Data Draws a Detailed Picture of the Customer
Besides experimentation, the teams are also gaining insights from other data sources (e.g. analytics, surveys, heatmaps). Optimizely's integration with some of their tools, helps them to get a better understanding of customer needs and see if the variations in their experiments better fulfill these needs.
The integration with the Analytics tool allows KLM to automatically import experiment data for further analysis within a wider business context. Also heatmaps can be automatically tagged with the information about the A/B test variation that a particular user has seen. This way the analysts can differentiate between experiences during their analysis.
Joost brings up the project for KLM’s Corporate program to optimize the experience of business travellers by providing them with a special booking flow for corporate customers. “This a perfect example where we used insights from user feedback, analytics and experimentation in conjunction.”
Before developing the experience, the team wanted to draw a picture of this particular segment and understand how they like to engage with the site. To decide if and how to build the experience, the team ran an experiment with Optimizely to find out, if users were actually willing to disclose whether they were travelling for leisure or business by adding an option to specify the reason for travel. They also conducted a survey asking users to fill in a questionnaire about their booking preferences. The results were complemented with data from their analytics tool.
While the project has not yet been completed, the research has lead to the hypothesis that users might be more willing to reveal their reason for travel if they knew what the information would be used for and how it would benefit them.
This example shows how data from various sources of research helps to gain insights on users’ needs and preferences and how experiments help optimizing the experience of visitors.
