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Maintaining Your CX In The Ever-Changing World of Digital Transformation! – Deri Jones
On this episode of the eCommerce Growth Show, Segmentify’s guest is Deri Jones. Deri Jones is an experienced tech entrepreneur and founder and CEO of thinkTribe, a fully independent performance testing and monitoring service company based in Canterbury, UK. thinkTribe focuses on helping brands with fast and error-free user experiences. They’ve worked with over 50 blue-chip retailers 𑁋 most of them from the UK. Some of their clients include: Fitflop, Jigsaw, Boden, Dixons, Ralph Lauren, etc. thinkTribe also has non-eCommerce clients that focus on selling tickets for events, such as cineworld and Royal Albert Hall.
Today, Deri talks about his experience with customer experience (CX) design and its importance. Go ahead and read our article to learn more about Deri Jones and his expertise with CX! You can find the full transcript of the podcast down below as well.
Valuable Learnings from the Podcast
This episode of the eCommerce Growth Show focused on Deri Jones’ experiences with customer experience design and its importance for an eCommerce website. Here are some of the key points from his discussion on CX and eCommerce:
- The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the shift to online. There was immense growth in the eCommerce industry because of this shift.
- Customer experience is the most critical aspect of any eCommerce business, regardless of what they’re selling.
- A pitfall to avoid while designing customer experience: The gap between what the company thinks they’ve built and what they’ve actually built and all the glitches in between.
- The best way to overcome this pitfall is through testing 𑁋 most specifically, through testing the live website.
Shift to Online
The Internet has been a part of our lives for decades now. And ever since the invention of the World Wide Web protocol, the involvement of the Internet in everyday life has been moving at an accelerated pace. The Internet’s cultural effects have been at their most visible starting from the mid-1990s with the introduction of emails, instant messaging, video chat, forums, blogs, online retailers, etc. 𑁋 the so-called Internet Bubble.
In the past two years, we’ve faced another breaking point in the life course of the Internet: the COVID-19 pandemic. This accelerated shift to online has primarily affected the eCommerce industry. With this, customer experience optimisation has become even more crucial than before. Jones mentions how even the retailers who did not have an online presence before have moved online in the past year. eCommerce websites have changed significantly to cater to the customers’ needs and will continue to do so.
“Customer experience is the last battleground.”
Regardless of what an eCommerce business is selling, the most critical aspect is the customer experience. How you interact with your customers via your website, your social media channels, the emails you send, etc. – They are all a part of your customer experience.
As Jones explains, the most challenging aspect of customer experience is that all the changes that are done on an eCommerce website introduce technical risks: The gap between what the company thinks they’ve built and what they’ve actually built and all the glitches in between. The best way to avoid this pitfall is through testing.
However, Jones explains that most people refrain from testing the live website and only focus on testing during the early stages of the software development. According to him, this is because you can get a lot of false errors with normal testing. The ideal customer experience design tool is the one that looks at the live pages of the website and tries to imitate what a customer would do with their clicks and scrolls, including the randomness of those actions. Because many things can go wrong on a live website: You can click the button to add a pair of shoes to the shopping cart but end up seeing a different pair there or nothing at all, or the payment process might not be completed due to a bug. There are many lousy customer experience scenarios like these, resulting in lower conversion rates, abandoned carts, lost customers, etc.
Another critical aspect of customer experience is matching the right customers with the right products at the right time. One of the best ways to ensure this level of high customer experience on your eCommerce website is through Segmentify’s extremely smart algorithms. Segmentify solutions help you create a unique and personalised shopping experience for your customers by tracking and observing your data in real-time. Using real-time analytics, Segmentify allows you to segment your customers based on their preferences and past & current behaviours to match them with the right products.
Book a free demo to learn more about Segmentify’s smart and innovative personalisation solutions and how you can increase your conversion rates and revenue through real-time analytics and personalised product recommendations!
The Podcast Transcript
Phill Kay: Welcome to the eCommerce Growth Show. This is the first recording of 2021, I’m pleased to say. I’m in Bristol and in the middle of another full lockdown. So at the moment, my cocktail of juggling, if you like, the two kids, two different curricula; my wife juggling two days a week. Obviously I am doing my job and there’s no internet bandwidth… So let’s see how we get on today. But I’m really excited to speak today about a very very important personal topic, if you’d like, at the moment. And I’m going to be talking to Deri Jones. Now, Deri is a very experienced tech entrepreneur and founder and CEO of Think Tribe. Think Tribe helps brands with fast and error-free user experiences. So we’re going to talk a bit today about how that fits into the current climate that we’re in. Hey Deri, how’re you doing?
Deri Jones: I’m good. Thanks. Yeah, I’m not in Bristol. I’m down in Canterbury. We didn’t get any snow the day before yesterday, but I did drive through it on the way out of London, so yeah.
Phill Kay: We had some fun. We had, I don’t know, two or three inches, but it was enough to make a reasonably big snowman and have a snowball fight. And the kids are on the trampoline as well with all the snow all over it. So that kept them occupied and you know, trying to find things to do at the moment with obviously the restrictions and so on.
Why don’t we start with a quick ice breaker? You mentioned to me earlier that the internet was founded or built, started in Canterbury. Tell us more.
Deri Jones: It’s one of those Michael Caine things, isn’t it? Not a lot of people know that. Everybody assumes London, but it was actually a spin out from the University of Kent, here in Canterbury, which is why and how I moved down here 25 years ago. They had a bunch of techies in the computer lab, using this operating system called Unix and they were dialing up via modem, into the States, into American universities and so on. And the TCP IP protocol had been developed. This is even before Tim Berners-Lee had his magic stuff, inventing the web protocol. So the Internet was there. You could do emails, you could do other stuff, but you couldn’t do web. So I came down and they had some techies and the university didn’t really know what they had. So I wrote my business plan. I became their first business commercial employee. And I grew them from 3 techies to 30 staff and the rest is history.
A funny story there. A year or two later, I got a phone call from a guy with a posh London accent saying, “Hi, I’m looking to buy the Internet.”. I said, “Well, you can’t. Yeah, I can’t sell you the Internet, I’m afraid.”But you know, it was just those days when people really didn’t know what the Internet was and so on. So…fantastic guys.
Phill Kay: So you’ve seen the entire journey from basically it being nothing to being what it is now, the absolute backbone of the world, right?
Deri Jones: Yeah, I remember a job I did before. Before that I spent six months with a medical missionary society going around Europe, wiring up their offices so they could do emails to Africa, the remote staff. And these modems were just so so slow. But that was wonderful. You could do international email. Before that I have done a couple of startups and you know, digital background, but moved across to marketing in my late 20s, did a marketing diploma and so on.
Phill Kay: Wow. Great journey. You’ve seen so much. Well obviously now, we’re going to talk about the company that you founded, Think Tribe, and that you run now. And that’s obviously all about customer experience and of course, we’re very much both in the same world when it comes to that. As you mentioned, it’s come into even sharper focus now with what’s going on with the accelerated shift to online. I suppose the key thing is to optimize CX, but the impact that might have on the quality of the online experience and how that affects the customers obviously comes into that sharp focus as well. So could you kind of open the chat around that side of the things?
Deri Jones: Yeah. I mean, customer experience…We’re talking about it a lot now. You know the economic history… A hundred years ago, we had our first factories and you could buy mass-produced products. It was all about, I can sell what I make. And then we turned into a service-based economy, and now we’re much more… Whatever product or service you sell, the last battleground is the customer experience of the process of buying and using and phoning and emailing and twittering and online. It’s called online customer expense, what we all know is king now. But there’s a collision course that we’re all stuck in: I want to improve my customer experience, I want to change my website, I want to plug in some cool plugins, I want to revamp the platform. But all those technical changes introduced technical risks. And we’ve all experienced those sites that are weirdly slow unexpectedly, when they were fast a minute ago, or you put something in the basket and then it won’t let you check out. There’s so many ways… We just know that technology has bugs and so… We are helpful at that digital transform. And at the same time, we can take a step back and then losing some customer experience and credibility. And of course, only a few disgruntled users make a lot of noise on social media.
Phill Kay: Yeah, absolutely. So how does… Before we go into the solution side of it, the challenges in general… Because obviously I know from our experience that when you’re talking to a brand and they have a lot of tech on their site already, or you’re looking to test with a proof of concept or something like that… It’s very very important in terms of the technology that the supplier is providing that brand, in terms of making sure it doesn’t slow down the site or cause problems or whatever it might be. Especially at the kind of digital merchandising level, the engagement level, and stuff that requires a lot of JavaScript and so on. Talk us through some of the challenges that you’ve experienced and the reasons why obviously Think Tribe came about to try and solve those.
Deri Jones: Website technology has changed so much since I started the company 15 years ago or whatever. Back in the day, it was HTML and images. That’s all you had. Then CSS came along and now of course, everything’s driven by JavaScript and the browsers do a whole lot more.
So, what we’re left with is a really powerful bit of software running your store and lots can break. Different organizations have different sorts of pain points, where they realize, “Gosh, I’ve got to take seriously this gap between the CX we wanted to build and the features we are building.”. And actually the glitches and the weird slowdowns… Sometimes it occurs after people have a problem. You know nobody on an iPhone could place an order for three hours. There was some weird thing that only affected iPhone users. And they’re one of our biggest client markets, so that was painful. Three or four years ago, people would have issues where whole chunks of their site would just not perform for hours at a time. Now it tends to be that, “Gosh, we had something happen last night. We had an increase in the number of complaints last night at the call center. It’s unexpected slowness. It’s these glitches like… We get wonderful ones. We had one where a shoe store… You’d go online, you’d search for the shoes you’d like. That color, that size at the basket, Cha-ching! You look at the basket and say, “Those are not the shoes I clicked on! It’s a different pair!”. In the end, it wasn’t even a problem on the website so much as in their backend business logic that they put in duff data. Website tried to render it and it defaulted to shoes skew number one or something like that. So it wasn’t really the web front-end or web technical team at all to blame. So it is complicated. Some retailers are only just really going hell-for-leather on digital in the last year. They weren’t really present online and everybody is now.
Phill Kay: Yeah, completely. I was going to add actually that we’re talking about the overall climate at the moment. Obviously we’ve been through multiple lockdowns now and the initial sort of panic phase and so on. And then obviously the reactions that have been going on. Have you seen a lot of businesses actually trying to rush even harder to drive the change to help engage better with this kind of new shift in accelerated online purchasing at the moment?
Deri Jones: Yeah, I think that’s probably a general trend across all of retail whether you’re a starter. All you had was two pages on WordPress and suddenly you wanted to start selling online right up to the big guy saying, “You know, our stores are closed. We better accelerate some of those new, better features we wanted on the online store. Because we’ve got clients like Dixons PC World Currys. You know, what they do… Is it a 6 billion turnover company? They’re online doubled, and that’s a big number. It is already a big chunk of their turnover and that was twice as big. So it is huge. And of course, we know people have had problems with warehousing and ability to ship the product. But a lot of websites have changed a lot and people want to change even more this year.
Phill Kay: Yeah, some of the functionality that you’ve experienced and come across that brands are looking to change, improve, enhance… What sort of things have you seen?
Deri Jones: It varies from people doing more and more marketing plugins – things that the marketing guys can do without a lot of tech involvement. And I’ve got some maverick views about artificial intelligence and machine learning in the space. But whether it’s plugging in to better search or personalisation right through to people saying we’ve been putting it off, but we’ve got a replatform now. This technology is so long in the tooth, technical debt is killing us. And that’s replatform, but let’s try and do it in six months, not the 18 months we were thinking of. Having said that some big organizations have just… Last year, a lot of those projects were shelved for a while. Now it’s waking up again and there’s a lot more activity.
Phill Kay: I want to hear these maverick views of yours.
Deri Jones: Well, it’s because I’m a weird guy. Because I started in technology. I did a degree in Electronics at Cambridge, and then I shifted across to business commercial marketing. I’ve been a CEO for a while. So I’m unusual in that sense. It’s funny how technical fabs get picked up by the mainstream. Two or three years ago, it was blockchain. Blockchain was this wonderful thing. And there are some niche areas where it really helps. Lots of startups were offering blockchain competition to Uber taxis or loads of those have come and gone. Billions have been invested by VCs and wasted. Because it was a problem looking for a solution. But more currently machine learning. There’s no doubt that machine learning as a technology is just advancing incredibly rapidly. And some of it’s quite funny, some of it… I don’t know if you saw the dancing robots from Boston Robotics. I mean, those robotics use a lot of machine learning, although they have to train them to do those cool dances. But solving complicated medical, biochemistry analysis and so on, beating everybody at chess and go and games. We have benefits, but the places where it doesn’t really work is where you want more than 85%.
Machine learning tools are great, if you saw… I’ve got a huge data set, there’s no way we’re going through this manually. There’s no simple statistics or spreadsheets. So let some machine learning train up and we’ll tell it which of these profiles are customers and which aren’t, and it will come back and tell us what future customers might look like. And if you’re happy with an 85% accuracy, that’s great.Because you can’t really tune it once you’ve built it. You can’t tune it to make it better. That’s the problem with it. It’s a black box. So there are places like that, doing stuff that you couldn’t do before. But in a lot of places, when people say it’s AI, it’s really just a bit of statistics. It’s just a bit of spreadsheet thinking. If a client does this and the client did that, and they showed up here, then they’re in our sweet spot and we’ll target them. That’s not really machine learning.
Phill Kay: I agree. Actually, a lot of people, I think back to the AI term, throw around a lot. But like you say, we would say Segmentify is a machine learning platform ultimately. We can say AI, but it’s machine learning. I think you were right. One of the reasons why Segmentify has been able to really help brands is because it does combine not just a black box algorithm side of things, but has the ability to tune them either on an individual kind of variable level, whether it be a specific brand or variant level logic, if you like. But also from a segmentation point of view as well. So you can really start to dive down into that database and actually create your own custom segments, which has become very popular because it just gives much more power to the brand to say, “Well, hold on a minute. It’s all very well saying that you’ve got your Richie Riches, your VIPs and so on. But actually I’ve just noticed that people are scrambling to buy napkins or whatever. So I campaign around those users to obviously maximize the experience.” Coming back to what you said at the beginning, you see X in your journey for those particular users. So I totally agree with you.
I think our whole business globally has noticed that ability to bring that sort of finite detail to the table to enhance the machine learning does in fact push the boundaries at 85%.
Deri Jones: Yeah, I think that’s spot on. Because the pure AI often overcompensates, but I think what you do at Segmentify , as you say, gives it that extra level of detail. That X of knowledge and insight and segmentation around it. And then it becomes really powerful.
Phill Kay: It’s been an interesting journey for us because we’d always had that kind of bespoke logic within the platform, but more recently from customer demand, it was more around how do we get more out of our data, not just from a one-to-one user experience point of view. You go on a website, you’re going to want to expect that if you’re looking at a medium jacket at a price point of 150 quid, and it doesn’t happen to be in stock, you are going to want to expect something within those parameters. That’s really almost a given in a good machine learning platform.
And then obviously the speed to deliver it. But then the customer demands started coming through the woodwork through the account manager function. It was like, we need more Intel. We want to be able to build our own customised segments. And then obviously we got to work sort of six months ago. So it’s been exciting developments based on demand, the sort of things you’re talking about, you know?
So moving over to what you do within the CX environment, tell us a bit more about how brands are really ensuring. Cause all very well, me talking about Segmentify, putting it on a site and all the rest of the stuff like we said at the beginning. How do you address making sure that the CX experience is optimised and to customers whilst they’re driving change, testing, whatever else they’re trying to do.
Deri Jones: So that’s exactly what we do. We want eCommerce directors to sleep at night and we want eCommerce merchandising business guys to better the crack on with getting the job done, changing stuff fast, doing the difficult transformation fast without having to worry about that little gap between what we had thought we built and what we actually built and the glitches in the middle. So that’s really what we do at one level. You can say we are basically mystery shopping on steroids. That’s what our tool does. It actually visits your website and does what customers do. All the complexity and intelligent choices and randomness and so on. So by doing that… Our core focus, 80% of what we do is on live sites because that’s the only truth, isn’t it? Obviously companies do lots of testing in the various stages of software development life cycle, but it’s only when you go live with all of your plugins, all of your staff, all of your CDNs, all of your cloudy stuff, whatever it is… that’s the only truth you’ve got. That’s what we measure.
We measure that 24/7 and our magic sources that are our software tools are intelligent. It’s able to respond to the way your site changes. If you suddenly have a sale section pop up that wasn’t there before, that’s fine. We’ll find that. We’ll track that as well. We won’t throw up any arrows simply when it disappears. We won’t say, well, that’s a failure. If sales have gone… If a product’s no longer findable on your site, we’ll never complain. We’re always looking at the live site, doing what customers do. And so to a great extent, it’s almost a fit and forget it.
We’ve worked closely with eCommerce tech guys and delivery guys to provide a whole stack of useful information for them so they can fix stuff. But at the manager level, it’s like, “Here’s the wallboard. It’s all green. Okay guys, I don’t need any meetings this week. That’s fine. Carry on. Good work guys. Keep it up. More releases this week. Great.” Or “Oh, I can see some red on Friday, guys. Can you make sure that doesn’t happen again?” And if the tech team says, “Well, that problem we’ve been talking about. That’s why we want that budget. That’s why we want two guys for a month.” So that the boss can say “Okay, I’ll give you those resources as long as you promise that it won’t go red again, for that reason. It will be green from here on in.” So again, it allows the management to manage that gap between what we think we’ve built with our tech and what we’ve actually built, because it’s quite tricky. A lot of organizations have quite a long “bug list” that they are aware of. Everybody has a bug list. And so we’re able to help you prioritize it and say, ” We can flag up how common these are, etc.” and just take away all that. So a lot of what we say… Dixons called us years ago… We helped to unite the Tribes. At a senior level, we unite the teams in your organisation.
We stop the little friction between marketing and tech. We stop the friction between internal tech teams and external tech teams doing stuff. We stop fights between retailers and their A/B multivariate third parties when they blame each other why the test didn’t work: “It’s not providing the value you promised, we don’t want to pay the money.”
We find weird things like they thought they were putting 50% on the A/B tests, and they weren’t. So the statistics they were making decisions along the way were not truly…
Phill Kay: Wow.
Deri Jones: That’s really important.
Phill Kay: Going just a little bit deeper in terms of the tech… it sounds really really exciting. So is it automated algorithms or something that are driving sort of larger load processes around what a human might be doing with the site and picking up the glitches that it somehow feeds back?
Deri Jones: Yeah, it’s pretty close. I mean, there’s two core deliverables, so there’s the 24/7 one. So that as you release, we spot things immediately, day and night you get automated alerts, detecting problems and so on.
And then we have the as planned load testing, stress testing, where are we going to thrash your website. So you can prove beforehand how big our online store is. Our magic sauce there is we don’t just tell you a meaningless number, like 10,000 concurrent users, which we hear all the time. It’s such an easy number to get from your system, but it means literally nothing. Because 10,000 people that hit your homepage go away. That’s 10,000 users. 10,000 people of whom 3000 put three things in the basket and checkout; and 3000 search for 10 products. That’s still only 10,000 users. So a totally different load on your website.
So the load testing is done out of hours and planned in advance so that we’re not [causing any] inconvenience [to] real customers. So yeah the tool has got a lot of years of business logic and awareness of how websites work and what choices are, so that we can track a lot of the site changes on your website without throwing what’s the bane of testing.
The problem with any testing is you end up with false alerts. And particularly when you’re digitally transforming and changing the website and doing stuff and doing plug-ins. [With] normal testing approaches you keep getting errors that aren’t errors. So a lot of people back off from testing the live site for that reason, they only test the safe little environment earlier in the software process.
So that’s our engine, very intelligent. It looks at stuff. It really looks in the live page. It’s not making assumptions about what ought to be there. It’s just saying “Is the product there?”. It clicks on the buttons. It finds out… There’s so many ways that clicking on that basket button doesn’t work. There’s so many combinations that can cause that to fail, but it’s only by us doing it that we find the map. So it’s a bit like testing, taking a car for a test drive. You can do stuff in the garage.
Phill Kay: Very interesting. I’m just thinking, even in my own experiences, when you hit for a full-page example, just like a simple broken link, I’m imagining it’s going to pick up stuff like that. They run like thousands of tests per second or something. How does it… How do you cover the volume of all the things you have to test and stuff?
Deri Jones: Yeah, I mean, across all of our clients, we are running thousands of tests a second. Yeah, absolutely. When we’re low testing, it’s tens of thousands of seconds per client. I mean, our guys who do the slow testing, they call it the 420,000 pounds per minute club. Because that’s how many TVs they buy when they’re load testing. That’s probably out of date. That was a couple years ago. It’s absolutely a huge website and a huge use of capacity. But obviously 24x/7 we’re not going to load the website down for that. We’re measuring it. We are running combinations of journeys. But you’re not going to notice particularly in the traffic there at all.
Because everything we do is from outside doing what users do. There’s no setup time. You don’t need to talk to your software guys about plugins. We just kick it off. “Okay, what are we doing? Let’s have a look. Let’s start some stuff.” And we just start tomorrow morning and start feeding you back the results.
Phill Kay: I realise something that’s really interesting, isn’t it like around this? And you mentioned it before we came live about how sometimes, technology providers, Segmentify for example, would potentially take ownership of a website for a time, even in a test mode maybe, but then switch that to live where you’re creating the divs and maybe the widgets and so on. So, I mean, in that scenario, it’d be perfect, wouldn’t it to be running tests and making sure that anything that when you switch that from a test environment into live is spot on, is being checked by the security guard 24/7 to make sure it’s all tickety-boo.
Deri Jones: Absolutely. It’s risk reduction. It’s insurance to say whatever you’ve just changed go hell for leather, but we’ll keep an eye on it for you in case something slips through the net. As you say, it’s about different teams. We’re no longer in control of our own websites. Retailers are trusting you for some other stuff, they’re putting in other plugins. So there’s all sorts of JavaScript and code that their site depends on that they don’t even own or control. And it’s changed hour by hour by one of these third parties, of which they’ve got a say over, some of it’s just they’re buying in a SaaS service and they’ve got no say over what JavaScript changes are made. So it’s really hard to blame. Something goes wrong. What’s happened? And where is it?
Phill Kay: What about the code audit type stuff? Does it all pick up like legacy code that’s on a website doesn’t need to be anymore? Things like that as part of the standard sort of process picking up stuff?
Deri Jones: Yeah. I mean, we start with the high level, we’re measuring the speed of every page. We’re videoing every page. So you can always look back and say, “Hey, what was that glitch? What does it really look like?” And we’re saving every component that makes up the page. So you can start highlighting and say, “Gosh, we’ve got some pages that are much. Why is this page two meg and that there’s only one meg.” So you can start from the top. “How is that impacting the delivery?”
It’s very much a managed service. We work with clients as well as them getting the automated alerts and reports. We’ll be paying them saying, “Gosh, we’ve just seen this happen. We’ve seen that happen at two other clients [that] are using the same plugin or whatever, just be aware.”. Sometimes we act as kind of user experience advisors saying, “Do you realize it’s seven clicks for those shoes? But only three for those. Gosh, that’s not really user friendly.”. Not our job to comment on the class user experience design. But we say, “Gosh, there’s a whole pile of JavaScript coming down that’s just not used anywhere. We need a tidy-up.
Phill Kay: Just a little bit about Think Tribe itself. I’m interested in what territories you serve. Also give us your feedback on the types of brands that would really get the most out of this type of technology across any specific verticals or size of businesses.
Deri Jones: We worked with over 50 mostly UK blue chip retailers. So we’ve got the fast growing guys, like Fitflop. We’ve got classic fashion or whatever, Mulberry, Jigsaw, or Boden. We’ve got electricals, Dixons, COES. We’ve got big brands like Ralph Lauren. We have non eCommerce as well: Finance sectors and so on where people are quite big in ticketing and events, where again your website experience is key.
Point where we particularly add value is where you haven’t just started on the Internet eCommerce sales path, but you’re getting a bit bigger. You’ve got more complexity happening. You’re trying to do more with your plugins and your platform. You’re experimenting with segmented fire. You’re bringing in personalisation. You’re bringing in stuff and it’s starting to get quite a lot of balls up in the air. That’s when little glitches can really hit your customer experience. And it’s really hard to keep everybody on the same wavelength and talking the same, but a common set of metrics we can come in and clarify, save a lot of friction, save a lot of meetings. So it’s people have that kind of transition. So it’s not the very small retailers which are just starting, but the ones who started to go up and it’s starting to accelerate fast. I talked last week to some guys, they were doing 3 million last year. They’re doing 15 million this year. The lockdown has really helped them hugely. So they’re the kind of guys saying “Gosh, we’ve been doing this on a shoestring and dang it, but we’ve really now got to do this properly. We need some help to prioritise.”.
Phill Kay: If you were to put, I don’t know, any sort of numbers behind the types of businesses in your experience that really benefit from this kind of thing. I don’t say in terms of traffic levels or you know, transaction levels or something. How do you quantify that normally?
Deri Jones: At any pure play retailer, who’s doing more than 3 or 5 million online should be thinking about this stuff. So certainly anybody who is doing a more than 10 million online. It’s just worth it. If we’re not finding 1 and 2% of glitches and slowness, which we do everyday, then that’s worth fixing it. And protecting your long tail and just protecting the biggest stuff that catches their light problems… You can’t have it. So all the android guys have a problem for several hours. You just can’t afford that in today’s world.
Phill Kay: No, it makes a lot of sense. So if anyone who’s been listening and watching wants to get in touch with Think Tribe, what’s the best way to get hold of yourself for a chat or one of the team?
Deri Jones: We chat to them on LinkedIn. There aren’t many Deri Joneses. That’s D-E-R-I Jones. It’s pretty wacky… I’m a half-Welsh guy. So yeah, find me under Think Tribe on LinkedIn.
Phill Kay: Awesome. That’s great. And just to finish off then, give us your golden nugget for our viewers. Something out the vaults of Deri Jones’s vast experience.
Deri Jones: Ooh, golden nuggets… I should charge those, shouldn’t I? Once it was a golden nugget… I think it’s just that it’s realism. It’s “Customer experience is the final battleground.”. Forget having the best products and the best services. That’s not possible to be unique anymore, but it’s that customer experience. So get realistic. I guess, get your teams together, get your tech guys and your marketing and merchandising guys together and say “Let’s measure this. Let’s have a single truth so that we don’t get tripped up about this sometimes.” So that kind of bringing the teams together is the way forward.
Phill Kay: I completely agree with that. Culturally, you’re tapping in there, aren’t you, to make sure there’s communication and honor between the teams so that people could work without the usual things that ruin businesses, right? Any toxicity or stuff. And like you say, if you’ve got a realistic way of measuring stuff, and like you said at the beginning, giving unity between the tribes, that’s a great golden nugget takeaway for sure. Well Deri, thank you so much for the chat.
Deri Jones: Thank you, Phill. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.
Phill Kay: Yeah. It’s been really really… [I] appreciate having you on. And it just reminds me to say to you guys, if you haven’t already and you want to sign up to get any future episodes of the eCommerce Growth Show and obviously access Deri as well whenever you want, just chip over to segmentify.com/egs.
And as always, if you’re interested in being involved or got any questions, Deri, I or anybody on the series, then just give me a shout any time. I’m at phil@segmentify.com. All right. But have a wonderful rest of your day and have a productive lockdown. Let’s hope we get out soon and can start enjoying life a bit more. But thanks again Deri.
Deri Jones: Thank you, Phill.
Phill Kay: Take care guys, bye bye.