Dear employee, partner or customer of excentos Guided Selling:
This short documentation describes how to develop, refine and specify a product guide concept.
Introduction
This is the short documentation to give you a starting point only. excentos developed a very detailed and in-depth process for product guide concept creation that is far more detailed than what you see here. This however takes some time to learn, a lot of experience and is our company expertise and thus not open to the public.
The process is based on excentos intensive experience from plenty of projects in a wide range of product categories and millions of usage data records from countless Product Guide sessions.
We're happy to learn from your experience what actually helped you creating great concepts, so let's keep in touch on ideas how to improve and streamline this process.
Do's and Don'ts
Do's
think how your best personal sales representative / service staff proceeds
work with your market research, web analytics and business intelligence team / data
think and work user-centric; try to take the end-user perspective
work test driven and iterative to allow quick improvements
forget all the details you know about your products for a while - since this is how new customers interact with your website
- check the references on www.excentos.com how excentos already solved certain problems - and consider what you like and dislike into your concept thoughts
- create an engaging shopping experience. Use nice images and entertaining and informing explanation content to provide insights to your shoppers
- create a click path that is not too long and asks only relevant questions
- define a target clickthrough time depending on your target group and the complexity of your product assortment / the buying decision.
- E.g. for take-away-products, the clickpath should not be longer than 90 seconds.
But for complex products where users buy only once every 5 years, the clickpath may take 2 minutes, sometimes even longer. We realized session durations of even longer than 5 minutes, but this is only justified if the Advisor Concept presents engaging explanation content
- challenge the formulation of questions and answer options. Can every user understand them?
Don'ts
don't forget there are different target groups out there: some users know a lot about the products, others don't. Use the Question Flow features to offer additional info / questions to e.g. expert buyers
don't look at your product data too early; neither too late
don't stick to your warehousing logic / category system / product assortment rules. Think of use cases instead
don't make it too complex - after all, the user wants to take the buying decision as easy as possible (of course depending on the product category's complexity)
- don't try to cram everything (e.g. all product categories, all target groups, all questions/answers) in one Product Guide or one single click-flow
- don't think about organizational barriers, different marketing / category managers and sales initiatives of your organization for a while
Step by Step to Your Product Guide Concept
The key steps of the process to develop a sound product guide concept are listed here.
Please use the page "Product Guide Concept Definition" provided in your Confluence Space to document your results. If you have trouble defining your concept, contact excentos.
| # | Step | Comments |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Define the target group | Who are the users? What do they know about your products? How much time do they want to spend searching a solution? It may help to define several "persona" that showcase different types of user needs, search profiles and e.g. web usage patterns. |
| 2 | Analyze your shop / website | Ask yourself the following questions:
|
| 3 | Define topics and / or user requirements | Define topics and / or user requirements that are important to your target group when searching for products. If you defined different target groups / persona, are there different topics / user requirements? Group similar topics to define topic groups that could be presented together to the user |
| 4 | Check dependencies | (iterative with "define topics":) Check if there are dependencies between the topics. Write them down and consider them when defining the question flow and recommendation rules. |
| Starting from here (or already in step 3), the most effective approach is to directly collect concept ideas into the Workbench | ||
| 5 | Define questions and answer options | (iterative with "define topics" and "check dependencies":) Carefully define the exact text for each question and answer option. If you have trouble defining precise and understandable content (for your target group!), you probably missed out one of the steps before. |
| 6 | Group the questions into an order and summarize them into Stages | Think about in which order and context you would like to present the questions. Depending on the user interface, it makes sense to group the questions into separate Stages (each containing one or more questions). |
| 7 | Make a first check | Check and refine your questions and answer options with users of your target group and e.g. product experts, your marketing team, your sales team and your customer services team |
| 8 | Choose an appropriate Theme | excentos offers a variety of different Themes. Please check our Theme description or test them yourselves in your Workbench account. Each Theme contains a description for intended usecases and features. Here is what you should pay attention to when choosing the Theme:
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| 9 | Create engaging and informative Explanation Content | Providing great images and explanation content is crucial for a good conversion rate and upselling of your Product Guide. Depending on whether you want to create an emotional shopping experience, or show a lot of explanations and product features, you will most probably need different images. Please check that our different Themes make different use of decoration images and explanation images. |
| 10 | Configure the desired recommendation behavior | For each question and / or answer option, define the desired impact on the recommendation behavior, i.e. which products or product groups would you like to recommend? See Matching and Reasoning |
| 11 | Define Reasonings | It helps to define which Reason texts / statements about the products and requirements you would like to present to the user.
|
| 12 | Pre-test | Get some users to test your concept. Make the following tests:
|
| 13 | Refine your Product Guide concept | |
| 14 | create a powerful Onsite Marketing and Linking concept | It is crucial that your users easily find the Product Guide, whenever they are stuck in the buying decision and otherwise risk to abondon your website. We've created many tips and examples in this Onsite Marketing and Linking documentation on how to successfully link into the Product Guide and at the same time increase traffic and conversion of your shop: |
Good Reasonings enhance the result list and its conversion since every positive Reason provides an argument why to buy the product.You now should have a good concept in place that creates a good basis for going live. The best thing now is to go live in order to collect usage data, analyze it in the excentos Web Analytics and optimize it based on the usage data.
Discuss your concept with excentos and let the Guided Selling Gurus optimize it
Get help and ideas!
Of course, excentos will be happy providing you with tips and tricks how to further optimize the Product Guide. It's really important for us to have great Product Guides out there. Just Contact excentos Support, we're here to help!
