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Shaun Ryan: [0:02] Hi, I’m Shaun Ryan from SLI Systems and this is the Ecommerce Podcast. Today, I’m talking to Susan Aldrich, Senior Vice-President from the Patricia Seybold Group.

[0:10] Hi, Susan.

Susan Aldrich: [0:11] Well, hi Shaun. How are you today?

Shaun: [0:13] Very good, thank you. Now, traditional first question, what was the first thing you ever bought online?

Susan: [0:19] Well, I bought a computer.

Shaun: [0:21] You bought a computer? Where did you buy that from?

Susan: [0:25] I think the first computer that I bought online was from Toshiba.

Shaun: [0:31] OK. Excellent.

Susan: [0:33] … For whatever reason.

Shaun: [0:34] And can you remember the most recent thing you bought online?

Susan: [0:40] In the last few weeks, I have bought a heavy duty belt sander, a box of brass D rings, an opera, three dog leashes, a central vacuum, five yards of baby alpaca, a 25 slot CD player and four kinds of pepper.

Shaun: [0:55] Oh, my God, haven’t you heard there’s a recession on?

Susan: [0:58] Well, I’m doing the best that I can to get us to drag it out of it all by myself.

Shaun: [1:02] Well, thank you. It sounds like you are doing great job. Wow, you obviously shop a lot online.

Susan: [1:07] It’s almost my job to shop online. It just wreaks hell on the domestic economy here at my household.

Shaun: [1:15] So, can you give me a bit of background on yourself?

Susan: [1:18] Sure. Today, I would say I’m a leading authority on customer experience metrics and on site search marketing and site search discovery and navigation and findability.

Shaun: [1:31] So how did you get to where you are today? How did you get to be this expert on these subjects?

Susan: [1:36] Well, I started my career many decades ago. I spent 20 years in I guess you would say in a hands-on mode, helping companies use computers, often their very first computer, to run their businesses more efficiently.

[1:54] In the beginning, most of those customers, most of those companies, were in the distribution business, like manufacturing business or the retail business. So, that became where my lifelong interests is how those companies are run.

[2:09] I’ve been at Patricia Seybold Group now for about 13 years, which is a much more contemplative wall; it’s much less hands-on. I’m not driving computers around and trying to teach people how to use them any longer.

[2:22] Now, I spend my time in a more strategic level advising on customers experience transformation, customer dashboards, or just helping companies make their information findable.

[2:36] I’ll tell you that seems to be a problem that is not going away. That’s good news for you, Shaun.

Shaun: [2:43] It is. [laughs] It’s something I see everyday. So, tell me a little bit more about Patricia Seybold. What do you guys do? And who are your customers?

Susan: [2:54] Our customers are really companies of all sizes in all vertical industries all around the world. In fact, some of our customers, at least for our free stuff… Can you call a person a customer if they have free stuff?

Shaun: [3:14] Absolutely.

Susan: [3:15] OK, some of our customers are even students at universities, etc. So, our company has two main businesses. One is customers experience, strategic consulting. And the other business is traditional industry analysts business, which focused on the topics that are trying, really difficult for companies to get right or just problems that are intractable for companies in the technology realm.

[3:49] One of those areas is search and findability. So, that’s the technology area that I cover.

Shaun: [3:55] Excellent. So, in particular a lot of our listeners run ecommerce sites. How could they use the services that you offer?

Susan: [4:06] Well, if your industry has a very complex customer experience, then you should get our help in making your own customer experience the best that it can be. This would give you an edge over everybody else in your industry.

[4:21] If you run a site, if that’s not really your situation or you are running a site where users can’t find what they need as easily as you would like them to, then you can call on me for advice on how to improve that.

[4:36] Or you can visit our website and get our very comprehensive matrix of requirements for search, navigation and discovery. That’s something that you can get for free. We call it an evaluation framework. If you follow the links under my name, Susan Aldridge, you’ll see it at the top of the list of my research.

Shaun: [5:00] Excellent. We’ll add a link in the show notes.

Susan: [5:03] By the way, that was in the order of how much money that you would have to give us all the way from lots of money to none at all.

Shaun: [5:10] All right.

Susan: [5:12] Our website is PSGroup.com. That would be for Patricia Seybold Group, PGGroup.com.

Shaun: [5:20] Excellent. So, can you give me an example of the customer that you may have dealt with and how you have helped them out?

Susan: [5:28] Well, we recently worked with a Canadian financial institution that wanted to transform their customer experience. They wanted to be a bank that customers love to do business with, instead of being more like a phone company where people said, [makes strange sound] I can’t stand it. This is how most people feel about most banks most of the time.

[5:54] So, that would be an example of a customer experience. Another customers experience project, we’re working with a manufacturer who’s customers said it is also impossible to buy things from you no matter how much I want to.

[6:07] And it weren’t for your valiant sales reps, I would never be able to buy from you. You have to fix this. But, they couldn’t figure out what to fix. Everybody had 10 opinions about what to fix. They couldn’t figure out where to start.

Shaun: [6:20] So you showed them where to start?

Susan: [6:23] Oh, yeah. We take things from the realm of opinions to the realm of data. And it all settles into something that is a little more clear. But then, if you think of something much more concrete and small, I worked with a semiconductor manufacturer who just was frustrated that design engineers were looking for chips that would fit into their latest design. Obviously, the manufacturer wanted them to find some of their chips. [laughs]

[6:58] They end up being spec’d. I just felt that that wasn’t working as well as it should. So, they were looking to me for advice on how do make a whole variety of types of searches amongst this very large catalog of very different kinds of information. How can they make that work better?
Shaun: [7:17] And so do you see the searching experience or something like that, where you are searching for a technical product, microchips, to be quite different from searching on a normal retail site, where you are searching for a shirt of something like that?
Susan: [7:32] Yes and no. You could pose instances where the merchandise they sell at the Gap could be described in just a complicated a way as the products sold by a semiconductor manufacturer and vice versa. Yeah, people have a lot of difficulty sometimes describing the attributes of what it is they are looking for. [8:04] Sometimes it’s very easy. I want a red sweater. But, sometimes it’s not so easy. It’s not exactly red. It’s really not exactly a sweater. And once you get into that spot, now what words do you use to actually describe what you are looking for. Even that obviously simple situation can start to get complicated.

[8:29] And will the words that you use match up to the words that your supplier decided to use? Wow. Now that’s difficulty.

[8:38] That said, I would generally say that products at the gap would generally be much easier to describe and find than semiconductors. Anyway, semiconductor things get very complicated and it has to be very precise.
Shaun: [8:58] I think what you are talking about there is somewhat universal. You need to, if you are running a website, you need to be looking at the language that your visitors are using and trying to match that up with the language that you are using on your site. [9:14] So that the people who are visiting your site using whatever language it is that they are using, can use that language and successfully find stuff using that language.
Susan: [9:25] And the language that people use really reflects several things. One thing it reflects is what they’re trying to do. So, mainly being more focused on the use of the product, rather than the physical attributes of the product. And until very recently, the mere idea of concluding information about how a product was used was enough to make most suppliers and merchants throw up their hands.
Shaun: [10:01] Just too hard?
Susan: [10:03] My God! All right. Where would people wear their red sweater? “Oh, God, I don’t know, everywhere!” So, if people have decided that they want to search for things in terms of how it’s used, well, that gets pretty complicated. Or if it’s a fashion item and they want to search in terms of how it makes them feel, good heavens! [laughs]
Shaun: [10:31] Interestingly, one of the trends I’ve seen in that area is with ratings and reviews, where there are social tags that go with those reviews. People can specify, “Here’s the best uses I see for that particular product.” You may say that this is a great cocktail party dress, for example, or whatever. Those social tags can be surfaced and searched. Is that something you’re seeing happen?
Susan: [11:05] Yeah. That’s actually critical. And the more that merchants make that kind of information searchable, I think, the more successful they’re going to be. Currently, it’s typically not searchable information. Sometimes some of that is searchable in terms of some metadata that’s associated with the review, but whereas the words in the description are all searchable, the words in each of the product reviews, the user reviews are not. I look forward to the day when all of those words are searchable.
Shaun: [11:52] Yes. I think we are starting to see more and more retailers looking at that data. I know we have customers who have reviews where they’re making the tags in those reviews searchable, and also bringing the social tags from those reviews into the search and surfacing them as facets. So, that is something we’re seeing. [12:18] I really wanted to ask you what sort of trends you’re seeing, particularly around e-commerce, over the last year or two.
Susan: [12:28] Well, I think that there’s been some really striking improvements in the customer experience in the last two years. It’s almost startling. Search has gotten much, much better in the last couple of years. Much more effective. That’s an awfully squishy thing to say.
Shaun: [12:50] [laughs]
Susan: [12:52] I apologize for that. But, given the fact that as a researcher in the area of site search, I spend part of every day searching on other people’s websites. Two years ago, 80% of the sites I visited had horrible search – just horrible! And now I’d say probably only 20% of the sites I visit have horrible search. I’ll say right there that search has gotten a lot better. [13:25] In addition, in the sites where search was good two years ago, the bar for good has gone way up. In some places, it’s quite astonishingly good.
Shaun: [13:39] Tell me about that bar. What is a good search?
Susan: [13:44] A good search is a search which brings back results that are, to me, clearly related to what I asked for and are organized in a way that however ambiguous my request might turn out to have been, it is easy for me to choose what direction I want to go. So, if my search subject turns out to have a couple of different meanings, I can choose which meaning. [14:24] I just mentioned I bought a heavy-duty belt sander. Well, if I had been looking for a sander, there’s round ones, there’s square ones, there’s industrial, there’s lightweight, the ones that are going to break if you use them a few times. Something that would help me organize the landscape and understand what it is I’m trying to do and head in the right direction. That, to me, is what it’s all about.

[14:52] On one site that I use quite a lot, unfortunately because they sell a bunch of stuff that I like to buy, so I just have to forgive them for their bad search. You search for wool and they come back and say, “Well, we have a lot of results! Some of the results are wool, and some of the results are cotton.”
Shaun: [15:10] [laughs]
Susan: [15:10] Well, how can some of the results be cotton if I asked for wool? What? How does that make any sense? [laughs] It’s just so annoying. Why do they do that? That’s because they have an old-fashioned idea about what I’d like to see, I guess. [15:27] Another thing I see is that many, many sites have bought into ratings and reviews. I think those are very important. And although way too many products don’t have reviews, that’s not their fault. That’s up to us customers to write those. I also love the fact that more and more sites have the product detail information popping up as you mouse over your results list.
Shaun: [16:00] OK. So, you mouse over the image and you get more detail about the product.
Susan: [16:05] Yeah. You get a pop-up. Here’s all the colors. You can click here to see the reviews and the ratings. The back-and-forth thing, going from the thumbnail to the details and back, forward and back and forward, is just not fun. It’s work.
Shaun: [16:26] And are you saying that from your personal experience or from the data that you’ve collected from usability studies?
Susan: [16:37] Both, actually.
Shaun: [16:40] All right. Trends we’re seeing are that search has gotten better in terms of more relevance, more disambiguation and options on the search page, ratings and reviews, and the mouse-overs. That’s sort of a summary of some of those trends you’ve seen over the past few years?
Susan: [17:00] Yeah. Those are the three things that, to me, have significantly improved the customer experience in the last two years.
Shaun: [17:08] Excellent. So, what do you think is coming up? What’s going to be different next year?
Susan: [17:15] Phew! I’m going to observe that, for the last year, and still continuing right now, at least from our vantage point, search, e-commerce and customer service are very, very hot topics.
Shaun: [17:35] Yep.
Susan: [17:35] There is a very steady stream of downloads of that research from that site. People don’t read that stuff for fun, I’ll promise you that! [laughs]
Shaun: [17:46] Hey, I do, but normal people don’t.
Susan: [17:51] [laughs] They read that stuff because they’re in the throes of making decisions. So, I’m going to surmise that activity is continuing in terms of making technology improvements in those areas. That would be continuing this year. Those are great ways to improve your cost profile and also to improve your revenue profile.
Shaun: [18:17] Yep.
Susan: [18:20] However, as recovery begins to take hold a year from now, and as we start to really notice that picking up, I think many companies are going to find themselves short-staffed and they’ll have to turn their attentions more to issues like that – restaffing, probably somewhat cautiously. So, whatever promise we make in customer experience this year, there’s going to be a lull in customer experience change in 2010 and maybe even 2011. That would be my guess. So, there’s going to be a wave of new customer service applications implemented this year, new search, new ecommerce platforms. [19:31] I think that there’s going to be a lot of catch ups in this wave of improvements like the ones that we just discussed. I’m not sure that I see any new things on the horizon.

[19:45] What about you? What do you see? I know it’s my interview but…
Shaun: [19:50] One thing that I noticed. I was down at the Engineer Retailer Design Conference in Florida in January. I saw that there are a lot more people talking about using video, a lot more retailers talking about using video on their site to help sell the products, describe how the products are being used. [20:13] The basic reason for doing this is, it increases the conversion rate because people get to find more about the products and by watching a video they become more engaged with the product. So, that video, use of video in retail site is one trend that I think, we don’t see a lot of our customers have it yet, but we are seeing more and more customers have it.

[20:37] Video can be surface in the search, which is where we get involved with it as well.
Susan: [20:42] Yeah, I think that’s going to be very important as well. I think it gives companies an edge in search marketing as well because those videos are likely to rank fairly well in natural search results.
Shaun: [21:01] Yeah, with the Google Universal Search, those videos can actually appear in the normal Google search results as well as people searching for video or they are either on Google or one of the other search engines or within YouTube, for example. [21:17] So I agree. They can help a lot with search marketing as well as improving conversion rates.
Susan: [21:22] And if our user-generated content can start to easily include video, in addition to or in place of the paragraph or the two sentences that we are getting today, that could prove to be truly entertaining.
Shaun: [21:43] Definitely, I haven’t seen sites actively requesting video reviews but that would be an interesting direction. That’s the first I have heard of that, but we do see a lot of… We’ve already mentioned the reviews. We see that’s becoming very common and almost a must-have for any site. [22:08] But, the video reviews would definitely be an interesting tweak.
Susan: [22:12] Manufacturers have to deal with the fact that an awful lot of interaction with their product happens outside their control, right? If you’re in the software business, people may not be coming to your site to learn about the latest on the product. They may be going to community for the latest. [22:35] If the community is out there active about your product that’s a wonderful thing. If you can make use of the videos that they are spontaneously creating, that would be truly wonderful. So, that’s from a marketing standpoint to start to send those around or …
Shaun: [22:55] I suppose the thing is not necessarily having the videos on your site, but monitoring the community interactions happening on your site or off your site and being a part of it.
Susan: [23:07] That would be another tact to take. I think, depending on your own audience, your own customer set, you’d know which ones are the most important way to go. [23:21] I don’t think my son read a book until he went to college for example. You’d want to give him the video reviews.
Shaun: [23:27] Yeah. Everyone consumes information differently, don’t they? Now, is there a site out there that you particularly admire and if so, why?
Susan: [23:40] Yes, there is. I hope that the owner of this site is not unhappy about me saying this. But, Footwearetc has this feature that I have been looking for 10 years.
Shaun: [23:56] Wow, what’s that?
Susan: [23:57] It’s the first time I that I have seen it. It’s the most fantastic thing. It is just the most wonderful thing. You can resume checkout. I am the empress of second thoughts. Every single time I get half way through the checkout process I go, Oh, I need to check and see if they got this. I forgot to see if I could buy this. [24:17] Oh, maybe I should have looked at this other thing. And I leave the checkout process and of course when I come back I have to start all over again at the beginning. By the way, it may have taken three tries to get as far as I got through the checkout process anywhere, because I pushed the wrong button, this, that and the other thing.

[24:35] Anyway, now the second time through the checkout process I may have another second thought or maybe by now it’s a third or fourth thought. I’m not sure how you count them.

[24:45] But, even though I may say, oh, my God, I need to buy another pair of shoes. Well, I can’t go back because I have already spent like 20 minutes doing checkout. That’s just too much. So, I won’t go back.

[24:59] But, at Footware you can be in the middle of typing your name practically and leave the checkout process and when you come back it will just be sitting there waiting for you.
Shaun: [25:12] That’s excellent.
Susan: [25:15] The guy that runs the site must be a genius. He must be a genius.
Shaun: [25:20] So I know the guy that runs that site. It’s Mike Baranov, my friend. Do you know him?
Susan: [25:27] I’ve spoken with him.
Shaun: [25:28] Yeah, right. Do you know how they do that? Are they recording the keystrokes as you type them to save the partially completed forms?
Susan: [25:42] I don’t know! I don’t know how they do that. What Mike said was, well, I just told them it was a requirement. “Them” being the people implementing checkout. So, he must have some really smart people doing checkout.
Shaun: [25:57] Yeah. Yeah. That’s interesting. And that’s not something I have heard before. That’s a fantastic example.
Susan: [26:04] Now, in contrast, I also enjoy Endless.com. Endless is another foot wear site and named after the amount of time that you can spend looking at shoes on their site. [26:17] But, when it comes to buying, I would always go to Foorwearetc – so many second thoughts.
Shaun: [26:24] I’m familiar with Endless, but for our listeners can you tell us about that site and what you find interesting about it?
Susan: [26:31] Well, they have this wonderful ribbon of shoes or handbags or whatever that your results lists and that’s strung across the top of your screen. Now you are looking at the detail of one of those. [26:49] But, like dangling before you like a string of Christmas lights is all of the other ones that maybe you should look at. And they are kind of tiny so you can’t really see them. You have to click on them to really see them.

[27:01] Then you have a little magnifying glass, which you can drag all around your object and look at each stitch [laughs] on your pair of shoes or your handbag. And if it’s a handbag you can look at… if this were a patient and you were a doctor you would know everything that you could ever possibly need to know.

[27:23] [laughs] You can see every aspect of this handbag by the time you are done, inside, outside, upside down, right side, left side. Anyway, so they do a great job of product images and a really engaging way to interact with the product.

Shaun: [27:44] Excellent, I’m not a big handbag shopper, but I can imagine …

Susan: [27:47] You’re not! Well, then you are very lucky because those handbags are really expensive and you save a lot of money by not being a handbag shopper.

Shaun: [27:55] Thank goodness for that. Endless, I believe, are owned by Amazon, right?

Susan: [28:01] Yes.

Shaun: [28:04] Sue, what do you think are the biggest opportunity out there for ecommerce operators at the moment?

Susan: [28:12] Well, I’m going to answer that in terms of site improvements. I’m the customer experience person. I work for the customers.com company. I have to answer the question this way. If that’s all right.

Shaun: [28:31] Yep.

Susan: [28:31] First of all, I would recommend that you make it easy to resume checkout so that people like me who have second thoughts… By the way, I have yet to find – when I describe this to people, I have yet to find anybody that says, oh I never need to do that. [28:48] Everybody I say this to says, yeah, I do that all the time. [laughs] So, all of your customers have second thoughts and make it easier for them to indulge their second thoughts. Try to cut the number of steps people have to go through like in half.

[29:04] Just make that a general goal. We’re going to cut the number of steps in half. For anything, everything. And don’t take this the wrong way. But, on the one hand, when customers use search and navigation, it’s great because it gives you a clue as to what they are thinking about and looking for, and now you can start to interact with them.

[29:33] On the other hand, from the customer’s viewpoint, things just went into a very uncontrolled situation. And unless you have done a good job of implementing search and navigation, it’s also gone kind of uncontrolled on your end, too.

[29:54] Whatever you can do to reduce the situations that the customer actually has to use to search and navigation that would be a good thing.

[30:04] So, if you can send them emails with links that say here’s the thing you need to buy. If you can recognize them when they come and say, here’s the stuff you usually buy… anything you can do that helps them zero in on the stuff that they need without having to “wander the aisles” of your tens of thousands of products.

Shaun: [30:31] And again, your search marketing should be sending them deep into your site, rather than at a high level when they navigate after they come there.

Susan: [30:40] Absolutely, that’s part and parcel of reducing the situations where you are driving your customers to helplessly search. Make sure they are always in a very controlled situation when they are searching, if you can. You can’t make sure. Do what you can. Do what you can. Try to think that way.

Shaun: [31:07] Excellent. That sounds like great advice. What are the biggest headaches your clients have?

Susan: [31:15] Well, I’m going to sound like I’ve got a hammer and everything on second nail. But, even our clients that have engaged us for transformation for their customer experience or they may be company because they have search and findability problems, all of them suffer because they can’t connect their customers or distributors and partners with the right information at the right time.

[31:50] Some of them, the problem is absolutely horrendous and killing them and some of them it just makes their customers really, really ticked off a lot of the time. [laughs] But, I have yet to find anybody for whom that is a trivial problem.

[32:08] Another issue, a second headache, and I guess many of them don’t regard this as a headache. So, maybe it’s not a headache. They can’t or they don’t measure customer experience in a meaningful way. In other words, if you ask them, what’s the most important thing from your customers’ viewpoint? What’s the most important to your customer?

[32:32] They’ll say, ‘Oh, it’s blah, blah.’ Well, how do you measure that? Oh, we don’t.

Shaun: [32:37] [laughs]

Susan: [32:39] We measure some other thing. It takes you back to early days of the web where everybody measured hits. Is that important to your business? Silence. They come up with a convoluted story about how well more hits could mean better than…

Shaun: [32:58] More business.

Susan: [32:59] It’s good. It might. And what does that mean for your customers’ view of the experience? Well, nothing at all. In fact, it could mean it’s getting worse. All right. [laughs] So, everybody has moved beyond hits, obviously. We don’t measure those anymore. Nobody ever talks about them anymore.

[33:23] But, this is an example of a metric people were attached to for a time that didn’t actually mean anything. And every company that I’ve worked with is attached to some set of metrics that they have traditionally associated with the customer experience, which in fact didn’t have much to do with the customer experience. Certainly, it doesn’t relate to what the customers really care about.

Shaun: [33:50] Right. So, how should they be measuring customer experience?

Susan: [33:57] They should identify what matters the most to their customers. And find some way to measure that or measure something that tells them whether that is going up or down. We want our customers to be happy. Well, you can’t measure if they are happy. [laughs]

[34:16] You can only measure whether they are buying more or buying less. Yeah, you have to do these measures near to what’s important.

[34:24] With retailers, it’s not as complicated as with others, because customers care that you have what they want in stock, and that you deliver it when you say you will deliver it. What they got is what they expected. In other words, you described it properly, represented it properly.

[34:51] What the customer cares about is fairly straightforward. They’re a very common set that nobody knows enough to really measure it already. But, there are also some nuances specific to each type of business and there’s also some specific nuances to the online experience that the people aren’t measuring yet that probably need to be considered.

Shaun: [35:21] And what are those nuances?

Susan: [35:25] Well, how much time are your customers willing to spend finding and buying product from you?

Shaun: [35:37] Right. Do they have time on their hand or are they running short on time?

Susan: [35:43] Yeah. We had a gift company. I think it was 1800Flowers in one of our sessions. And one of his customers, an executive, said to him. Well, a Japanese delegation just left my office and I’ve got five minutes before my next meeting. I’ve got to send them a present. I need to get on your site and find something and order it to be sent to each of these six people in five minutes.

[36:12] And this was 10 years ago, and the chief exec of 1800Flowers just said that was completely impossible. He said, then I can’t buy anything from you. I’ll have to pick up the phone and send them flowers, go call FTD.

Shaun: [36:28] [laughs]

Susan: [36:30] Sorry, I’ve only got five minutes. Other people had more time, but that’s all I’ve got. Each of us as individuals – maybe some days I only have five minutes, other days I will go to endless [laughs] with the amount of time. But, you need to have a number in mind for how much time people should have to spend.

[36:59] And then you need to design for that and test for that and make sure that although we met that goal early last year, we still need that goal today. Things change as time goes by and you find out how the process has gotten twice as long as it used to be.

[37:19] That’s one simple and obvious thing.

Shaun: [37:22] Excellent. So, I think we might wrap it up there. I think we’ve got some fantastic tips from you during this interview. So, I want to just thank you very much for being part of the Ecommerce Podcast.

Susan: [37:32] Well, Shaun, I thank you very much for letting me blather on at you for this half hour. I’ve enjoyed it tremendously. And I hope your listeners will not be shy about coming to PS Group four for any of our free advice, of which there is a fair amount.

[37:51] And I hope that they will take advantage of your blog and podcasts in the future because they are generally full of really valuable information.

Shaun: [38:00] Excellent. For those interested, the website is PSGroup.com for the Patricia Seybold Group. And you can download a lot of free information from there.

[38:09] Thanks again, Susan.

Susan: [38:10] Thanks.

Shaun: [38:11] I’m Shaun Ryan for the Ecommerce Podcast. Tune in next time. Thank you.