Your customers are engaging with your business through various channels and expect much more from these interactions than before. To remain competitive and relevant, you must be ready to adapt swiftly to customer demands and industry changes. This means anticipating your customers’ needs and providing unforgettable experiences.
This is where experimentation plays a role. A solid testing program allows your business to create and evaluate data-driven ideas about how customers interact with you. An experimentation approach gives you the means to enhance the performance of your websites, apps, and other digital platforms by testing and analyzing results. Since this happens in a controlled setting, you can implement significant changes with little risk.
From incremental tweaks to complete overhauls, experimentation lets you implement change quickly and see results in real time. Take Electronic Arts, Inc. (EA), for example. In an attempt to boost pre-orders for an upcoming game release, EA extended an online promotional offer to its customers. When pre-order numbers came in much lower than expected, the company ran tests and found that removing the online promo actually unexpectedly increased revenue by nearly 44%.
Here are three ways to start implementing this experimentation mindset right now, and start sparking innovation across your organization.
Embrace Failure
Some of the most significant breakthroughs in business were only achieved after many unsuccessful attempts. Bill Bowerman and Phil Knight, co-founders of Nike, spent the better part of a decade developing the Waffle Trainer – one of the signature designs in shoe history. Accepting failure as part of the learning process helps create a mindset shift within your organization, and leads to a culture of support and encouragement where employees are more willing and able to share their ideas.
Measure and Test
Armed with data and a willingness to try out new ideas, companies can collaborate and create the most memorable customer experiences. Holding monthly meetings with members of every team in your organization, from Sales to Merchandising and Design, can help fine-tune processes and identify ways to improve efficiency. Learning through trial-and-error also contributes to an environment of collaboration, ideation, and experimentation.
Encourage Employees
The more individuals involved in the success of a company, the easier it is to understand your customer base and make informed decisions that drive business value. Leaders who encourage every employee to contribute their ideas create a trickle-down effect within their companies, resulting in more employees across all departments who are eager to gain a deeper understanding about your customers and become a part of the solution. This type of empowerment leads to workers who are more impassioned, loyal, and motivated.
Embracing failure, learning through trial-and-error, and encouraging every employee to contribute can go a long way towards creating a culture of experimentation that can help your organization gain valuable insights and improve the customer experience. For more information about what experimentation allows you to accomplish and how to make this philosophy a part of your enterprise’s DNA, download the Creating a Culture of Experimentation whitepaper today.
