Automate even more in 2023

In addition to working harder, we want to work smarter. Automating all kinds of facets within our CRO work ensures that we have time for other cool and important things. For example, we work towards automated prioritization of website opportunities, monitoring, pausing, reactivating, and evaluating experiments. We do this with Bigquiery, Datastudio, and Tableau, but mainly by smart thinking about the experiment workflow and the underlying data model. This gives the team more time to focus on the fun things on the job, such as customer behavior, psychology, meta-analyses, and cool innovations. This also creates room for more in-depth analyses to learn more about end users. And because we also store, access, and find these insights centrally, we can better aggregate, reuse and use them for our clients.

Flexible response to the wishes of the client 

Focusing your entire CRO program on experiments alone is out of date. Of course, we prefer to validate every online change through statistically indisputable experiment results, but we see that there is an increasing need for customization in the current market. Think of integrating risk profiles, so that you can take this into account in your choice for validation methodology. For example, it is smarter not to go through all regular experiment steps, such as classic A/B test lead times, stopping rules, QA’s, and PLCs, for simple textual changes. By looking at this more critically, you will become more flexible, because you only look at the steps in the process that are needed in each situation to optimize the quality of your decision. For this reason, almost every program has a fast track, in which we can quickly validate smaller changes or changes with a minimal risk profile. In addition to fast-track, sometimes there is also a need for slow-track programs. These are ideal for making radical redesign decisions and validating more complex solutions. To this end, we integrate additional qualitative research instruments into our toolbox.

We sometimes use these types of instruments as pre-validation to maximize the quality and success rate of the subsequent experiment, an alternative to an A/B test. And we always weigh time, budget, risk, and quality to determine what helps substantiate the best decision in that situation. This need is strongly reflected in B2B environments where you must deal with longer buying cycles and there is not always enough traffic to base all decisions on standard experiments. With these tools, we can support all types of customers. This can even be done offline. For example, we are already actively optimizing their store direction and POS systems with some customers. In this way, we can continue to answer all questions from our customers about growth.

Training clients and working on maturity 

We see it as a natural process that customers eventually outgrow us. In fact, we applaud this. It makes sense that companies are gradually becoming more mature and bringing in more CRO specialists and knowledge. When UX designers, Developers, Researchers, Psychologists, and Analysts are employed, we can train them to do more themselves.

However, we do see that insourcing often leads to a decline in velocity, quality, and even impact. For example, we often see ‘the issues of the day’ take over, so CRO resources are used on other projects and are no longer continuously engaged in growth. At these times we can monitor the high velocity, maintain ticket discipline, guarantee the quality of all deliverables, and organize cooperation with other departments.

That is why together we ensure that the in-house CRO team becomes increasingly mature and can get started with their CRO activities themselves so that they can ultimately make better (data) substantiated decisions. Therefore, it is often a compliment when an organization, such as Adidas, has taken back control over CRO activities after helping them for some time.

Redesign and CRO/CXO go hand in hand

With the arrival of Joost Bröker (ex-Bol.com and ABN AMRO), we can serve our customers in a wider sense. His expertise in UX Design and Redesign offers opportunities to support larger redesign projects and even help develop websites together with our in-house developers. With Bol.com, Joost has led the transition from store to platform and he will support more of our clients with choices regarding redesigns, design thinking, re-platforming, and design systems in the coming year.

What else is on our agenda 

Like everyone else, we also look at all the arising AI possibilities. Especially tools that determine online experiences based on algorithms are on the rise and can have radical consequences for the entire online organization. An example of this is personalization based on algorithms. This one-on-one conversion optimization is extremely interesting, especially for the part of algorithm optimization, where you learn how to control and improve algorithms. However, you learn to a lesser extent from the behavior and attitude of end users.

We see that knowledge from algorithms is often more difficult to reuse in other areas of optimization. And we find the latter interesting. where you get a better picture and understanding of your target group through optimization. This helps you to form new hypotheses for other areas of optimization. Online and offline. For us, that is also what we as optimization specialists are most passionate about. We want to find out where something works and how we can help our customers even more. That is why our focus in 2023 will mainly be on being able to reuse customer data. We are putting the finishing touches to a complete database of customer insights. This helps us to better predict whether certain insights have a greater or lesser chance of success and which tickets should be at the top of the backlog.

Furthermore, this year our attention will of course also go to the transitions around GA4 and Google Optimize. But that’s business as usual of course. So, what will you do about your CRO/CXO in 2023?