Master Experience Optimization: Beat the Disruptors

They can innovate faster, compete, and win through thoughtful experimentation, data activation and personalization. When these three core tenets of experience optimization are combined they provide, at scale, the best possible customer experiences. We call that Mastering Digital Experience Optimization and recently published an e-book on that topic. 

Experimentation is a mindset and methodology organizations can use to answer questions, as well as to inform and guide decisions. By generating and then testing a business hypothesis, and validating or refuting this “hunch” with data, businesses are able to make better decisions and more easily identify and deliver personalized experiences customers love with our digital experience platform.

Experience optimization is a strategy for running your business that fundamentally changes how decisions get made and accelerates the pace of innovation. In this new business culture, “Executive leadership devolves from its traditional role,” says Columbia University Professor Rita Gunther-McGrath. “They no longer make all the decisions. The data assumes that role. CEOs need to coach company leaders and inspire them to encourage new ideas and experiments and assure that results are promptly turned into action.”

In this new role, the first step for executives is to embrace customer data, that’s where innovation begins. This customer data mindset is an experimentation mindset, helping to unearth solutions to customer problems with experiments helps teams deliver innovative, winning results. 

Leaders also need to orient their team around learning, and not outcomes. Removing the fear of a failed launch allows teams to constantly be focusing on continuous improvements. With this experimentation mindset “test and learn” replaces “build and validate.” The most successful digital customer experience is one that is constantly improving and the risk associated with inaction, or with months of development followed by a failed launch, are reduced or removed. 

One company who has embraced the power of customer data is ‘The Wall Street Journal’. Realizing that they needed to accelerate their pace of innovation just to remain competitive, WSJ now has a team of people developing experiments across multiple platforms every day. When many newspapers froze in the face of digital challengers, they cracked the code on the new way people consume content and as a result, have dramatically grown their subscription business. They routinely conduct tests to find out what is working and what is not, and more important than just acquiring data, they have become adept at executing on what they learn. The result is an online subscription boom that raised their conversion rate by 64%, and the revenue impact has been in the millions. As Peter Gray, VP Product Optimization, says “experimentation is an exponentially more powerful way of making business decisions over anything in the history of mankind…this is the only way to make business decisions in the future.”