The market is awash with optimisation solutions – technologies that provide website testing, conversion rate optimisation, user experience optimisation and more – that are designed to support the basic needs of small to medium businesses. The success of vendors in the lower-end of the market has shaped the way optimisation is understood by the broader market and has placed an emphasis on the simplest use cases. However, this has come at the expense of recognising the unique needs of large and complex companies – those that require enterprise optimisation. In the coming weeks, I will share my thoughts around how to build successful enterprise optimisation programs.
I am often involved in conversations that fail to emphasise product ease-of-use – along with the need for expertise – to deal with complex testing scenarios. These conversations miss the point entirely, at least if you’re talking to enterprises. It’s a bit of a no-brainer that products should be easy-to-use and try to make complex things easy to do – and yet, organisations often find themselves lacking the expertise and resources to run a continuously optimised customer experience program. The good news is there are a few foundational requirements for any optimisation to be successful at scale and at least 10 attributes that should be part of any enterprise optimisation solution.
Foundations of Enterprise Optimisation
- Expertise — Understanding the concepts and methodologies required to run a successful optimisation program throughout the enterprise – and then being able to turn those concepts into strategies.
- Data — Data collection across channels and devices, as well as reporting are foundational to measurement.
- Transparency — Sciences applied to data, such as methodologies used for evaluating test results, segment discovery and predictive measurement, should be understandable and verifiable.
10 Attributes of Enterprise Optimisation Programs
- Intuitive — Clients desiring to run optimisation programs internally need an intuitive solution to enable rapid on boarding.
- Collaborative — Across lines of business and geographies, teams need to be able to test without tripping over one another – or worse, compromising results.
- Scalable — Peak traffic can be predictable (e.g., holidays and promotions) or unexpected (e.g., natural disasters), so testing must be able to scale seamlessly.
- Responsive — Customers and users expect a snappy experience and optimisation solutions must not negatively affect those experiences.
- Flexible — No two sites or applications are exactly alike and the complexity of deployments requires a flexible and customised solution.
- Secure — Reputation matters and secure sessions and data protect the brand and customer relationships. The implications are greater within large enterprises and certain industries, such as financial services and healthcare.
- Integrated — Leverage customer information and third-party data to augment visitor profiles for personalised experiences.
- Cross-channel — More than ever, users move across channels, so experiences need to facilitate the movement as user goals change.
- Predictive — Change recommendations should include predicted results to set expectations.
- Discoverable — Easy access to data allows clients to pose ad hoc questions and discover the answers quickly.
For that past 10 years, our enterprise clients have driven our roadmap with these topics in mind. What do you think about the unique needs of enterprise optimisation? In upcoming posts, I’ll explore how these key attributes and foundations of an enterprise optimisation solution are applied to support the unique needs of enterprise organisations.
