You know you need to refresh your existing D2C offering, or to build a new digital product...but where to start?
Before you jump to a complete rebuild of your existing digital product or platform you can add huge value to your programme by learnings to be taken from where you’ve already been.
Recent working with our FMCG clients enhancing their D2C offerings and building new digital products has underlined the importance of three specific areas for investigation - and the huge value of the learnings to be had from thorough auditing.
The Usability Audit
A better user experience is clearly good for customer satisfaction and implicitly for sales growth. Ask yourself, do I really understand how my existing customers behave on my e-comm platform? Why is there drop off on these pages? Why is my basket conversion poor?
Of course you know the answers. But do you really know and do you really understand your customers’ behaviours? You would not be alone in thinking that you have ALL the answers.
A client of ours felt they had a very clear idea of what their users got up to. BUT when we started asking those users specific and detailed questions (that seemed obvious to the product owner) about their on site experience, it turned out that those customers quite literally had minds of their own, and were not responding at all in the expected ways. Expect the unexpected!
The learnings we built out from a thorough usability audit led to real impacts on conversion and onsite behaviours.
The Data Audit
You have data! Lots of data. You are not alone if you feel that you are struggling to untangle it, make meaning from it, and most importantly extract value from it.
Completing a data audit across all your user touch points, and your complex data stack will laser focus your renewed efforts, helping you drive real efficiencies. It will reveal startling areas of inefficiency, and help you deliver against those ambitious KPI’s.
You will benefit from better understanding of your customers and potential customers, reduce risk, enhance your e-CRM, drive ever more targeted personalisation and help deliver real growth.
The Technology Audit
Perhaps the biggest leap of all, when considering a platform refresh, a rebuild or building a new product, is into a new technology.
This is the single consideration which will cause the largest of anxieties amongst your board and senior stakeholders. Getting out of an existing licence, switching to a new one, or potentially compromising your data architecture can have lasting business implications.
Before adopting new IT infrastructure, it's important to conduct a technology audit. A technology audit can be performed on a website, or iOS and Android and is typically completed by expert developers on the relevant device.
Within an audit, developers will study how the existing code base has been written and analyse how easy it is to work with. The objective of this is to highlight areas which need improvement, to make recommendations and to make the code go from hard maintainability to easy maintainability.
And if you are kept awake at night by fears of the vulnerability of your product, a penetration audit, might allow you to sleep better.
We’ve recently completed a technical audit for a client and the resulting report on the overall health of their platform exposed real areas for concern and drove significant improvements, helping them ensure greater security, reliability and efficiency.
