#18: You Wouldn’t Treat Your Friends That Way: Customer Experience with Jonny Longden

~ This transcript is automatically generated so may contain some errors ~

everybody knows that if you want a deal from sky or virgin media You ring up and you pretend you want to cancel.

Welcome to Statements of Intent. In this 20 minute episode, we're addressing how eCommerce has lost sight of the people at its very heart. You, the customer. It's a chat that's optimistic, it's casual, it's probably slightly ranty in places, but that's okay. But it's a place where I talk to senior eCommerce marketers.

And share their statement of how they're looking to change the status quo of eCommerce, adding more care, being more considerate to those very people that they're selling to - the customer. I'm your host, David Mannheim, the founder of Made With Intent. And we're going to jump right into it. Have fun

So I'm here with the, uh, incredibly good looking, uh, how old are you now, Johnny? Eighteen. Eighteen. I'm here with incredibly good looking underage Johnny Longdon. Uh, Johnny, you've just moved over to, uh, over to Boohoo, the fashion world. How, how are you finding that? Uh, incredible, actually.

Yeah, I'm having a very good time. I've been, I've been in the role, I think, six weeks. Um, so, but yeah, it's, it's a really, really good time to join a company because they've been through a lot of kind of restructuring and change. So everything's kind of new for everybody, not just me. So, um, it's a really good time to join.

You're not kind of joining. Somewhere where everything's really sort of set and institutionalized like everything's shifted anyway. So everybody's in everybody's in a new place So it's just a very good time to join. So is your job. It's global digital director, isn't it? But what does that encompass? What does that mean?

It's group digital director. Um, so boohoo group has different brands I can't remember, maybe 13 different brands, um, a lot of them are, um, within the Debenhams sort of world. So there's two separate kind of sides of it, like there's Debenhams and various brands they look after, and then Boohoo. Um, and so I sit within a centralized tech function that is responsible for the websites and apps of those brands, uh, that's been Boohoo, Boohoo Man, Pretty Little Thing, and Karen Millen.

And, uh, yeah, so, uh, I am, uh, effectively product director, really, despite my title. So, um, I am responsible for everything related to the front end of those websites and all the associated product engineering teams, um, analytics, experimentation, everything like that as well. And in a way we're a little bit like an internal, uh, Sort of a bit like an internal agency, really.

Cause we have, we have the stakeholders from those brand teams, um, who are kind of like internal clients, I guess. Well, that's something that you're, you're incredibly used to, right? Because you've been, you've been agency side before. So your, your career spans from Journey Further, the Fab8, Fabulous Agency in Leeds, and prior to that, it was Sky and Devere Hotel Group, uh, so you've got this.

Beautiful balance of client and agency.

Can you tell me a little bit about the difference in, I guess, pressure from, from stakeholders? I would have thought that in the retail world, there's an enormous amount of pressure to perform. Yeah. I mean, I think if an agency is working well for its clients, they should be feeling the exact same pressure as the client really, um, because, you know, that that's when you've got a proper partnership.

Thanks. You know, in a perfect world, an agency is really a kind of an extension of an in house team. And, you know, it should be working a bit like they are in house really. So, you know, I mean, this is, you know, in an ideal world. Um, it doesn't necessarily always work like that because obviously agencies work for lots of different clients and, uh, you know, and they're trying to do lots of different things.

And those might be in different sectors and things like that. So you're kind of juggling lots of different objectives. Um, but I guess, you know, really, I have, I have been back and forwards clients. I'd actually originally started out my entire career in client side and then went agency side, then went back client side, agency, but now I'm back client side.

Oh, wow, that's really kind of you. Yeah, so I've done that a lot. Generally, it's always been a case of the, eventually the grass is greener. Um, there's, there's, there's a lot of very fundamentally different things about both worlds and, and not one isn't better than the other. It's just that eventually you kind of like missed the other one.

Um, I think to be honest though, now I've probably got to a place where, you know, as you get more senior, I do feel like, um, the client side world is slightly more rewarding because in agency life, you actually, well, the more senior you get, the more you end up, you know, Um, doing just kind of resource management and sales and things like that, you know, you get a little bit removed from the work that you started out believing in, um, that you set the agency up for, which, you know, because as you naturally hand that off to other people who do that work.

So, um, yeah, that's, I, I, I feel like, I mean, I'll never say never, but I feel like I'll probably be like client side now for the rest of my career. I feel like I'm an intermediate footballer where you want to keep your options open for the future. Yeah, yeah. Um, that's really interesting. Like, I'm, I'm really curious at this.

So at Major Intent, we really feel as though retailers are under an enormous amount of pressure, especially in this economy. But the short term pressure, um, means that you create knee jerk reactions, almost. It's almost as though retailers have been subjected to this form of digital directness where the assumption is that everybody's ready to buy.

And that is imbalanced. In comparison to the long term need of the customer or nurturing that customer over time. I'm curious to see your views in that balance. How do you balance short term pressure with what's actually right for the customer? Well, yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I'm going to, I'm going to use actually a really, I'm going to use Sky as a different analogy because you know, um, Sky and Virgin Media, they have this thing where.

You've been mad to pay full price for their services, right? Because they constantly have. These like deals and also everybody knows that if you want a deal from sky or virgin media You ring up and you pretend you want to cancel. Um, and you know Never say yes the first time keep saying no And then they'll come down they come down and that's how you get a deal good tip.

And so Um, that is how that's how those And the problem is they don't want to work like that, but they've got trapped into that because of the competitive nature of it. So one of them couldn't stop doing that because that, that, that is now a customer behavior that's being created. And, um, you know, if, if one of them was to just stop doing it, then all the customers would go to the other one because they know that's where they can get.

What's become inherent behavior. So there's a little bit of that problem in all industries, I think, where, you know, what starts out as kind of short term ism, you know, react reacting to pressure then becomes ingrained behavior. And, um, you know, in a lot of retail industries that manifests as discounting and, you know, stuff like that.

So say if you were buying a sofa, no, like you, nobody would ever pay full price for a sofa, right? They just know that you're going to go in and it's going to have always on discounts and things like that. I guess there are other examples outside of discounting as well though. Like generally speaking, customers on, on the whole or like the majority of customers feel as though they're being followed around.

You know, if I buy, you know, a toilet seat online, I only need one toilet seat, yet I'm still followed around saying, would you like more toilet seats? No, I only have, I've got four bathrooms, but I only have four, I don't need four toilet seats. I'm not a toilet seat addict. Um, yeah. So I feel like there are other forms of, uh, execution based from short term pressure than just discounting, you know?

Yeah, absolutely.

I think, um, uh, you know, it comes down to really sort of. Actually, you know, a lot of it comes down to metrics. And, you know, I've talked about this a lot at the moment, but most businesses operate on trying to move metrics, whether that be, you know, conversion rate or revenue or something like that.

And these things are actually like really quite myopic way of viewing stuff. So, uh, conversion rate is a good example where. You can do something to increase conversion rate and you would successfully increase conversion rate, but that would have a detrimental impact on your entire business and you would never know because you wouldn't see it in the conversion rate.

So, for example, you could, you could encourage more people to buy, but they might be. Um, you know, for a start, they might, they might spend less, but they also might return more, or they might just be less loyal, or they might be less, uh, might be worse brand advocates and things like that, and you would never ever know that because you're not seeing it in your metric.

And so, yes, the pressure's there, but I think the, one of the reasons that all of these things that we're talking about happen is because of this idea of, you know, Optimizing metrics and moving metrics. And, you know, um, those that sort of sky and Virgin Media, uh, sort of stuff is driven by trading targets around things like revenue and stuff like that.

And. Actually, you know, nobody's looking holistically, the whole, you know, system of how customers behave with them and interact with them and how loyalty works and things like that. And it's really hard to do that. It is hard to do that. It's not, you know, it's not, you can just go around it, you know, it's hard to move to that.

But I, you know, this belief that, that. In business, we need to start thinking about how we move to understanding more of the total systems, um, that govern how people behave and how interact, and you will never get nice neat metrics and things to measure and things to kind of optimize, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.

It doesn't mean you shouldn't think like that. Like, um, as an example, I don't know, I was working with one of the big telco retailers, um, and on their loyalty program, and, uh, if you think about it, loyalty in, as a telco, um, you know, you can give people discounts and vouchers and things like that, but it's completely pointless unless they are going to stay with you on your contract.

And the only reason that would happen is if it was, it was sufficiently. unique and different that they thought I'm not going to be able to get this elsewhere. But if you're just giving people half price of Pizza Express, like, you know, you'd be mad to pay like full price for Pizza Express anyway. Um, so it's not, it's not going to generate that loyalty.

So this, this particular telco, they were measuring their loyalty programs just on the basis of. Whether or not people have signed up to it. And it's like, well, it's irrelevant. It doesn't matter. I mean, you could have everybody signed up to it, and it would be completely irrelevant. If they don't actually believe that it's worthwhile, and they should not go to another vendor because of it, then it's all completely pointless.

Um, so what you really need to measure is to what extent people love it. The things that you're giving them and that find it uniquely beneficial and such that they will not go to another vendor. Now, there's no metric for that, right? You can't make a metric out of that, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.

It doesn't mean you shouldn't. Measure it, you know, try and do it, at least, even if you can't measure it. Can't hear you, by the way, David. Sorry, I was on mute, as you do on the podcast recording. Um, I'm not going to be on the spot and ask you, like, what is the metric that we should be measuring against? But it feels like I mean, this leads back to your statement of intent, right?

But it feels like metrics almost cloud what we should be really optimizing for. I mean, we're speaking, you called me a figurehead in conversion rate optimization earlier, by the way, just to, uh, let's throw that one out there, shall we? Um, but as people in that CRO industry, optimizing our conversion rate feels Parochial feels archaic.

It doesn't feel like the right thing to do. And within that industry, we've been banging that drum for some time. People say it's business optimization or what have you. So I guess, what is it that we should be optimizing for? Do you feel as though metrics cloud our judgment? For what we should be really doing.

Well, I think, I think when it comes down to the level of something like CRO, I think you, you could still run a test and measure the impact on the conversion rate. I think the difference that I'm now seeing is that that isn't necessarily any proof of anything. Do you know what I mean? It's like a piece of information.

It's a piece of quite valuable information, but it should, it should be taken as a piece of a bigger jigsaw. So there really kind of needs to be frameworks and things like that, where someone can. Say, we're thinking of doing this and we've tested it against these various things. It's increased the conversion rate, whatever, um, that's a piece of information, but there are other things that we can look at that we can also look at, like, do we believe that this would actually increase customer loyalty or do we believe it would have some other ramification downstream?

And so, you know, there might be other pieces of research that you would do to understand that, which are not necessarily Um, Controlled A B testing, more qualitative testing and so, you know, the idea of like gathering evidence can become more of a general thing around. There's different types of evidence that you can gather.

You could do tests, you could do bits of research, you could just have, you know, some kind of consensus opinions about things or, you know, whatever you need to be understanding. Like there's this whole picture where this thing that you might do It'd be almost like a butterfly effect of other things that would happen.

Even though you can't measure it, you can still try and understand it. And that's still better than, um, you know, just guessing or like, you know, going right. It's increased conversion. Brilliant. Let's do it. So I know that's not very useful or helpful, but you know, practically, but you know, it's a starting point.

Um, there are lots of books out there on systems theory and systems theory is the kind of first of what I'm talking about. Um, where you, you know, you try and understand the way different things interact with each other and the, and the interplay of things that create a total system. Um, and I think that's, you know, what, where we need to move to.

And this is even more pertinent given all the problems with cookies and things like that, you know, A, B testing and metrics are not what people think they are. Um, it doesn't give you the accuracy that you think it does. It never does. Um, so you have to take it with a bit of a pinch of salt anyway, and like, you know, if that, if you rely, if you relying.

All of your decisions on that one thing, that like one metric improvement, then you can't be that confident in it anyway, necessarily all the time. How do you think we've got here like this myopic view on either a business metric or indeed just conversion rate? Like, why is it that we've got to where we've got to?

Because it's so because, because human beings inherently need simple, like to, to simplify everything to make things simple and metrics. They're simple to understand, but they're also simple to manage from a kind of an organizational point of view, because you can say, right, this whole team over here, you're responsible for that.

And that whole team over there, you're responsible for that. And then somebody can have a dashboard that tells them, you know, how those things are performing and things like that. So it's, it's the simplicity of like managing things that, you know, it, it, It creates a kind of a practical solution to management rather than an actual solution to customer problems.

Um, you know, I think that's ultimately it really.

Just flipping it on its head a little bit and not, not want to like overly talk about what we're doing over at Maid of Intent, but the concept of understanding someone's intent is so It's the foundations of how you're supposed to sell. I'm designed to get context from you to understand your intent, either explicitly or implicitly.

And I'm going to change my sales pitch appropriately to match what you need. You know, it's a, it's a need and solution kind of relationship we've got going on here. Why do you think intent Is not the basis on how we sell. And it's because for me, that seems a really simple way of how we should be selling online.

Yeah. Um, I think one of the best examples is a different industry altogether actually is automotive. Um, so I long time ago worked with quite a few automotive manufacturers and. They have this, this, this, this problem that we're talking about, but in a much more serious way, because if you think it can take you a year to decide to buy a car, like, you know, to start with, you just start looking at other cars on the road and then you might have a look at some websites and things like that.

Meanwhile, you've already got a car and like, maybe the lease is coming to an end and all that kind of stuff. So it can take a very long time to buy a car. Um, but if you go on and on an automotive manufacturers website, what they're trying to do at that very moment in time is persuade you to take a test drive or download a brochure and all of their metrics and marketing are geared around that.

You know, it's like, how can you increase test drive bookings on the website? And the problem is, is for a start, you don't even have to do that. So it's not, you know, with an e commerce retail website, you have to actually buy the product through the website. But on an automotive manufacturing website, you don't even need to do that.

You can just walk into a dealership, you know, you don't, you don't have to book a test drive. Um, so it's not something that is required anyway. And, you know, the, what I always used to say to these clients is the equivalent of what you're doing is just putting a massive flashing thing on the screen for every single user, it says book a test drive.

And, you know, the vast majority of people either are not ready to do that at that point in time, or are not going to do it anyway, because they don't have to do it. And what you're doing is basically just. Detracting from the experience that they want, which is just looking at the car and trying and figuring out whether they want to buy the car.

And because you can't measure that bit. Yeah, you're not focusing on it necessarily because it's not measurable. And so you, you just deliberately focusing on the things that can be measured because then you can report to somebody internally on like how you increase test drives by 2%. Or whatever. And actually, then you've got millions of customers going, well, I'm not sure whether it's got leather seats, do you know what I mean?

Um, so, and that, that is just a simple, that's an easier way to understand the problem that is happening on everybody's website. Um, because that's what's happening. Like, you're basically like driving everything towards simply what can be measured and not thinking about the experience that the customer is trying to have.

Yeah, it's digital correctness, which creates those kind of Experiences that, forgive me for like coming at it from an ethical standpoint, but it's just vastly inappropriate. Um, I mean, usually it distracts and therefore it could impact the metric that it is that you're actually trying to optimize for, you know, from a customer standpoint, it feels not unethical or immoral or inhuman.

It feels unhuman. It feels the opposite of being human. It feels, uh, genericized and dirty, but inappropriate for me. Absolutely. Yeah. And it's and you know, as a consumer, you might not, you might not be aware of this. You might not be aware that you've been pushed towards becoming a metric, but you will, you will be confused by the experience because you're not, you know, you're, you're being.

guided towards something that you're not ready for and that you don't want. Wow. Well, that does feel unethical.

Um, Mr. Longden, uh, 20 minutes are up. What are your closing remarks? How would you, you know, this podcast is all about a statement of intent, like a guiding principles, a flag, flagpole in the ground, something that you really believe in and how we should treat or measure customers.

What's your, uh, what would you say to everybody Yeah, I guess, um, I guess I'd like to think about it is imagine if you. Try to sort of optimize your friendship with one of your friends through metrics, you know, you wouldn't do it, would you? I just would be really, really weird. Like, you, you know, you just have a human relationship with them.

And that's kind of where we need to get to. And I'm not talking about one on one personalization or that. I'm just talking about the way we think about customers and what they need and things like that, you know, like need to try not to reduce everything down to numbers in a way. And try and just, you know, think what is the right thing to do and, you know, how, how best to do it.

Wise words from an 18 year old.

Um, thank you so much, Johnny. Really appreciate it. No problem. Thank you.

There we have it. Thank you so much for listening. Please do like, subscribe and share on whatever platform it is that you're listening to on today. This show comes from the team behind Made With Intent, the customer intent platform for retailers. If you are of course, interested in being more profitable, whilst being more personal.

And please feel free to check us out at madewithintent. ai. Thanks again for listening and joining us on our mission to change how eCommerce sees, measures, and treats their customers. I've been your host, David Mannheim. Have a great day.