To drive intelligence-backed customer experiences in a digital marketplace, marketers and salespeople need to balance their use of AI tools and human intuition effectively; Nitzan Shaer, Co-founder and CEO at WEVO shares some top best practices while discussing the story behind the WEVO platform:

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Welcome to this martech chat Nitzan, tell us more about the WEVO platform?

Thanks so much for having me!

We are in a moment when the importance of digital business and providing an outstanding customer experience is at an all-time high. Digital transformation was accelerated years ahead in 2020, and it’s a big challenge to keep up with fast-evolving customer expectations.  At WEVO we know that the key  is to have a means of understanding why customers interact with digital experiences the way they do. 

WEVO is a customer experience platform that leverages human-augmented AI to enable next-generation user research, putting those critical insights in the hands of anyone in the organization who needs them. WEVO takes the effort out of research and combines the statistical significance of quantitative tests and the emotional response of qualitative tests. By using AI to theme and score the feedback, benchmarking and measuring against large data sets, we’re able to offer fast, accurate, and synthesized insights for marketers so they can spend their time creating digital experiences that will really resonate with their customers.

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What are some top best practices you feel today’s marketers need to be focusing on to drive more effective digital customer experiences? 

The key is to start testing early before launching your website or product. This is the best way to ensure that the digital experience will resonate with the target audience before it goes live. If you optimize after launching, you’ll be iterating slowly in front of live traffic. This will cost you revenue over time. 

Incorporate user research as a foundational part of your development process. This way you can be guided by user feedback every step of the way. Start early with user testing in the concept phase and validate with statistically significant research before launching. You should continue testing after launch against the competition to make sure you always know what your customers expect from you — and that you are delivering on those expectations. 

How have you seen marketing technologies around the world be used to drive better online journeys that have left a mark for users, can you share some examples?

AI (artificial intelligence) can be a powerful tool for marketers. It can take on the heavy lifting of user research, reducing hundreds of hours of human effort to just minutes. For example, AI can analyze, theme, and score qualitative feedback on a quantitative scale. it can identify statistically significant insights much faster than any human can. The AI platforms don’t have to rely only on results of a single survey, but rather can look back on historical data, as well as real-time benchmarking. At WEVO, we’ve trained the system on over 1.5 million human data inputs. And that means that every insight is not only looking at the results of that particular survey, but looking back to all of the tests that came before. Maybe one of the most powerful capabilities of next-generation marketing technology is predictive evaluation. Instead of relying on comparisons of A/B testing, AI can perform predictive analysis based on historical data. 

To be clear, we don’t rely on AI alone — we believe it works best when it’s paired with human intuition. People are masters at understanding context and will assess AI-generated insights. The AI removes the tedium of the research collecting and analyzing process, so the researcher or marketer’s team can spend more time applying the learnings to build a more successful digital experience for the customer and drive business growth.

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When creating new digital experiences, what are some of the top challenges you still see marketers struggle with?

A struggle that many marketers face today is launching new digital experiences untested, either because they don’t have the resources or the stakeholder buy-in they need to incorporate customer insights into their development or design process. When marketers rely on A/B tests or Google Analytics to track customer behavior on live sites and journey, they can discern the “what,” but they don’t know WHY users are engaging or not engaging, and they’ll often have to spend time and resources iterating on a live experience.  

By leveraging a user research platform to collect user feedback prior to going live, marketers can remove any internal bias and build stakeholder confidence with data that quantifies the qualitative feedback. Once that confidence is established, user research can be democratized. A solution like WEVO requires no specialized training, providing the guardrails and integrity of results so that teams across the organization can leverage it for their specific needs. When everyone has access to insights, a test-and-learn culture can thrive, empowering organizations to create new, better digital experiences for their customers. 

A few takeaways for marketing leaders and CMOs/CEOs for the rest of 2021?

2020 was a challenging year for CMOs as the Covid-19 pandemic forced millions of consumers online. This digital migration is here to stay and has permanently altered customer expectations. That’s why it’s never been more important that CMOs empower their teams with next-generation user research tools that will help them understand the WHY of customer behavior. 

Taking a democratized approach with solutions that are standardized and require no specialized training means more testing, more insights, and less risk in launching new experiences. We envision a future in which nothing goes untested as research is accurate, effortless, and available to everybody.

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