The Say Yeah team had the opportunity to sit in on some great conversations and hear some fresh perspectives on self-service, data usage, customer needs and so much more.

Conference highlights

1. Learning how to build exceptional self-service from Josh Bean.
2. Hearing from Katrina Schiedemeyer, Kamesh Moola, and Kobi Ben Meir on how even though digital services are taking over, it’s important to recognize that there are times when consumers prefer physical interaction. As CX professionals, we need to learn to balance both needs.
3. Listening to Ashley Fitzgerald, Afshin Ahangar, and John Ross’s approach to using data as a means of finding the entry and exit points on your website to understand where your company is not delivering.

Building effective self-service

Josh Bean’s talk was centred around how we can increase the productivity of help centre agents as customer preferences for self-service solutions increase. Josh listed three ways of deflecting tickets to improve the productivity of agents:

1. Having a knowledge base;
2. an online community; and,
3. a customer service portal.

During his session, Josh also walked us through a 5 step process for getting self-service up and running:

1. Project planning
2. Content planning
3. Content creation
4. Launch and execution
5. KPIs for success

This aligns with one of the key objectives we help customers achieve: guiding customers through critical product and website flows so you can better drive engagement without burdening help staff.

Balancing in-person and digital customer interactions

During this panel discussion, Katrina Schiedemeyer raised the point that while self-service and digital services are the focus of many organizations, customers may at times prefer having face-to-face or phone interactions.

Customers may have concerns that they would rather speak to someone directly to get help faster and with more clarity. Additionally, they may feel it is easier to speak with someone rather than having to dig through pages of information on a website, or being forced to speak with a chatbot that doesn’t give them the results they want.

Katrina highlighted how empathy can get lost in digital services. In trying to become more efficient and reduce calls to a call centre (with features like chatbots) for the benefit of the company, it is important that we make sure that we aren’t creating more challenges for the customer.

We need to ensure we are still providing a range of ways for customers to meet their goals, providing the personal support they may need.

Understanding consumers with the help of data

In their talk on actionable data insights, Ashley Fitzgerald, Afshin Ahangar, and John Ross discussed using the data you’ve gathered to find the blind spots in customer experience.

John Ross emphasized making use of data to determine where you aren’t delivering on your website. Using the data to discover where the entrance and exit points are on your site is valuable to understanding what makes your customers behave the way they do. Based on this knowledge, a team can brainstorm ways to fix the areas that are putting up barriers for users.

Data is there to help us discover things we couldn’t see before and plan for better outcomes.

This year’s Digital Customer Experience Summit was an exceptional opportunity to further develop your CX toolbox and connect with industry experts. We’re looking forward to next year’s conference and future events hosted by Strategy Institute!

Ready to bring new customer experience insights and practices to your organization?

We can help improve customer reach, engagement, and retention with our efficient, data-driven approach to product strategy, design, and delivery.

Get in touch

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Catch the latest digital CX trends, how to maximize CX ROI, digital activities and data analytics to provide the best customer experiences, and how to leverage the link between content and SEO.

Participants will also have the opportunity to learn best practices adopted by PepsiCo, McDonald’s, Porsche, Lenovo, Tim Hortons, AT&T, RBC, City of Las Vegas, LinkedIn, Mars, GoDaddy, and more, while networking with accomplished CX executives from reputable brands and over 450 CX thought leaders.

Here are a few sessions we’d like to highlight:

CX data and analytics

Customer data and related insights are a foundational aspect of ongoing product and services decision-making. We often find organizations struggle with knowing what data is valuable and how to leverage it towards improved customer experience. We expect these two talks will bring clarity on how to improve your data practices.

1. Day 2 Opening Panel Discussion: Actionable Insights – Harness CX Data Analytics for Actionable Insights That Drive Bottom-Line Results with Ashley Fitzgerald, Afshin Ahangar, John Ross, and John Oxford, Wednesday at 10:05 AM
2. Industry Expert: Harvesting Better Data – The Unstructured Data Goldmine: Target, Extract, & Share Value with Josh Snider, Wednesday at 11:45 AM

Customer journey best practices

Another typical organizational gap covered in these talks: unifying customer communication across all channels and eliminating information silos, often described as omni-channel, or a 360 degree customer view.

1. Industry Expert: Unify, Streamline, Connect – How to Build Better Customer Journeys with Amrit Dhangal, Wednesday at 10:40 AM
2. Spotlight Session: Powering Up Digital CX Journeys – Adapt Your Customer Strategies to Meet the New Digital CX: From Consideration and Applications with Kasia Bigda, Wednesday at 3:30 PM

For more information and the full conference schedule take a look at the event website.

Register today!

Tune in March 29th and March 30th for this exciting opportunity to grow your customer experience strategy.

Tickets start at $495 and include live access and networking as well as ongoing access to the conference recordings for up to 12 months.

Ready to bring new customer experience insights and practices to your organization?

We can help improve customer reach, engagement, and retention with our efficient, data-driven approach to product strategy and service design.

Get in touch

The post Digital Customer Experience Summit, March 29-30, 2022 appeared first on Say Yeah!.

Hosted by our colleagues at The Strategy Institute and Digital Marketing for Financial Services, this webinar will help you and your team extend your knowledge of how to adjust your customer experience and marketing strategies during COVID-19.

From the United Nations COVID-19 Response series. This “positive propaganda” is meant to foster a sense of hopefulness in times of uncertainty. The future is still bright. Image created by Heads Up (Madwell).

With a great roster of speakers, from Simon Wyse, Borrowell’s VP of Revenue, to Bank of Montreal’s Vice President and Sr. Digital Product Owner Jerry Breef, and more, it’s sure to be a timely and informative session.

You’ll learn how to use experience design and product strategy to ensure customers reach your products and services in a way that meets their goals. All of this learning is industry-specific, with a lens on financial brands in particular.

Register now

The post Understanding your consumer needs in uncertain times. A financial services webinar, May 27th, 2020 appeared first on Say Yeah!.

This spring, we’ll be continuing our conference collaborations with the Customer Experience Strategies Summit. For two educational and entertaining days in Toronto’s Westin Harbour Castle we’ll immerse ourselves in all things CX. You should join us!

From April 16th to 17th, the Customer Experience Strategies Summit offers CX professionals the rare chance to hear from many incredible industry experts, all of whom advise top established brands in this space—from Disney, to TD Bank, to LinkedIn, and more. Not to mention the many invaluable networking breaks that offer you a chance to engage with industry professionals.

We’re especially looking forward to hearing talks from:

• Mark Lannutti, Sun Life’s Client Experience Strategy AVP
• Catherine Kromkowski, Walmart’s SM of Product & Analytics, and
• Mélanie Bois, Banque Nationale’s Director of the Voice of the Customer.

You’ll be able to spot us easily: we’ll be the ones with a camera crew. Please don’t be shy, while we’ll have our hands full with in depth summit speaker conversations talking digital transformation and customer experience, we’d love to chat with you, too. We’ll be producing an informative conference recap video and look to capture these important topics as part of our ‘Industry Experts’ series.

There’s no need to wait until mid-April to connect with us—visit our blog, LinkedIn group, and our YouTube channel to stay up to speed other event recap videos, service design and product strategy posts, and much more.

Connect with us at the event by reaching out on Twitter @sayyeahto or emailing Kate at kate@sayyeah.com

If you can’t attend the Customer Experience Strategies Summit this year, check out our comprehensive day-of and conference-recap content.

Get your ticket here

We hope to see you at the Summit!

The Say Yeah Team

The post We’ll be at the Customer Experience Strategies Summit April 16th-17th, 2020—POSTPONED appeared first on Say Yeah!.

Intent is essential in establishing a connection to explain and persuade towards an exchange between your organization and a consumer, whether on your homepage, an advertising marketing page, or elsewhere on your site.

When we look at a blog and the articles you’re publishing, or other long-form pages or cornerstone content, intent plays into how visitors will react to your CTAs, and how you can best support that person in taking their next step towards making a purchase decision.

One of the challenges businesses faces when investing in publishing longer, information-focused articles or pages on their site is falling into the trap of thinking like a publisher.

A publisher’s job is to grow time on site by offering more engaging content and promoting the consumption of that content, typically encouraging readers to click on an ad or buy a subscription. As a business, your blog is a tool to drive transactions that support your products and services, not your content, and not 3rd-party advertisers.

Learn the best practices that shift a business blog from being content-focused to conversion-focused with this 8 step guide.

In this guide, we highlight ways you can adapt your blog posts and long-form articles to enable those transactions that draw you closer to customers across all stages of their purchase journey. We’ll achieve this by walking through a series of best practices that helped shift one of our customers from a content-focused blog to a service-focused blog, increasing their service engagement, mailing list growth, and deal flow.

Here’s a look at the overall wireframe of a standard article on our client’s blog

The structure of the blog post was designed to facilitate action by consumers.

As a service provider first (not a news publication), it was critical to guide behaviour toward service transactions. As you scroll the page, various paths to services are highlighted through different calls-to-action (CTAs), with no visible promotional marketing content or other article links until the reader has seen all the service options available.

Let’s examine a version of this wireframe that isolates and highlights the CTAs so you can see how they work together as a user scrolls down the page.

From the top of the page down to the links in the footer, we can map the page by intent.

Let’s review the methodology and detail behind each of the CTAs corresponding to the numbers from the wireframe so you can map your pages by consumer intent.

1. 

   The above-the-fold second column to the right of the article is there for visitors who are ready to buy now. The subtle but consistently placed primary CTA allows people who are there to read to focus on the content. Those prepared to shop can also get started, whether it’s their first visit to the site or they’ve been clicking through a series of articles.

2. For users focused on the content, an inline CTA contextualized to the content leads them into the purchase funnel (rather than related content or articles, which move people sideways across the purchase funnel instead of further toward a sale). Remember, you’re a business first; as a primary and secondary objective, help your visitor take the next step, not get lost in more content. Placing other contextualized service links throughout the content encourages people to take their next step towards a purchase as you build trust with the content. Suppose the user continues to be focused on the content. In that case, they can scroll down and read through while secondary CTAs designed to support people with different levels of purchase intent follow along the side:
3. 

   Not ready to buy today? We can share a reminder when it’s time to renew so you can get the best rate.

4. 

   Did you arrive through a search engine to read our great content? You don’t know much about us? Here are all the services we offer to assist with your needs.

5. As the user reaches the end of the article, there’s a prominent CTA widget to entice into the purchase funnel, paired with a renewal reminder link if they’re not ready to shop today. This structure has the added benefit of working great on smartphones, where the second column on the right may be hidden or unavailable. This combined end-of-article get quotes CTA and renewal reminder is another view of the content higher in the side column. It’s not too close to being repetitive and doesn’t take away from the content. Still, it’s there, so these critical CTAs don’t get lost on a smartphone while supporting everyone in taking the next step towards a business goal as they finish reading the article.
6. 

   From there, we get to our third level of intent: someone hesitant to shop immediately or share their details for a renewal reminder but has connected with the content. Did you enjoy this article? Sign up for our newsletter.

7. Not ready to commit to providing any personal information? Here are some other articles you may enjoy. We’ll ensure to use a similar conversion-oriented wireframe structure on each of those as we build trust with you through our premium content.
8. Lastly, we have a rich footer highlighting services and key links that help illustrate the organization’s capabilities, give everyone a jumping-off point to other aspects of the site, and support SEO initiatives by sharing key content categories and cross-linking on every page. In this case, we also highlight contact information and encourage connecting with the organization by phone, email, or social channels. To the user, the company is a customer-first organization ready to help! Another step toward building trust as the consumer weighs their purchase options.

This progressive, methodical, and courteous approach to providing access to services and information supports users at different stages of their purchase journey.

The journey begins with their arrival on the website from a search engine. It extends to the delightful reading experience in your articles, fast and free quote delivery and seamless purchase process. Ensuring to cover all these levels of consumer intent with your wireframes is a sure way to build towards increased conversions and business success.

Our customer’s results

The improved clarity and accessibility of services, content, and actionable next steps improved deal flow across many articles that were well-ranking on search engines but saw limited service engagement.

A before and after comparison

For this customer, the ongoing investment in content began to drive several improved business outcomes. The mailing list grew, the organic search continued to be a key driver of site traffic, site visitors began engaging with various helpful services that were previously siloed away from the content-focused blog pages, and time-on-site shifted from reading to taking action towards business goals.

In part, these improvements helped bolster Kanetix.ca ahead of their 2018 acquisition by the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan.

The post Designing business blogs around consumer intent, a step-by-step guide appeared first on Say Yeah!.

With knowledge of this key tool for driving customer experience across channels accelerating throughout the past year, you can expect customer journey mapping to be among the biggest digital marketing buzzwords of 2016.

As Chris Risdon at CapitalOneLabs said in 2011: “their importance exceeds their prevalence.” That’s finally starting to change.

What is Customer Journey Mapping?

In a sentence, customer journey mapping is the process of defining a comprehensive and actionable step-by-step path of your customer’s complete journey in addressing a problem or need they have identified.

From awareness of the product to customer retention, including sales touch points, engagements with your product or service, and any other customer interactions which fall in between, customer journey maps help to give a better understanding of customer motivations, goals, and behaviors.

From Joel Flom’s UX Matters article comes this example of someone looking for broadband service in 2010 (click to view full size):

Why Should I use Customer Journey Maps?

Whether you are launching a new digital product or updating an existing site, app, or other digital property, Customer journey maps provide valuable insight, informing: strategy, design, and content.

Customer journey maps help to better define the who, what, why, when, where, and how of customer decision-making by taking an in-depth look at customer personas, timelines, emotions, touchpoints, and channels, throughout the customer journey.

Well-considered customer journey maps enable you to:

1. determine the ideal channels to reach customers at different points of their journey;
2. work with sales, marketing, and support to identify the content necessary to drive users to action across those channels;
3. focus each of your digital properties around the role they fulfill within the customer journey.

This example highlights the key media required across various touchpoints in a sales funnel (click to view full size):

Ultimately, your customer journey map is the key tool you’ll use to increase conversions and improve customer retention.

So why should you use customer journey maps? Because they inform successful and profitable digital properties.

Get Mapping

Do you need help creating your customer journey map and understanding how your digital properties can be better aligned to your customer’s journey?

Get in touch.

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You need to give your customers the tools they need to not need you. Sure, you need someone in charge of customer service. But you also need someone in charge of service design. Someone responsible for fixing what’s broken, not merely apologizing for it again and again.

The post Give your customers the tools they need to not need you. appeared first on Say Yeah!.

It’s the data that’s generated at the Genius bar that fascinates me. This data, in aggregate, can tell Apple a lot about what machines break, how they break, and after how long in a much more direct way than what would come out of a third party service center.

Remember when Apple introduced the Intel-based MacBook Pros and they changed the power connector from a plug to the new MagSafe adapter? I’m pretty sure I recall Steve saying on stage they made the change in response to seeing lots of broken laptops caused by people tripping over the cord.

I wonder how many other issues in Apple products get addressed, in part, because of the data gathered in Apple stores by Apple employees. Customer service insights like these are invaluable to making effective product decisions.

I tripped over someone’s power cord yesterday and their laptop didn’t even budge thanks to the MagSafe power adaptor. I’m sure there are countless stories like this. Genius.

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