What Continuous Experience Optimization is NOT

"On my team, you have to talk about the ugly babies,"

Said Billy Ray Taylor, an executive director at Goodyear Tire. At the time, he was touring an underperforming factory that he was tasked with turning around and improving.

What he meant by this was uncovering the hidden problems that no one wanted to talk about.

Even after identifying these issues, he knew there wouldn't be an easy, immediate fix. It would require continuous improvement. Or gradual and repeatable effort.

It's like if you make small decisions every day to get 1% better at something. After a year, you'll end up 37x better than when you first began. That's the power of continuous improvement.

Continuous Experience Optimization

It's the same idea when we talk about mastering the art of continuous improvement for your website. 

Continuous Experience Optimization is an ongoing effort. It's a cultural shift to making incremental (or even breakthrough) changes and improvements, which in the end, produce significant results.

Time for a quick quiz! Continuous Experience Optimization (CEO) is not:

• A new trend
• Guesswork
• Finger pointing
• Easy
• All of the above

And the outcomes are not BS – if you can prove it and show positive ROI. 

1. CEO is not a new trend.

Continuous Experience Optimization is a tested, proven strategy.

Companies winning in digital have built cultures obsessed with continually improving their customers' digital experience. 

Nearly 60% of consumers would prefer being stuck in a traffic jam over having a bad customer experience.

Sitting in traffic is frustrating. So, what does that say about friction-filled digital experiences?

Expectations have changed for every part of purchasing and transacting online. Customers expect frictionless, remarkable experiences. And this has changed how brands build customer trust and loyalty. Not even price, convenience, or brand name recognition excuses a bad digital customer experience.

2. CEO is not guesswork.

Customer friction is connected to revenue.

So, it’s no surprise that teams begin optimization projects to remove friction. But, with so many site performance alerts impacting the customer experience, where should they begin?

“Well, the home page is the most critical. Or maybe it’s the checkout page. How about we just focus on the pages with the most traffic instead."

In the pursuit of improving business outcomes, not every alert is the same.

So, it becomes a guessing game which friction points to fix first. Or which ones will actually impact revenue.

Continuous Experience Optimization empowers teams to know where to prioritize limited resources when multiple friction points are identified.

3. CEO is not finger pointing.

"Great, now a Marketing tag on this landing page is acting up. Or maybe it’s a Development issue impacting site performance. And the new rollout is causing friction. It’s not you, it’s me.”

Finger pointing is not productive. It leads to more confusion and wastes resources.

Continuous Experience Optimization relies on qualitative and quantitative data to uncover the "ugly babies" that are creating friction. Regardless of team or department.

To achieve this, there must be a company-wide culture driven by performance and continuous improvement. This will help break down siloed barriers in your organization. 

When you put business outcomes at the center of Continuous Experience Optimization, then it's something that everyone can get behind. So, you’ll know exactly where each costly friction point is and what to do about it. 

4. CEO is not easy.

There was a popular study from Amazon where they found every 100 milliseconds in added page load time costs them 1% of sales. So, 1 second could have a friction cost of $1.6 billion. 

So does that mean you need to speed up your website by 1 second?

No, every website and webpage is different. So are your customers and their sensitivity to website friction and page performance.

You're not Amazon (but, if you are, lets talk 😉).

So your unique traffic volume and page response time, and the experiences your customers receive, must be taken into account to optimize for YOUR best conversion rate possible; not Amazon's. 

With so much to consider, it can be challenging to constantly improve the digital experience. Each customer interaction could be a point of friction. It'll require ongoing effort and practice to master Continuous Experience Optimization.

But, you'll soon realize an immediate benefit: reclaim lost dollars from costly friction and provide a frictionless digital experience. And it'll pay off in the long-term too, especially during your peak periods. 

5. So, that leaves one answer left on our quiz. CEO is none of the above!

Continuous Experience Optimization is not new. Today, leading companies in every industry who are winning in digital have realized that continuous improvement is needed to create frictionless, remarkable customer experiences. It's the secret to building customer trust and loyalty!

Successful Continuous Experience Optimization depends on data to drive business decisions. So you can improve and prioritize your optimization efforts based on revenue and customer impact.

A good place to start is by identifying and resolving the costliest friction points that customers may face along their journey. Last year, for example, we uncovered a shocking $2.7 billion in friction costs alone for many of the world's leading brands.

Sign up for a free, no obligation Friction Quantified Assessment to find out how much friction is costing you.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Continuous Experience Optimization?

It’s an evolutionary new approach to outdated ways of digital experience management and observability. It begins and ends with business outcomes to help performance-driven organizations deliver frictionless customer experiences that move the needle of their business.

Who is Continuous Experience Optimization for?

It’s for any company with a performance-driven culture (or looking to build one) obsessed with taking friction out of the customer journey and the relentless pursuit of growing revenue. It allows business leaders and teams to quantify the impact of their decisions and optimization efforts with real-time customer data in ways that are not possible with traditional observability or digital experience management tools.