How UX Impacts Customer Experience with Object Edge

Hello everyone, and welcome back to another.

Episode of the Account Experience Podcast.

And before we dive in to the latest guest, I have an exciting announcement to make. We are officially going live. That's right. We've received so much positive feedback from you all over the last few months that we've decided to start a weekly live series we've dubbed Experience on the Rocks. But this is not your run of the mill experience event. Nope. Bring a drink, relax, and let's talk shop. We wanted to create a casual event without the marketing polish to problem solve your toughest and most challenging experience problems in real time. Every Single Thursday at 8pm Eastern Time, we'll be featuring a new set of experience expert guests with amazing backgrounds to lay out best practices and problem solve live. We have our first event this Thursday, May 6, and every Thursday from then on.

So.

So if it sounds interesting, go to experienceontherocks.com to register and join the hundreds of experienced professionals already signed up. So here's a quick cheers to better experiences for all and we'll see you on Thursdays.

Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of the Counter Experience Podcast. I'm here as always with my co host, Mr. Carrie T. Self.

Say hello, Kerry.

Hello everybody.

And today we have one of our.

Newest partners, Kelly Radar.

She's the Vice President of Digital Experience at Object Edge. And we're so happy to have you here. Kelly, how are you doing today?

I'm doing great. Thanks for having me.

I know we've been working with you for the last couple months and we love what Object Edge is up to. We figured we had to have you on this podcast and kind of talk about user experience, customer experience, the whole nine yards. So are you ready to dive in?

I love it. Yeah, that's my favorite topics.

All right, the first question that we really have for you is how does the user experience play into the overall customer experience when it comes to their marketing and their website? What are you seeing out there?

Yeah, I think what everybody is trying to do is really just appeal broadly to the most users they possibly can to be as accessible as possible. And sometimes accessibility is something that is forgotten or deprioritize because it's a shared responsibility between developers and marketers and folks who are in charge of content. So it's not just really a developer challenge, it's a marketing challenge and a business challenge. So we help customers day in and day out figure out how to make their sites more accessible broadly to the set. Not just a small segment, but truly as many people as possible.

Yeah, and I think that's. That's really interesting because it's not something a lot of companies think about in a weird way where it's like accessibility. It's such a important thing to get right. And I think that plays right into that user experience for your end users of your website. And, Carrie, it sounds like you got something that you want to jump in with, but go ahead.

Well, again, my mind starts to race. I mean, how much this has changed just in the last forget decade, just in the last couple of years. I'm sure there's a new law, a new rule or something happening, but paint a picture for us a little bit. Tell us a little bit about why is this important or how does this reach into that and why is it so important for some of these companies to have accessibility?

Yeah, so accessibility also, I mean, I've seen both sides of it. I've actually been in testimony as an expert witness in accessibility cases where companies have been. Large companies have been, you know, sued for not being accessible or not being compliant. And that's a difficult position to be in. But. But I've also seen this side of it where I've observed a ton of tests, you know, and worked with organizations for those who are disabled. And they really struggle, you know, to use technology and to have sort of an equal access to all of the products and services that everyone else does. And accessibility really impacts almost everybody. I mean, it's not just someone who's, you know, blind. It could be. I mean, I'm. I'm in my mid-40s, and it's getting harder to see. So, you know, even really, you know, just readability of site content and those kinds of things become, you know, challenging for probably one in five of us. But, yeah, there was an interesting case, you know, when I was in that testimony position, and I don't want to disclose the brand because it's definitely a brand all of us would recognize, but a pretty huge retailer. And the consequences for not being accessible, they can be pretty significant. I believe this particular case, they ended up settling out of court for just under a million dollars, which equates to almost two years of somebody's product roadmap. Right. So those dollars have to come from somewhere. But beyond doing it to avoid litigation, it's really just what's right to do for customers. It's what's right to do on a human level. Domino's, I think, tried to fight. They said it was, you know, they took one all the way to the Supreme Court and, you know, they really tried to say that it was too arduous and too expensive and too much of a burden, frankly, for Domino's to make all of its products accessible to everybody. But the Supreme Court did not side with Domino's and their legal teams and said, hey, no, you need to. This needs to be a focus. And so, you know, the Department of Justice has set a precedent and so has our highest court, that accessibility is important. But I find that there's a million business reasons for doing it as well. It can improve your SEO, so you can get more traffic to your site simply by making a lot of your content accessible and those kinds of things. And truly the disabled community and those who do struggle when they find a solution that works really well for them, they tend to really evangelize it broadly. And so you get customers from different groups. And then there are also reasons to do it. Like if you're a, a B2B company, you know, it's really critical that your site is accessible because you might actually be losing out on contracts or potentially revenue. And if you're trying to do business with the government, for example, they require a 508 compliance level in order to even win those, those government contracts. So businesses might also be just missing out, frankly on, on revenue and opportunities as a result of not being accessible.

That's crazy to me that I had no idea that companies were getting sued if their websites weren't accessible. And I mean, what a crazy story about the. You're getting called as an expert witness in that case. That's wild. But it makes total sense, right? I mean, if users can't access your website, they're not able to process the information. I mean, it makes total sense. You're excluding a whole population. It sounds like something really interesting there too, where I think even in our pre talk you talked about B2B Enterprises. You don't really care how big or how small they are. If you're in B2B enterprise, there's going to be some level of business that's being done with the government, which to your point, you need to be compliant. And what are some of the things that businesses can look for? Are there certain guidelines or standards that companies can look up to see if they're compliant?

Yeah, that's a great question. So in the United States, the de facto kind of regulation is something called wcag. Strange acronym. You know, it's. It, you can always have an acronym, but WCAG has a standard. It's a, it's got three levels. And in the United States, the Department of justice has usually upheld 2.1 as a standard. And there are three levels, as I mentioned, and 2.1 is kind of a middle ground. So we try to help customers really achieve that 2.1 standard. It's actually not as difficult as it may seem to achieve accessibility, particularly at that level. So. But it is something that you have to do both from a design standpoint. There are contrast rules and then there are content rules. You want to have things like closed captioning and really good definition of data on your content side. And then of course, there's some things that you want to do in your front end development also that make your site more accessible to screen readers and assistive devices and things like that. So it's a group and team effort, which is why I think it has to kind of start with marketing and it has to extend into the teams and even support teams.

And I could see where even like account managers or CSMs need to be very involved in that because if they keep getting feedback or they keep hearing from their customers. Well, no one told me that. And we're like, well, it's on the website. But if the contrast isn't correct and it's kind of hidden or camouflaged, I could see where even that could cause, you know, so it's accessibility to just information that's there. I can see whether that could even improve the experience overall.

Yeah. They say 10% of all men have some form of colorblindness. So, you know, it's not uncommon for us to be working with brands that have a lot of like red and green, those kinds of things. And there are different types of colorblindness. So literally you could be missing a button, thinking that you have a really giant call to action, a big red button, and you might actually have people that don't see it at all. So really kind of walking a mile in somebody else's shoes and doing the testing and making sure that you're doing the right thing. It really is. It's good for people and it's good for business.

I laugh because I'm the guy standing.

There like, I don't see the next button. What do they want me to click?

So I completely get that.

So accessibility. All right, that's a really great point. And I think something that not a lot of companies think about. So thank you for bringing that up. What would you say is like the second point for companies to optimize their user and customer experience?

Well, one that's kind of top of mind right now really has to do with Google. So Google has announced that its page experience is now going to have three new signals, if you will, one for loading, one for interactivity, and one for visual stability. People have been racing sort of in the last year when it silently went up on a Google developer blog that they were going to be changing their search algorithm to look at these new signals. And folks really started kind of trying to figure out when was this change going to take effect and how do we go about kind of monitoring our sites to make sure that the page experience is great so that Google will continue to rank us high in search results? I think it was the November of last year that they actually came out and announced that It's May of 2021. So we're like literally weeks away from when Google said that this is going to go live. So a lot of folks, we've been helping them really try to optimize their site experience and their performance and UX so that they can maintain the strength of their search engine rankings. And for those that maybe they're trying to leapfrog competition, frankly, it's a unique time where an optimization will really pay off.

This one to me is amazing because it's like one of those unconscious things that people don't know, like not everyone can realize why they're being agitated. And I think you gave us an example, so I'm going to ask you for some examples here. But it's like you go to one website and you go to another website and you go, that was a great experience. And then you go to another one and go, I didn't like it and I can't tell you why. You know, so what are these performance? Because I heard metrics, I heard vitals. These are all things that are in our wheelhouse and we love talking about them. What are some of these things that they're going to be measuring and tracking and comparing?

Yeah, so loading. And we may not realize it, but our intolerance for waiting is it's pervasive. We type in that URL into the browser and we really do expect it to load instantaneously. And if you've ever gone there and it was just a white screen, it's painful. And most times you're not going to actually sit there for very long. And Google knows this, right? I mean, they have so much analytic data on our behavior and they've really realized that we don't want to drive people to sites that aren't performing well. So I think that's why loading was maybe the first signal that they listed is that they are really looking for sites that are going to load in under 2.5 seconds. And they have made some really great tools available to us to be able to go out and measure our own sites and sort of understand, you know, are we going to meet the Google standard? So that's great. And you know, and then there are a couple of other things like, you know, interactivity. If you've ever seen a page sort of lazy load or only one part of the site loads at a time and you can't really interact with it. It might be like a carousel or some piece of video content that hasn't fully loaded. And so when you click on, nothing happens. Right. It just, it's not a great experience. Well, Google knows this too, right? So that's probably why it's the second signal and the third is about visual stability. And this one is really jarring for a lot of people. You know, it's like if you've ever gone to a site and then things start just reorienting, it's like it was a search box and then there was two columns and then all of a sudden it's one column and that data you were trying to look at or even the content you were trying to read, it just, it all moved. So they also know that people expect stability in the experience. And so if your CSS is not really lining up and you're having trouble transitioning in break points, that's going to start to penalize you.

I think this is so interesting too because I'm guessing a lot of the listeners out there are like user experience. Get that? How does this relate to customer experience? Well, you have your login on your homepage. If that thing takes 10 seconds to load, it's going to be a bad experience for your customers. But even before that, I can't tell you how many times I've been researching vendors for software purchases. As the VP of marketing that I've gone to and popped up six, 10 sites of competitors basically. And if the website is really hard to use, I don't even if it's the best product, I'm like, eh, I'll get back to it if it's interesting enough. But rarely does that happen. So this user experience feeds directly into the customer experience. I mean that's, it's so important to get your website nailed especially. Yeah.

And now they're actually coming up with this nice badging system. They've kind of leaked something that it might look like, like a diamond inside of a circle. But it seems like Google's actually going to be endorsing, you know, if something is a good experience. And I think that badge is, you know, we haven't seen what it's going to look like. We won't see it until May or maybe even a little after that. But I think people are eager to see like, what does that endorsement look like, you know, from Google, because they're basically going to be saying this is a good page experience or this is a good site experience. And if yours sits in the search results next to one that isn't endorsed, it's going to be hard not to follow the one that is kind of Google approved and endorsed.

How do you recommend, like any listeners to check out to make sure their core vitals are up to snuff? Any tools out there that they can use?

Yeah. So you can use Lighthouse tools from Google if you're a developer. I think that's the strongest recommendation. It actually generates a really nice report that tells you kind of a grade between, you know, zero, hopefully you don't get a zero and 100. And you know, I think if you're, it's like the typical grading system. So if you, if you're in the 90 plus range, I think you're gonna, it's gonna be green and, and then they, they kind of color code it so it's very clear what areas are sort of the worst and where you're, you're failing. And, and I do think that, you know, when you look through those, you'll see what I'm saying is very real, that some of the issues are design oriented and some of the issues are going to be content oriented, some of them are going to be purely code. So it does take everybody looking at it very similar to accessibility.

I'm always king of the analogy here. And I think about this, it's almost like visiting your favorite restaurant or a restaurant, you can measure how good the food or the experience would be. Is it clean, is it organized? Do they get you through queue in the right amount of time? To take it a step further about the whole user experience, if the user.

Experience is poor, are they going to.

Be able to deliver the service they're promising on that page? To me also, so that we, I think we do. It's what Ian was saying, it's like, yeah, I'll get back to there, but I'm going to move on to someone else's experience that is because that's a reflection of maybe the amount of work or the quality of work that we get from that particular company.

That's totally true. Yeah. And we help each, you know, we help customers all day long, like try to achieve these core, well, core web vitals, but, you know, and accessibility and all of these things using a variety of tools. And we share in the responsibilities because again, it's a team effort.

Okay. So we got accessibility, performance. So basically, core vitals, which is a really good tip and super timely. What would you say is like, the third thing that B2B companies should look out for to optimize for user and customer experience?

Yes, I think I could talk on just that topic for a long time period. But I would say that a lot of the customers, and I'm going to focus really strongly on B2B. Here is just that, you know, you really have to get a couple of really basics in place. I will talk to customers and again, I won't use any names, but this is a broad thing that I see across almost all of our B2B clients. But in the beginning, we'll ask them for their access to analytics because of course, we want to understand their user. We want to understand the Persona and the target audience and what are they doing on their site today and where are they falling off and abandoning and having trouble. And analytics can be really rich data. And so many of our customers say, well, don't look at our analytics because it's really not properly instrumented. And we only look at this one section because we know it's done, you know, correctly. So I would say, you know, one of the optimizations is just to make sure that your analytics, that, you know, whether it's, you know, the Adobe package or the free version of Google Enterprise or what have you, like, make sure your analytics are properly instrumented. And that's something we help customers with day in and day out, is to get all of the tagging correct. You know, make sure that you're capturing the data that you're looking for inside of those experiences and that you have the journey set up. I would say that's definitely number one. And number two is this will ring true to our partnership. But, you know, voice the customer data is really important. So if you're not surveying your users and you're not talking to your customer base and in B2B, you know, most people will find if they actually dig into the numbers, that a good portion, 70 to 80% of their business may be coming from, you know, 20, 30% of their accounts. So how do you get to those insights? How do marketers know where to put their money, their time, their attention support, etc. You know, if you don't have these really basic metrics in place, then it's really hard to tie it to revenue, it's really hard to tie it to campaigns, and it's really hard for marketers to justify, well, I want to spend money in this area with this account based marketing approach, unless they have the sort of the bigger picture to justify their strategies. So I would say akin to the whole step one is get your analytics right so you know what's going on with your users. I think it's also about managing and measuring satisfaction with your existing clients and understanding where you stand and where there's opportunities. So definitely I kind of put that into the first two. And then for B2B, I think a couple of things that go, I guess underrepresented are site search. So site search people think is not that important to B2B, but I would argue intent is much higher on a B2B site than it is for B2C, where they might be more likely to browse. Usually in a business context, a business person needs something. They're either trying to qualify you as a vendor or they're trying to see if you have a product or service that's available. And a lot of people rely on search. And the larger the catalog skew of services or products, the more they rely on search. And if you don't believe me, think about your own behavior, right? When you go to Amazon, which has everything to A to Z, right? Millions and millions and millions of SKUs, right. You don't generally probably browse Amazon. You go and you just start typing in a category or a product because you're pretty sure that, you know from there you'll be able to whittle it down from the results that come back in search. And I would say that, you know, for large catalog B2B sites, site search is really important. So I would say spend some time really understanding from those analytics how many people are searching on your site, how many people are browsing, and then really optimize that search experience. We've helped customers with things like optimizing for SKU entries, you know, for, you know, colors, measurements, even imperial or metric measurements, being able to look for piping that's a certain length, or being able to search for, you know, fans or materials that have certain attributes, being able to filter and search is just really critical. So I would say those are some of the areas that I would have folks really focus on.

Yeah, and I think there's a lot to unpack there so set up tracking properly. I think as a marketer I 100% agree with you. And that goes for acquisition type things like Google search Traffic or xyz. But I think the other side of it is making sure you have your customer analytics set up properly, which I think is where a lot of the B2B companies fall off the rails there you kind of treat them separately, you treat your acquisition or your prospect pool, you get a ton of honestly, really shit hot technology that tracks analytics behavior. And then once they become customers, it's like, all right, that's about it. You don't really use those tools on the customer side. So I think setting up tracking properly across the entire life cycle is really important. So thank you for pointing that out. And then obviously I'm sure Carrie can pipe in on the customer feedback loop because I think that's we preach that day in, day out. And I know Kerry is super passionate about that. But that's another huge piece that we see these B2B companies missing is getting those conversations started. And I think, Kerry, you have firsthand knowledge of like how impactful that can be on a business.

Yeah, I think there's almost a taking for granted that happens. Like you said, once they pass that.

Threshold and okay, welcome aboard and here's what you got. And you kind of are left out there until you have a problem. It seems we only listen to the people that are really, really upset and it's like, well, that's not how you form relationships. And to hear you say that, the whole customer feedback loop and analytics, we marry both of them together. For us, it's so important to have both of those running combined. Not even parallel, but linked together. And you think about it, you were talking about, which leads into the next thing is that whole user experience. If someone's looking for something or needs something, the better you can, you know, put information on that, help it make it easier for them to find, easier to get to. Although I think I'm weird, I'm the one that goes to Amazon and just kind of, kind of does just flip through everything. But no, but you're right. It's like in a B2B environment, people are looking for specific needs, whether it's compliance, whether it's, you know, a particular certificate you might carry. And it's really, really vital to make sure you get people to it because time is money. We keep hearing that. And part of this experience and part of that loop, because it's really nice to see this whole ecosystem now Google now is saying, well, we're going to prioritize the sites to get this right and the companies that get this right because people appreciate that. And that's where we want to go and that's where we want to spend our money. And you can kind of start to see that ecosystem being baked out here. So it just speaks to that. And if companies took that same ecosystem and go, okay, we're going to bake it into our own experience. The same thing Google's trying to do. We're going to do. We're going to get your feedback, we're going to tie analytics to it, we're going to make sure that you can find what you need quickly. And there is that other piece. As marketers, both of you guys do this really well. We're going to tell our story. We know what we're good at, we know what you're going to get value out of. And let's get you on that journey. So, yeah, it's amazing how the parallels between user experience and customer experience, it's just interchanging. But we're using the same terminology across the board.

Yeah. And I just think businesses have to look at it broadly. And some of the exercises that I often help customers with and my teams help customers with is building out journey maps and understanding what are all those customer touch points. To be honest, once you have the journey mapped out, it's easier to do the tagging and to figure out, are we measuring at each of these major milestones, where do we need to be capturing feedback and journeys. Do a good job of explaining how the user feels, building empathy, showing the linear process, which is not always linear, but what it really is segmented out and then really helping us as the business. Right. Understand. Oh, well, this is a painful part of the process. So how can we make it better? How can we eliminate some of the friction? If it's just. It's a long form, it's a lot of data, you know, what can we do? Oh, maybe we can capture this from, you know, you know, an image from a credit card or from another physical form. You know, there, there are so many things that can be done these days technically to sort of take the pain out of some of the processes. But if you don't ever lay it out and look at it as an organization, then you may be myopically only focused on the part of the business that you manage. And so seeing the bigger picture and being exposed really brings leaders inside of an organization together, breaks down silos and really gets people talking about their customers who really have to be at the, at the center of everything.

Yeah. And I think journey mapping is so key. So thanks for bringing that up. We talked a lot about that. In previous episodes. We had one literally called your journey map should be written with a pencil because it is constantly changing to the needs of the customer, depending on how many different touch points arise from different technologies, different reach out strategies. It's constantly evolving and it's super, super important, like you said, to make sure everybody's aligned on the overall journey. But then I think data plays a huge part in that. Once you have that journey map mapped out, collecting data from each of those touch points to see what can be improved. Because I think I've talked to a bunch of CMOs for large companies over the last two years, and one of the biggest things they say is like, you would be amazed what adjusting a small thing like making a proposal easier to sign has on a sales cycle for a B2B company. Like, you don't think it's that big of a issue, but once you fix it and you make it a little bit more frictionless, it can literally increase your sales velocity by like a hundred percent. It's crazy the results that such small little tweaks can have. But you wouldn't know those things if you didn't map it out and have a full journey map for all the touch points and start addressing the things that are causing friction. So I think that's a really good point to kind of end on is like map it out so you understand, use data, track it. But really the first step is really understanding.

Right.

Getting that journey mapped out, understanding what are the forces at play, and then putting a plan in place and getting, like you said, the silos broken down across all departments. So I love that. So thanks for bringing that up.

Yeah, you bet.

So, all right, let's just go through the three one more time. So accessibility, performance, and conversion. I think those are three amazing takeaways from this episode. Hopefully you guys got as much value out of it as everybody else on this call. I love this stuff. VP of Marketing. So it's right up my alley and I'm sure there are a ton of marketers out there that are going to go through and look at the Google core vitals today, because it's like you said, it's coming up pretty quick. So thanks again for bringing that to the table. Again, we're talking to Kelly Rader. She's the Vice president of Digital experience at Object Edge. Kelly, thank you so much for joining us today.

Yeah, it was Totally. My pleasure.

Thank you so much and we'll talk soon. Thanks for everybody listening. Make sure to share with friends and we'll catch you next time. This episode of the Account Experience Podcast.

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