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Supporting the User Experience through adoption of Agile functionality

Last week in our Developing and Sustaining Competitive Advantage in the eCommerce Sector blog post, we shared some of the latest trends and themes that we are proudly building into our clients’ ecommerce sites, to help optimise and maximise the end-User Experience (UX).

Our specialist web development experience is always focused to help delight the end-customer and provide differentiation from the majority of ecommerce retailers, still operating without customer engagement and a clear User Experience strategy, at their core.

This week, we explore the CRUCIAL feature within Phoenix’s standard web development approach, which both supports the User Experience strategy as well as future-proofing the continued, commercial success of our clients’ ecommerce sites: AGILITY.

"By building almost all of our client websites and ecommerce sites on top of an agile platform, we provide our clients with a series of automated data collation and analysis tools.

These tools combine to continually and proactively highlight evolving patterns of customer behaviour over time, that provide all of the insight needed to underpin the agile changes to content and structure that are required from time to time, to remain ultra-competitive."

Davinia Hamilton-Maddox, Director, Phoenix Digital.

As can be seen on every UK High Street, consumer behaviour patterns continue to evolve as expectations, awareness and choice (through competition) combine to significantly reduce footfall and thus revenues.

The same, in terms of evolving consumer behaviours and expectations, is obviously true online as well.

However, a number of years ago, the team at Phoenix Digital, identified online consumer behavioural change, as an opportunity not a threat.

Our logic was, if we were able to adapt our web development approach to incorporate a much more agile functionality, combined with the powerful, bespoke UX strategies that we were becoming well known for developing, our clients would be operating online estates, few could match.

So that was the approach, as a team, we focused on and mastered. Fast forward to the present day and the Phoenix Digital team deliver websites and ecommerce sites for our clients with built-in agile functionality, as matter of course.

Agile functionality within ecommerce sites naturally involves the automated capture and analysis of data.

However, the real client benefits, come from the platform’s capability of proactively presenting the evolving behavioural patterns, whilst highlighting issues and/or opportunities, combined with the ability to easily and quickly adapt the requisite changes within the site, to manage them to their favour.

Our agile platforms, provide our clients with the ability to segment buyer groups and highlight on-going patterns around purchasing behaviour throughout the year, by:

  • geography
  • sex
  • mosaic lifestyle
  • age
  • price fluctuations
  • product preferences
  • targeted discounting/voucher incentives
  • seasonal behaviour

This information provides the insight and confidence for proactive campaigns to be set up, personalised and applied directly to pre-determined buyer segments, which subsequently maximise relevance, profit and overall user experience.

Our agile web platforms are also built to incorporate automated operational functions and thus cost saving benefits too, such as:

  • direct links into internal systems to automate processes (such as invoicing, automatated email communications, stock control, product recall management etc)
  • targeted content management
  • non-purchase behaviour reporting, identifying patterns for when and where potential sales drop off occurs

FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT HOW WE DIGITALLY DEVELOP AND ENHANCE COMPLEX, CUTTING-EDGE E-COMMERCE PLATFORMS AND WEBSITES, GET IN TOUCH