigating the digital experience and where potential friction points are occurring. In turn, this will allow teams to understand areas of the site they need to prioritize to improve the digital experience. 

To accelerate these efforts, organizations should aim to have a better understanding of actual friction points along the customer journey by enhancing their quantitative analytics data with qualitative customer data. For example, knowing that users dropped off at a certain step has some value. However, being able to quantify the number of users and how much it’s costing the business enables top issues to be prioritized and addressed immediately. Finally, diving into the problem and understanding what actually happened via session replay is key to taking action and finding a resolution.

What used to work for your customers may not work now

It’s important for organizations to recognize that how customers engaged previously isn’t necessarily going to be the same under the new normal. When thinking about what type of action to take, it’s crucial for teams to show that their recommendations to improve the digital experience will actually work in the new normal, instead of blindly implementing changes. As a result, establishing a culture of experimentation is going to play an integral role in an organization’s digital transformation.

Through experimentation, teams will be able to prove that their recommended changes to the digital experience will have a positive impact on the organization’s goals, rather than just making that assumption. Moreover, organizations that establish a culture of experimentation understand that customer expectations are always evolving, and a one-time improvement to the digital experience may not be as effective. Instead, experimentation is the best way to help your team make informed business decisions so that the digital experience is consistently adapting to meet customers’ needs.

How can we get the most out of our experimentation efforts?

Breaking down silos and ensuring your experimentation platform integrates with other sources of customer data will garner more value from your experimentation efforts. Such integrations allow teams to pull in relevant customer data, which can be used for experimentation beyond the “one-size fits all approach.” Specifically, teams will be able to experiment for key audience segments, and such efforts can help organizations evolve towards creating a highly relevant digital experience through personalization.

In addition, integrating your experiments with other data sources gives your team the ability to analyze test performance on a deeper level and beyond just whether the test won or not. For example, analyzing customer engagement for the test variations using session replay will give your team better insight into how the test recommendation actually impacted customer interaction on the site. These learnings are valuable in increasing awareness across teams about the digital experience. More importantly, these types of insights lead to additional test ideas that will help evolve the digital experience, and, ultimately, drive the most value for your organization.

Without question, how an organization accelerates their digital transformation will be imperative for surviving and navigating the new normal. In doing so, organizations will need to rely on their most valuable asset, their data. Being able to turn this data into actionable insights will be key. Finally, it should be a top priority to establish a culture of experimentation as an integral part of an organization’s digital transformation, as it will be the primary way to ensure your organization is optimizing the digital experience to meet customers’ expectations over time.