When an online retail channel is underperforming, the problem is rarely contained neatly within the website.
What appears to be an eCommerce problem can originate in the customer experience, commercial strategy, operations, people, technology or the decisions connecting them.
That is why I start by diagnosing the business problem, not the website.
Start with what is happening
When I investigate digital commerce performance, I start with quantitative data.
Not because quantitative data provides the answer. It rarely does.
It tells me what is happening.
Conversion may have fallen. Customers may be abandoning at a particular point. Mobile performance may be materially different from desktop. A product category may attract significant traffic but produce disappointing sales. Repeat purchase behaviour may have changed.
Those signals establish where I need to investigate.
This is important because I don't approach customer research with a standard list of questions.
The quantitative evidence shapes the qualitative investigation.
If the data changes, my questions change.
Then investigate why
Once I understand what is happening, I start looking for why.
That means examining customer-centred qualitative evidence and talking to the people inside the business who are closest to the customer.
The quantitative evidence tells me what to look for.
It shapes the questions I ask frontline staff. Their answers create further questions. Customer evidence either supports the emerging diagnosis, contradicts it or exposes something the quantitative data could never explain on its own.
Every investigation develops differently because every business is showing me different evidence.
Quantitative data tells me what is happening. Qualitative evidence helps me understand why.
But there is still a critical layer between evidence and diagnosis.
The interpretive layer
Two people can be given exactly the same quantitative and qualitative evidence and reach very different conclusions.
The difference is the professional lens through which they interpret it.
After more than 25 years working across eCommerce, retail, business strategy and customer experience, I have repeatedly seen the relationships between customer behaviour, commercial performance, organisational capability, technology and the decisions businesses make.
That experience creates pattern recognition.
A signal that appears insignificant in isolation can become important when connected with something customers are saying.
What presents as a technology problem may actually originate in a business process.
What appears to be a conversion problem may have started much earlier in the customer journey.
What looks like poor website performance may have very little to do with the website itself.
The evidence is only as useful as the interpretation applied to it.
Diagnosis is only the first layer
Finding the real problem still does not solve it.
The diagnosis has to be translated into a solution that improves the customer experience while working commercially and operationally for the business.
This is the second layer.
My background in customer experience design allows me to move from interpreting the problem to designing the response.
That distinction matters.
A well-designed solution to the wrong problem is still the wrong solution.
An accurate diagnosis without the capability to create a practical response leaves the business knowing more, but performing no better.
The complete process is:
Evidence → Interpretation → Solution
The evidence establishes what is happening and helps uncover why.
Experience and pattern recognition determine what that evidence means.
Customer experience design turns that interpretation into something the business can actually do.
This is why solving digital commerce performance problems requires more than analytics, research or a technical assessment.
The hardest part is not finding more data. It is correctly interpreting what the evidence is telling you — and knowing what to do about it.
About Greg Randall
Greg Randall is an eCommerce consultant and the founder of Comma Consulting. He has spent more than 25 years working with retailers and B2B's, helping them understand what is getting in the way of better digital performance.
His work combines eCommerce strategy, customer experience design, data and commercial pattern recognition to identify the issues that matter and what businesses should do about them.
This article was as tagged as Data Driven Decision Making , Digital Strategy , Digital Transformation