Mapping the Digital Customer Journey

Adam Cabrera: Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of From the Ground Up. I'm your host today, Carol Wyman. And I'm sitting down with Lauren Siskin, the vice president of Digital for Heritage Family of Companies. And we're going to explore what a practical digital roadmap looks like for contractors, designers, and service-based businesses and the pool and landscape industry. First, Lauren, welcome. Welcome to the show. Thank you. I'm glad to be here. Thank you for having me. Yeah. Can you do for our guests, can you give us an introduction? Sure. So Lauren Siskan, I lead the Heritage Digital team. So underneath my responsibility, we have a product team that is focused on developing features and functions and experiences to better serve our customers. We also have a team that works on with our integration CRM partners for direct integrations, which we'll talk a little bit more about as we get into this. And then we also have a team that's responsible for working with our field and our customers directly to help them be able to understand and adopt our digital tools. ⁓ I spent prior to joining Heritage, which I've been here almost a year, I spent the last 20 years in luxury retail. I was at Neiman Marcus group. And most of my time ⁓ with the company, I was on the digital side of the business with two primary focuses. One was I worked on the product team. So again, very similar to here, working on building features and functions and experiences to better serve our customers. And then I also worked in digital strategy. And really the focus there was ⁓ Identifying opportunities that we felt like would better serve our customers and then working all across large cross-functional teams to help deliver ⁓ those different strategies and experiences and then measuring the value of them. That's quite a bit. That is a big lots of things on your plate for sure. That's pretty, I guess it's no never a dull moment for you. It hasn't been. So ⁓ How do you define a digital roadmap in a practical way for contractors, designers, and service-based businesses? Yeah, in practical terms, I think of a digital roadmap as just a prioritized plan for how a product and engineering team is going to deliver capabilities and experiences that better serve their customers. Our goal at Heritage is to make it as easy as possible for our customers to get their work done and being able to deliver value with self-service tools that create convenience, save them time. Give them better visibility and ultimately give them tools to win more jobs and grow their business. We want to get them in and out of our branches or bring the branches directly to them because we know that they make money in the backyard, not sitting in our branches and not sitting on our sites trying to order product. So for us, we start with the customer journey and the workflows. So we think about the things that our customers are already trying to do. They need to be able to find products, they need to be able to check availability and pricing so that they can quote their customers. They need the ability to be able to easily reorder products and be able to manage jobs and track orders. And so how we think about pulling together a roadmap is that we identify ultimately within our customer journey today where their areas of opportunity are areas that we can ultimately improve friction that our customers are experiencing. We typically develop an annual strategy and a roadmap. We're actually in the in the middle of that right now as we speak. And a large part of that is really developing, again, after we identify opportunities, it's developing hypotheses against those opportunities and saying, if we were to solve that problem, or if we were to be able to improve something for our customers, ultimately, what's the business outcome that we could expect? And then from there, we prioritize those opportunities against everything else that we are working on, or potentially future things that we work on. And then on a quarterly basis, we ultimately re-project our roadmap. ⁓ and we're looking at what has the greatest opportunity at that moment to deliver value to our customers and to our business. And then the teams from there begin planning an actual execution to be able to deliver that roadmap and then measure the results of that roadmap. Wow. And coming from the luxury retail side of things, you are so conscious of the user experience and how important that is and just the emotions of people or how they want things to be. Like you, you kind of ⁓ you come from a great background to be able to service ⁓ the clients as they come in and and when you're identifying that that experience for them. So that's that's interesting. And I I I loved your your identification of all the the different areas steps in the journey. Yes. I think that's so important. And ⁓ you know, I know it's important to have in those steps ways to be able to pivot, you know. So it's kind of interesting 'cause you have, you know, once you know the outcome. There could be something else that happens for that. So I I love having that hypothesis. Yeah, that happens regularly too in our business. And ultimately we want to be agile. We want to be ready to move in the direction that we think is going to be most important for our customers and for our business. And so for us, ⁓ you know, we do that on a on a quarterly basis, but even month to month as things happen, the team is be is able to be agile and brick-in, brick out. So if we find something that's much more important, we can bring that in and say something else has to move out. ⁓ but that's really the goal is that we can ⁓ react to what's happening with our customers and ⁓ figure out the best ways to serve them. And that does evolve over time. For sure. So what do you see as some signs that a company has outgrown its digital tools, website or customer management systems? Yeah, it's a great question. I think one of the primary things is ⁓ working around instead of through systems. ⁓ so this Some of those common signs could be you're doing duplicate order entry, you have disconnected customer records, there's too many phone calls that are happening for routine updates. There's manual reconciliation that has to take place behind the scenes, or you even are repeating customer information across multiple parts of your system. so those can be challenges that you might be facing. That's a good signal of we might outgrow what we have here. Another signal, though, is that your business wants to scale and grow, and you're prohibited by the systems and the technology that you have in place. One way at Heritage that we are working to grow with our customers is being able to support industry-leading CRM platforms with direct integrations. And so what this means is in a platform that a customer is potentially a service-based customer, already has all of their customers, their invoicing, their billing, maybe their routing. ⁓ that we have our heritage integrations. We've built a robust set of APIs that we can integrate directly with these platforms that give our customers their heritage catalog with their real-time pricing and inventory, which allows them to be able to use that directly to quote their customers. They can place orders directly through those platforms, get notifications, and even tracking afterwards. And so the value there is that they essentially have one system that they're running their business and doing everything that they need to do. versus having to work in multiple systems. Wow. That's great. and I'm sure there's training that goes along with that, but we can get into some other things a little bit later for sure. And and you've answered a little bit about this, but you know, you're coming obviously from luxury retail. So what customer experience lessons translate well to the pool and landscape industry? ⁓ so I would say for both businesses, their relationship driven businesses, that's probably the biggest parallel that I've seen in luxury retail, our largest Most loyal customers all were in dedicated relationships with sales associates that they shopped with regularly, but they also were customers who shopped across channels, which included digital. For heritage, we say that we're in the B2B business, which is a belly-to-belly business that's built on trust, service, and relationships. ⁓ So similar in our business, similar behavior that our customers who are engaging with us across channels ultimately are oftentimes some of our largest and most valuable customers. So digital really creates convenience, right? You can shop from anywhere at any time. A branch doesn't have to be open for you to shop or store doesn't have to be open for you to shop, but you also have a person, right, that you can reach out to at any point if you need assistance. And this means that digital needs to reflect the same level of customer understanding as a TM, as an example. They know who the customer is, they know the type of business that they run, the products that they typically purchase, and even the brands that they trust. Digital platforms need to essentially recognize those same signals and create customer experiences that are highly relevant, where they're seeing the products, content, pricing, and promotions, and even recommendations that are relevant to them. This helps them to be able to find and purchase the products that they need, and even being able to surface products that maybe they didn't know that we carried, that they may need, as well as recommending things that they may have forgot. Wow. That's a lot. There's a lot in there for sure. ⁓ So How can outdoor living companies use digital tools to better guide customers from inspiration to consultation to the actual final project? So I think this is a place that is very interesting because ⁓ with some of the emerging AI tools, ⁓ this I think space is really transforming. And so ultimately the goal is to be able to connect the inspiration for a homeowner to something that's actually executable. ⁓ For a professional contractor that's consulting with a homeowner that let's just use the example of wants to put a pool in their backyard, being able to help visualize what the outcome is going to look like for that homeowner so that they can see what's that pool gonna look like in my backyard? What's the position, what's the size relative to everything else in my backyard, being able to change out the tile, the coping, the deck, even being able to see the watercolor, what is the finished product gonna look like, and having the opportunity to easily reposition the spa, the sun deck, or even skimmers. To get to the final product, that is a super powerful thing that ⁓ ultimately AI tools are starting to be able to allow that to become ⁓ a reality much easier. But for heritage, our goal is to be able to take that visualization and be able to translate that into a project with a scope bill of materials to be able to generate an accurate quote that our pros can give directly to their homeowners and do that really quickly. So categories like pool, hardscape, and even outdoor living, it's not just a online digital checkout business, there's so much more involved. But really the highest value is helping the contractor be able to size the job correctly. Being able to quote that homeowner quickly oftentimes helps them to win the job. Being able to avoid missed materials that would slow down the ability for them to complete the job. And then also being able to bring a polished proposal back to the homeowner. We've built certain capabilities that start to allow our customers to be able to do some of this. So On both our pool landscape websites, we have a capability for our customers to build shopping lists. We also, our own internal teams, can help build shopping lists for our customers in a very white-gloved way. But we see a lot of our customers using this tool essentially to build projects and oftentimes projects that they're repeating over and over again. And so it becomes a project list of everything that they need for a bill of material. They can get their real-time pricing and inventory, and they can add everything to cart in one click. Wow. And by relieving them of that stress, by you know, helping the contractor be able to then they can focus on other things. They if you have that set for them, then they can actually focus on everything that you want them to focus on, which is the the customer experience for them. So I that I love that. That's wonderful. And heritage has always been a step ahead as far as AI is concerned. Like I was at the AI summit last year and ⁓ so amazing. It was it's just so impressive. And, you know, I think there's ⁓ There there's my experience with Heritage, who is our premier sponsor for the outdoor ⁓ coffee shop site, is that they always want to think ahead and solve problems before they actually happen. And with all the people that are in place and including yourself, it's just been really such a cool thing to see the advancements and all the technology and AI and being able to make it usable and functioning. You know, because I think that's, you know, it it's it's so well thought out. So that's always been really impressive. So I'm And ⁓ we like to be on the edge of innovation and thinking ahead of our customers ⁓ and meet them where they're at, right? they don't even have to worry about how we're solving their problems behind the scenes using AI, but ultimately meet them where they're at and give them more time back to be with their customers. Yeah, absolutely. So, what what role should a CRM personalization and customer data play in building stronger client relationships? I mean, I think it's key to developing strong relationships with customers. When done well, businesses can capture both implicit information from customer behavior and purchase history as well as explicit information that the customers give us, especially if you're progressively profiling and asking them questions as they're building the profile to understand who they are better and how to serve them. And then even our associates being able to glean information from conversations and having a CRM that they can put all of that information into. There's even the ability to use data data science models and AI to be able to look at customer behavior and start to group customers together that have like personas or like behavior and identify things that may not have even been immediately obvious to you looking at the customer data. But the goal is really to be able to centralize all of that information and be able to create a single view of the customer. That can be leveraged across systems and experiences to create highly relevant and personalized experiences for customers. And with that shared view, it helps us to understand how the customer works, like what's their trait, what's their preferred branch that they shop in, what types of jobs are they doing, what's their purchase preference and even account structure. And this really allows digital, our sales team, even our branch team to create highly relevant experiences and better identify opportunities that we can serve our customers. ⁓ this helps us to be able to recommend the right products, surface the right content to them, reduce repetitive questions, and even giving our teams better context for how they can create more value in that relationship with their customers. ⁓ it's such an intuitive approach so that you're saving them so much time later too when you're identifying all the ⁓ the nuances of customers and how they work. So that's I think oftentimes one of the challenges though is being able to realize. how much rich information you have across your organization, being able to identify all of the different data sets that you have and even just getting them into a single place that you can action off of and then having all of your systems utilizing that information. Like that sounds, that sounds lovely and it is, but it is not easy to go do. And it certainly takes time to be able to pull all of that information together and then to be able to leverage it across your systems. Yeah, to have it all in one place and be accessible without having to do duplicate like copy and paste to things and just having it there is just ⁓ you know, obviously saves time and mistakes and, you know, all those things. So I think the other place too is where AI is becoming really powerful is you can essentially look across all of your data sets and use it to be able to bring insights to the surface that otherwise would have taken hours, days, lots of teams, lots of people to be able to go do. So that's become a really powerful tool to be able to identify opportunities or insights about customers that otherwise would have taken a lot more time to go do. Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. ⁓ so how can companies balance high-touch relationship-based service with more automated digital experiences? We we touched a little bit on this too. Yeah, I mean, I think the best is ⁓ we like to say that we automate the routine and then we preserve human touch where it creates value. ⁓ so a customer shouldn't have to call the branch. ⁓ for things that digital can easily answer for them. So they have a question about an invoice, they have all of their invoice history available digitally. Whereas my order, that's one of the top, both in Rentale and even in distribution, one of the top things that customers need to know. ⁓ but even giving them access for easy and quick repeat ordering or access to basic ⁓ product information that they might might need. at Heritage, we've created a digital experience that essentially collects all of their purchase history across both. Our online and offline data sources. And we have a buy-again experience that allows our customers to see everything they've bought from us in the last 12 months. They can see how many times they've bought it. It has the ability to filter down to certain classifications or categories that they're interested in buying. They can sort everything. And we even have the ability for them to export it if there's other systems that they want to be able to import that into for like demand forecasting. We've also ⁓ we have an AI virtual assistant on our site. ⁓ that's kind of a one-stop shop that allows them to be able to search across products, product information, orders, and invoices. So instead of them having to go dig through the site to find all that information, they can search using the virtual sales associate to get to all of that. and at heritage, we say the branch and RTMs ultimately cultivate the relationship with our customers and digital supports the customer workflow with self-service tools. Yeah, and creates a less frustrating experience for them so they can focus on the the customers getting the jobs done. Yeah. Yes. It's so it's so great. ⁓ so what kind of mistakes do you ⁓ see businesses making when investing in a new digital platform or software? Yeah, I think there's a couple of things that can happen. I think probably the most critical one is starting with the software and start up instead of the business problem that you're trying to solve. So our digital team, we try to start with what's the problem? And I mentioned before that we used a hypothesis to essentially say if we were to solve that problem, what kind of business outcome could we expect? And then partnering with our engineering team to evaluate what are the possible solutions and how you could actually solve that problem, scoping that and then determining what our path forward is. We oftentimes like to use an MVP approach, which is just means what's the minimal viable product that you would need to deliver that would help you to test your hypothesis and validate it before you build the full solution. What this allows us to do is we're able to move faster, we're able to learn from real customer behavior. What did they do when we put that out in front of them? And it reduces a ton of rework while ensuring that we're investing in the right things before we start to scale. ⁓ I would say another mistake is treating the launch as the finish line. And this is something that I think is as I think about my prior experience, this was less of a concern, but certainly ⁓ for B2B and for distribution, it is that you can build the right solution. But it doesn't create value if the employees or the customers don't adopt it. And so successful digital investments oftentimes involve getting users involved early on to get their input and their feedback, being able to clearly communicate the value, and then continuing to iterate and prove upon what you've built based on how customers are actually using it. So to support that, we've built a go-to-market playbook for some of our new features and capabilities. Part of it is just starting with what's the right rollout approach. Some of this is dependent upon what's the operational complexity to help serve what we're building, as well as what the customer impact is. We also like to define our success metrics up front to say, what does success look like? And how are we going to measure adoption? How are we going to identify if we've introduced any issues or if there's opportunities for us to improve the experience beyond what we've already built? And then as we're as we're putting our rollout plan together, We ultimately are going to measure these different KPIs to say, are we hitting what we expected, or do we need to go back and look at our approach? And then also working with our marketing team to develop a marketing strategy about how we're going to communicate the value to our customers across all of our relevant touch points. And then I mentioned that we have a dedicated team that helps to train our field teams as well as our customers directly. So having them brought in early so that they understand what we're building, they understand what the value of that is and they can help to message that out to our field teams and to our customers. So it's really about thinking holistically, not just building something and launching a new technology, but thinking holistically around how are you going to drive awareness, adoption, and the measurable value from the new feature that you've built. You know, as you talk about the measure measurable value, how can a company measure whether its digital strategy is actually improving revenue, efficiency, or customer satisfaction? So I would say there's many metrics that you could use. To determine the success of digital, but ultimately it comes down to what's the right metric that's tied to your digital strategy and the outcomes that you're trying to achieve. And ultimately establishing a baseline first and then consistently measuring to see how does that change hopefully improve over time as you implement ⁓ improvements into the customer experience. I mean, if I think about some of the things that we look at, we look at digital revenue percentage to say what percent is digital of our total sales. And ultimately trying that part of that is just trying to move that number to show that we're getting more adoption of our tools and people are seeing value and using it more often. We also look at conversion rate. We're looking at the number of people that come to the site and how many of those customers are actually placing purchases and ordering with us. ⁓ in a service-based business, you want to look and see how often are they repeat purchasing, what's your order frequency rate. And then in instances, you know, I mentioned before recommendations is a good example. When you're doing cross-sell and upsell. What's your average order value and are you able to ultimately drive and increase there based on some of the tactics that you're taking? For us, product discovery tends to be very important. Most of our customers are finding and purchasing products from search or from our category pages. And so we often want to measure what's our search to cart success rate to make sure that they're able to find and purchase the products that they're looking for. And then I would say the last and probably one of the most important is all of those metrics are really keyed around. revenue and people purchasing, but we recognize that by building self-service tools, we're also serving customers that may come to the site and they need to look up an item. They need to check inventory for something before they go to the branch. They want to check on a price before they quote their customer. And they may or may not actually convert digitally. And that's okay because we've saved a call to the branch or a call to the TM. And so we also measure just how what percentage of our customers are digitally engaged and using the tool regularly, even if they're not converting. I would say another measure that's really important to look at is using direct customer feedback. So having something like a NPS score, a net promoter score, which is just pulling your customers and asking how likely are they to recommend your site or your experience, as well as a CSAT score, which is your customer satisfaction score. And that's really asking customers how satisfied are they with a specific experience. So as an example, we're rolling out some new things on the site. And we ultimately are going to target customers that are going through that new journey and ask them specifically at the end of the journey, how satisfied were you with that experience? What could we have done to improve it? ⁓ and surprisingly, customers, not always, but surprisingly, our customers ⁓ have given us really great feedback. And many of them have actually answered those questions versus just Xing out of them. ⁓ but that helps to actually give you feedback directly from customers that may not have necessarily been obvious as you were looking at your digital numbers. And so being able to capture that feedback, synthesize that into like what are the key things that you're seeing, and then track that sentiment as you're making changes to the site becomes really valuable. And then the last thing I would say is also to the extent that you have the ability to A-B test, ⁓ I love being able to put a hypothesis to the test, put it in front of live customers and let them ultimately vote and tell you what wins. ⁓ so the best way to understand how changes directly impact the customer is to be able to test those things. And then see what the KPIs tell you. But I think the you know advice I would give is don't get overwhelmed by measuring too many metrics. You can definitely get into a place of analysis paralysis where you're just looking at way too many things. It's probably most important to identify the metrics that best demonstrate ⁓ if digital is creating value for your business and measuring that with your customers and your overall business. Identify what those are for you and then track those over time. So I Everything you said is is is so so great. I think people can get very overwhelmed with all the data and analytics and not know how to respond. And sometimes you can look at something too soon and it's not really the full the full value, the full breadth of what is happening. So do you have a recommendation on how long ⁓ you should wait before you start checking your numbers? Yeah. It depends. And part of it depends on how much ⁓ traffic or how many customers are going through that experience that you've changed. So it can vary. But we tend to at least try and give ourselves 30 days. And I'm not very patient. I know, right? So I'm always asking, what what what are we seeing so far? But at least 30 days. And depending on, you know, the the time of the year, the seasonality, that obviously can impact things as well. But we tend to look at things between 30, 60, and 90 days to understand, especially if we're looking at things kind of pre-a change and post-a-change, to understand overall. Because one of the things you have to remember is, especially if you're changing something that's pretty dramatic in a customer experience that initially it actually you might go backwards before you go forwards. It takes time for them to figure things out. Hopefully you've made things very intuitive, but it can take time for them to adjust to changes you've made before you're really going to see the results of that change. Yeah, that's that's great advice. ⁓ and so for business owners who feel overwhelmed by the whole digital transformation, what is one achievable change they can make this year to move their company forward? I think my advice would be to map out one important customer journey, beginning to end, and then identify friction or opportunities that exist within that journey. Talk with customers, talk with your employees to observe the process today, and ultimately to identify where you may have opportunities. The first step doesn't have to be a major tech investment. In fact, I would almost say it shouldn't be. It should be something small that's tangible that you can work on. It's best to focus on changes that make the experience easier and better for customers and ultimately demonstrate value. So I think that's what's critical is that you can measure at the end of the changes that you've made whether or not that created value for your customers. I think the best practical step in improvement is just looking for places that you can save your customers time, you can build confidence, and then you can give proof that digital helps to support customers. Wow. That's I and I think it's important to have. right people in place and have people that are dedicated to that and understand their role for that so that they can ⁓ because there's so many analytics that you can see and if you don't have the person in place to be able to ⁓ look with those numbers and understand it it's you know you don't want to go too tech heavy without having everything in place. So you spoke to that really well ⁓ earlier as well. So ⁓ is there anything thank you so much. This has been I you have so much information and it was so well thought out, Lauren. I can't, I'm just really excited that you were able to talk to us today. ⁓ is there anything else, you know, to is there anything else you want to leave us with? I mean, I think that there's so much that's changing in the technology space, especially with AI, which we spoke about a little bit earlier. And so I think part of it is just staying curious, right? ⁓ you know, even even if it's not technology, but staying curious about your customer experience. ⁓ I love getting to go watch customer sessions ⁓ and be able to replay and see what customers are doing because oftentimes we can in our own minds think we understand, right? We understand this is what they're doing, this is how they're doing it. ⁓ but until you get a chance to see what the customer's doing andor talk directly with the customers, you may not fully understand or be able to empathize with them. So I think ⁓ the thing that has served me best in my career is just staying curious, always asking questions, always trying to understand and empathize with our customers and being able to build ⁓ experiences and solutions that we think will better serve them. Well said. Wow. Well, Lauren, I again, I just I want to thank you for for being here with us today. Absolutely. And We are really grateful for Heritage Family Cust Cus Companies as our premier sponsor for the pool. Thanks everybody for joining us today and until next time and enjoy your your time and ⁓ thanks for being here on From the Ground Up.