Guy Baxter

Guy's bio

Guy Baxter is an analytics consultant, working with clients to define, implement and optimise their analytical solutions. Guy heads up the Omniture analytical services offered by Foviance and has particular expertise in Omniture SiteCatalyst and the business optimisation suite.

Guy acts as a consultant for Transport for London, BSkyB, B&Q, Yell, Sony, Ocado and NSPCC. He holds a degree in information systems and has been with Foviance for 3 years.

These are exciting times in which to be involved in customer experience measurement. Tools are advancing at a rapid rate, and companies are realising the broader potential of investing resources to better understand their customers’ needs. Companies are beginning to understand ways in which their customers’ cross-channel experience – both offline and online – might be unified to achieve business goals.Companies now realise that successful customer experience can directly affect business performance. Measuring, understanding and taking actions based upon positive customer experience will certainly increase the likelihood of a business succeeding.

So what’s the key ingredient for achieving successful customer experience measurement? Despite the probability of success being higher than ever before, how many companies are actually doing it? Customer experience measurement remains a relatively undeveloped field compared to many other measurement strategies, and as with all new experiences, mistakes are made but learnt from during the journey. Organisations have never given up in their attempts to understand their customers’ experiences, and from this perspective at least, the hard work has been done.

Success is certainly not dependent on the amount of money a business allocates to customer experience measurement. Too often there is an assumption that success is largely related to monetary investment. Does purchasing an enterprise level tool automatically mean that a company will succeed in measuring its customer experience? No. Indeed, with the advent of the era of measurement technologies such as Google Web Optimiser and Google Analytics, there is no longer an excuse for any business to fail to measure arguably the most significant and most lucrative channel of the customer experience – the web.

Perhaps the functionality of measurement tools is at fault? Granted, there are a number of well founded reasons why freeware technology is not always the best fit for all organisations. It can be agued that enterprise level commercial tools will always be on the leading edge of customer experience measurement. It was announced earlier this month, for example, that best-of-breed optimisation vendor Omniture was one of the first providers to integrate Twitter data within its web analytics tool. However, early adoption by itself is not the overriding factor as to why some companies succeed more than others with customer experience measurement, either.

So what else is there that could contribute to the success of customer experience measurement? The answer lies within the organisation itself, and whether it is willing, able or aware enough to invest the required time and effort.

Measurement strategy must be based around business processes and culture, not the enabling tools and technologies. Too many times we see companies that have pledged a significant financial investment in the core area of customer experience measurement – web analytics – only to lack the know-how to decide what to do next. It is this ability to turn insight into processes from which decisions can be made, that allows businesses to truly succeed in customer experience measurement.

I believe we are on the verge of a major shift. Businesses are ready to leave previous mistakes behind them and are now determining how they will measure customer experience in the future. We are entering a maturity phase in which businesses are beginning to achieve greater insight, while customers are finally receiving their desired experience. Exciting times indeed.

Omniture, the online business optimisation specialist, recently announced that it had agreed to acquire search and merchandising assets from solutions provider Mercado.

Another day, another Omniture acquisition! How fun it is watching the leviathan consume all in its wake searching for the Holy Grail that is the perfect online business optimisation solution. Is this the final piece of the puzzle? If so, how will this fit in with the rest of the Omniture suite?

On the face of it, acquiring these central elements of Mercado’s business will allow Omniture to help its own customers market their products better. Online retailers are gaining a good deal of experience selling products and services, but they also want to be able to provide customers with pointers towards related products that best marry with their purchases.

Merchandising in this sense is an effective way of collaborating products together. Mercado’s technology will allow Omniture to record sales details, receptiveness to merchandising, track and compare customer data from external search with internal searches, and manage keyword and pay-per-click campaigns dynamically. The concept of merchandising is not just about collecting information about what customers look at in terms of site design, it is about analysing pure product focus information – what is hot and what is not?

Of course collecting data across online channels is one thing, but refining businesses based upon the information collected is more of a challenge. One of Omniture’s more interesting acquisitions of late was web optimisation company Offermatica. This flagged Omniture’s intent of moving from its analytical routes to something much more ambitious, a completely automated online business optimisation solution.

Test & Target, as it is now known to Omniture customers, provides the ability to conduct real-time multivariate testing – an extremely powerful tool that could provide the answer to what combination of content drives customers the most. But here’s the flaw; what happens if all the permutations Test & Target displays are bad? Just because ‘Layout A’ has the highest conversion rate does not mean it is the most you can achieve, maybe it is the information itself and not the means by which it is displayed. What if there was a means of determining the best content to serve on products to push?

Enter Mercado’s merchandising technology.

Merchandising encourages commercial activity via the promotion of content. This process involves analysing sources of data to determine which content sells and what doesn’t. Quite simply, Omniture is attempting to come up with an automated merchandising solution that analyses data sources and serving product/services information directly into Omniture Publish (online CMS system) via Omniture’s Test & Target.

Omniture started life as a highly-effective statistical reporting company. By acquiring new tools like Offermatica & Mercado, the Omniture suite is another step closer to delivering a fully automated online optimisation tool. The benefit of which will be the most powerful tool on the market giving businesses a ’switch to flick’, kick-starting a self-learning tool that will automatically increase the likelihood of turning visitors into a customers.