Driving a lot of website traffic is usually considered a sign that a retailer is doing something right. And it is, Aaron Hanlon says — as long as that traffic doesn’t consist of too many “rage clicks.”
As Google Cloud’s head of retail and CPG AI customer engineering, Hanlon knows that setting up IT infrastructure to support dependable, secure year-round sales requires looking at the data more closely. Rage clicks are a good indicator of where experiences are falling down.
“If you’ve ever been on a website where you’re trying to check out and the button doesn’t work, you might click your mouse a bunch of times,” he says. “Those kinds of details can give you valuable insight into what people are actually going through.”
How observability informs a better IT strategy
Google Cloud partners such as Quantum Metric offer tools for spotting rage clicking, but that’s just a starting point. Retailers that want to see success year-round, including during holiday seasons, need to gain observability at both the application and infrastructure levels to understand what’s causing churn or lost sales. This involves collecting data from multiple sources.
“It could be logs, it could be channels such as social or what you’re seeing in your contact centers, and then compiling those together in a trustworthy, near-real-time view,” Hanlon says.
Alex Cestaro, staff solutions engineer at Shopify, agrees: “When IT organizations examine their tech stack and start to zoom in, they need to also understand the integrations between systems. Where can they strive for better consistency? These back-end decisions are all going to lead to upstream effects for customers.”
Have you overlooked data opportunities?
Even if customers aren’t running into performance bottlenecks, indecision can bring their journey to a premature end. Many brands use an email nudge to address items left in shopping carts, but it’s wise to first do deeper analysis.
Cestaro says it’s important to figure out the “why” behind the abandonment of a cart and suggests examining the following questions: “Is the customer new to your brand? Are they exploring before they go off to learn more, or are they waiting to see if the item goes on sale?”
Retailers also might want to take a step back to determine how easy it is to search and discover their products online, for example, and how well their marketing tools enable them to segment and personalize customer outreach, Cestaro adds.
The truth is that most retailers aren’t capturing all the data at their disposal, such as the millions of voice calls that might come into their stores. Analyzing that information and leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) via chatbots and other channels to provide better service could be a way of keeping customers coming back and increasing how much they spend.
Why early adopters win
Retail organizations should also use performance data to establish service-level objectives (SLOs) to stay ahead of unexpected surges in demand, such as when a product featured in a viral social media video drives hordes of consumers to buy it, Hanlon says. This enables the organizations to scale effectively and not disappoint customers with stockouts or other pitfalls in the customer journey.
At the same time, retailers should pay attention to how solutions such as Shopify Checkout can propel their performance and scaling capabilities even further.
“Don’t be afraid to be an early adopter,” Cestaro says. “Where we start to see differentiation over time is with those companies that have taken advantage of innovative features as they have emerged. The growth they achieve in the long run far outweighs any bumps in the road when they get started.”
Learn more about Shopify for Enterprise, which is available on Google Cloud Marketplace.