On June 6-8, 2023, eTail Asia is taking place. This event gave us the opportunity to meet and exchange with E-commerce solutions from all over the world.
In this context, I had the opportunity to exchange with Alex Llorens, Vice President, Asia Pacific at Contentsquare:
Can you tell us a little bit about Contentsquare and what the company does?
Contentsquare is the global leader in digital experience analytics, which takes a look at how visitors navigate a website, using that data to help determine insights that point to customer intent, success, frustration, etc. Brands use Contentsquare’s AI-powered platform to help remove or minimise friction points along the customer journey so visitors have more seamless experiences. It provides quantifiable data that they can use to prioritise actions to deliver customer experiences that achieve customer happiness and deliver business impact. Brands are able to hone their digital customer experiences over time, delivering what customers want most, and avoiding what they don’t.
Contentsquare helps over 1,000 leading global brands to transform the way they use digital channels to drive business, allowing them to stay agile, make informed decisions, and build customer trust with security, privacy, and accessibility – at scale. Over a million websites use Contentsquare technology.
For a little bit of context, Contentsquare was founded in Paris a little over a decade ago, and now has 18 global offices. It has raised $1.4B in investment funding from leading investors, including Softbank Vision Fund II, BlackRock and others.
How does Contentsquare help retailers improve their customer experience?
Experience truly is the driving differentiator for brands, even eclipsing cost in some industries. If you go online and have any level of frustration, your likelihood of returning to that website is greatly diminished, at best. In general, people simply expect more. That’s what we strive to help brands accomplish, every day, on every page of their website or app.
Contentsquare aggregates user navigation data to surface insights about what people are doing, what they are trying to do, whether or not they’re finding what they need, and makes recommendations on what brands can adjust to improve the customer journey. In the face of constant market disruption and evolving customer expectations, Contentsquare’s digital experience analytics capabilities empower organisations to make data-based decisions quickly, driving customer happiness and business success. Our solution offers businesses the understanding they need to translate user data into business- redefining action, while ensuring they are done securely, intelligently, and with the highest level of privacy.
What are some of the key features of Contentsquare’s platform?
Contentsquare’s platform allows organisations to have a 360-degree view of the customer’s online experience, providing rich and contextual insight into what customers want, how they use it, and how they feel about the experience, from start to finish. Our solutions include:
- Contentsquare Digital captures journey data automatically, allowing brands to decide what to analyze and quantify without tagging.
- Contentsquare Find & Fix quickly locates errors and friction points, from session replays to page speed analysis, allowing brands to learn what makes their users return or leave the website.
- Contentsquare Zone-based Heatmaps are unbelievably powerful because they take the guessing game out of the data. Now people can visualise and see the data together and make decisions about what needs to change. It can give insight where content is overlooked or highly popular, without capturing personal data of customers Uniquely, Contentsquare even provides options for cookieless analytics, i.e. neither third nor first party cookies are required.
- Contentsquare Insights offers actionable insights and discovers site usability issues, user frustrations and quantifies issues based on impact on experience, conversion, and revenue.
- Contentsquare Merchandising helps brands take strategic action and learn how their product catalog performs across channels and the impact of product placement, price, stock, and cross selling has on revenue.
- Contentsquare Apps offers comprehensive insights with mobile app analytics. With zone-based heat mapping, journey analytics and mobile session replay, businesses can translate these insights into actions in order to improve the mobile user experience.
Can you walk us through the process of how a retailer would use Contentsquare’s platform to analyze their customer experience?
Users can see near-immediate results after deploying Contentsquare – within minutes it can analyze data and identify the parts of the customer journey that are performing well or are frustrating site visitors.
With our powerful platform with customized zoning capabilities, brands can customize their data set-up to be able to really hone in on the insights they desire most. Our auto scripts and AI insights work within minutes and brands can immediately see customer interactions. Contentsquare will support brands through that process, understanding the brand’s specific goals in order to tailor a data program that ensures insights are personal. It’s like having a personal trainer in your ear, helping you along. The power of aligning teams around common data sets, in real-time, means faster execution, and bigger impact on customer happiness and revenues.
How does Contentsquare gather and analyze customer data?
Contentsquare uses a lightweight tag on a brand’s site or SDK in mobile apps to capture every customer interaction, including mouse movements, clicks, taps, scrolls, swipes etc. This data is then securely sent to Contentsquare servers, where it is aggregated and prepared for analysis. Using machine learning, Contentsquare converts this data into actionable insights and recommendations for digital teams – allowing them to view and act on summaries of millions of user sessions with ease.
What kind of insights can retailers gain from using Contentsquare’s platform?
The best way to determine customer expectations and understand the root cause of customer frustration is to take your cue from customers themselves. Online customer interactions are the breadcrumbs they leave that tell a bigger story – every click, scroll, search, mouse hover, page forward or backward, and time spent on a brand’s website are valuable insights into what is working, and more crucially, what isn’t working online. When the data shows that one in three web experiences are frustrating visitors, it can have a big business impact. Using Contentsquare data can help minimise the fallout of having a less than perfect digital experience.
The data tells a story. For example, we can see when people are rage clicking right before they leave a website. That means whatever they just interacted with was frustrating enough to send them elsewhere. We can also see if the checkout process is seamless – i.e. it taking less than one minute to convert. There are ways to spot where there is confusion – constant scrolling or mouse hovers followed by repeated backpage clicks – which tells brands what to fix. These are all aspects of the experience that data helps with.
How does Contentsquare ensure the privacy and security of customer data?
Today’s consumers expect outstanding online experiences, but are not willing to sacrifice their privacy to get them. As more and more of our lives are lived online, Digital Trust has emerged as a key customer concern in recent years. Here at Contentsquare, the security and confidentiality of our customers’ data is of the utmost importance to us, and we adhere to the highest international security and privacy standards. In fact, we’ve been privacy-first from the start and our product team continues to work today on building solutions that anticipate people’s desire for privacy. In 2021, we launched our industry’s first cookieless experience analytics solution. And we recently joined a small list of privacy-first global organisations to have been awarded ISO 27701 certification — a standard of best practices for managing information security in compliance with the provisions of legal frameworks for data protection such as CCPA, GDPR, and other country-specific legislation.
What sets Contentsquare apart from other customer experience analytics platforms?
To put it simply, we have the largest data set to help brands understand behavioral data in a meaningful way. Our solutions use the best of what machine learning has to offer and marries it with a personalised approach to working with brands to understand their audiences, goals, programs, and challenges. Contentsquare is unique in its ability to enable understanding, action and trust at scale, tailored to specific needs and aspirations. The platform allows retailers to gain actionable insight through unique behavioural metrics that provide a full picture of the customer experience – what’s working, what’s not, what’s loved and what’s hated. With those accessible insights, Contentsquare helps brands make informed decisions quickly – there’s no need to see a lot of failure before making a meaningful fix.
What are some of the biggest challenges facing retailers when it comes to optimizing their customer experience?
Some are not fully realising the impact bad CX has on their business, and many are not knowing how to leverage data to their (and their customers’) benefit. We also hear from a lot of brands that they are making changes based on guesswork or hunches without truly understanding the root cause of friction. All of this combined translates to a lot of wasted time trying to figure it out, meanwhile losing revenue, irritating site visitors, and damaging their overall brand reputation.
Contentsquare can help close the gap between evolving customer expectations and behaviors, and the level of quality of the brand’s delivered CX. While most companies have access to tools that can measure some aspects of the performance of their website, most of them measure basic things like clicks, bounces, and conversions. The reality is, there’s a lot more to learn in the ‘in between’ moments. Of course, measuring the evolution of traffic and conversions is necessary — but it is only a finite part of the customer journey. Providing a consistently outstanding experience – from the moment they enter a website to the moment they leave – is key to building trust and long-lasting relationships with customers. That consistency and excellence hinges on one critical factor: customer understanding by unobtrusive means.
What are some future developments or plans for Contentsquare that you’re excited about?
We’re working on a lot of exciting innovations that will be rolled out in the coming months, but as always, our development centres on the end customer; understanding them better and ensuring their happiness is attainable by the brands they engage with online.
What are some of the key topics which you are keen to listen to during the eTail Asia?
Nothing beats getting insights across such a breadth from top industry experts in person. Collectively, we can listen and discuss challenges, new opportunities, and learn from each other’s success, finding ways to adopt winning strategies in our own unique way. I am especially excited to meet the ecosystem of partners on the side-lines of these discussions to talk about new use cases that our technologies are enabling together. For instance, Customer Support teams tell us they find our Session replays interesting because they can capture context by watching the replay to find what frustrates the customer even before the agent picks up the phone to help the customer. That’s just one example of a real-life use case of how Contentsquare adds value to retailers, unearthed through conversations with partners at an event of eTail’s calibre.
What are 2 key things you find most valuable being a partner of eTail Asia?
The first would be the opportunity to get up to speed on the dynamic landscape of retail in Asia. Retail remains the biggest industry for digital experience analytics alongside financial services. I am always excited to hear about or witness the innovation that retailers bring to the table at industry events like eTail Asia. The second most valuable thing about the partnership is the interaction with the speakers and other sponsors, who will no doubt bring tremendous insights and reflections, particularly as we navigate this year of uncertainty and challenges.
