Scenes Missing

Even in the present age of information, there's a lot we do not know about customer behavior.   We are able to detect and identify when a prospect enters our site or what happens after they leave, and while we can collect data on every click as the customer peruses our site, there is very little analysis and even less knowledge of what they happen to do while they are there.

As a result, the perspective on the customer experience follows the flowchart to the right, which has few known events and many gaping holes.  I am not prepared to fully explore those gaps at this time, as it would seem to be a monumental task, but for the present, I'd like to consider their nature.

Before Visiting the Site

The notion that people idly "surf" the web and stumble into random sites is vastly wrong.   It cannot be dismissed completely, but it is certainly not typical behavior: users surf when they are bored and nothing takes their fancy, but even then they tend to latch at some point upon an idea and take a more focused approach to gathering information.

As a result, the vast majority of instances in which someone arrives at your web site, the visitor has a specific purpose in mind.   For some sites, that purpose is merely gathering information - but for most commercial sites, we are more interested in purposes that lead the user to make a purchase.

This means two things: (1) the visitor has recognized a need and (2) has identified the product or service as a possible solution to his needs.   Both of these are elaborate cognitive processes.

People bumble through life on autopilot most of the time, not thinking or at least not putting very much thought into what they are doing.   At some point they become aware of a need: there is something preventing them from doing something they wish to do (problem) or there is something they wish to achieve for which they lack the means (opportunity).   It's at this point that the journey begins, and we are largely blind to what this initiating event might have been.

After the recognition of need comes the identification of a possible solution.  This is also largely invisible to the site operator because the visitor has not yet visited and he likely does a great deal of thinking on his own before he visits a site that sells a solution.   That's not to say that he arrives at a clear idea to which he is devoted before visiting, but some level consideration has been done in advance, the degree of which will vary according to the individual.

While Perusing the Site

Much is made of our ability to track behavior when visitors arrive at a website.  We know which page they landed upon and can track each click they make as they move from page to page.  There are even solutions in place that enable us to track in-page behaviors: data entered into form fields even if the form is not submitted and even scrolling and mouse-movement events.

Trouble is, we don't seem to know what to do with this data once it's been collected.   There are solutions in place to gather it, but analysis and reporting are still sorely lacking, and we often do not pay attention to what little data we have.  (And admittedly, we have quite a lot, but it's "little" in its relationship to the complete set of data pertaining to the buying decision.)

Even when we are paying attention to what the user is doing, then we know only that: what the user is doing, but not why the user is doing it, - and "why" is far more important to understanding motivation and behavior.   The best we can do is speculate, and we generally speculate with a laser-focus on whether a given action will lead to an immediate same-session purchase.  But that's about as far as traffic pattern analysis goes.

Moreover, there is likely not a shrink-wrapped solution that provides easy answers.   The behavior of customers on a given site and in a given situation is highly idiosyncratic and any generalizations are likely to be entirely wrong.   It's likely that the customer's personality also plays a significant role (the cognitive patterns they typically follow as determined by their past experience).  There's a great deal that is not only unknown, but seems to be unknowable.

After Leaving the Site

Our mercenary focus on the customer limits our field of vision to a few fundamental questions.  If they purchased, why did they not purchase?  If they did purchase, can we count on them to come back and purchase again?

Unfortunately, we often seek the answers to these questions in the data we have about the customer and their interaction on the site, and know little about their behavior once they have left.   My sense is that what happens during this period is critical to determining whether the customer will return to the site to make a purchase (or another purchase) in future.

For prospects that do not buy, there is the possibility that they abandoned the journey and decided not to fulfill the need after all, likely considering the need was not important or the solution was not worth the cost.   More likely, they did some further thinking and research off-site to consider other alternatives for solving their needs, and may return if the other options are unattractive or unsuccessful.   But we have no idea what those alternatives might have been in more than a superficial maner.

For customers that do buy, there remains the question of whether the good or service they purchased was successful in fulfilling the need for which it was purposed.   As we do not understand the need, we cannot answer the questions that arise.   We also rest on the assumption that if the product we provided filled the need satisfactorily, the customer will repurchase automatically.  Sometimes, that may be true, but there may be conditions that cause the customer to repeat the process of identifying and evaluating solutions the next time the need arises.

***

I'll stop at this point, having nattered on for quite a while.  It was not my intention to fully answer the questions that arise from the gaps in knowledge, merely to do a cursory exploration to identify some of the questions that arise.   It seems to me that there's a lot more to think about than I had assumed - and that the shopping and buying transactions are far less important to the overall experience of the customer than I had previously thought.   And I don't think I'm alone in this by any means.

Consider this as the starting point for many potential meditations to come, on the periphery of the on-site experience and consideration of the entire customer journey from the identification to the satisfaction of a given need.