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Dissect damaged relationship or broken, and you will find a breakdown in communication:
- The spouse who feels unloved;
- The surprise resignation of the star salesperson who feels taken for granted;
- The worker who is injured due to insufficient training; and
- The neighborhood who’s aggrieved because they don’t believe that they were consulted.
All are the outcomes of communication that is non or bad.
These communication failures may be worse when third parties have been involved. They impose politics, opinions and Chinese whispers that all add up to distort and misinform.
The silent killer of large companies
In an article from the Harvard Business Review, Boris Groysberg and Michael Slind clarify communication failures as “the silent killer of big companies” providing the following illustrations:
- Nokia and its battle to turn great ideas into goods;
- Enron and its own inability to convey appropriate values;
- Star Princess Cruise Lines plus a breakdown in communication in relaying passengers’ concern;
- BP’s Deepwater Horizon blowout, “poor communications” and a failure “to share important details.”
So the ability to communicate well is essential for the successful running of business.
The eCommerce difficulty
A significant barrier to communicating is that the number of services and volume of information that sits by itself, or at a ‘silo’. The problem is getting information out of a single silo merging it and makes sense of it. This is the end result of buying different applications when there is a company acquired or inheriting systems.
Site owners face the communication challenge. They include a plug in from seller A that enhances search performance, then a widget from seller B which provides smarter recommendations and so on. Sooner or later a hotchpotch of services emerges, each operating in isolation with algorithms their own interpretation and data sets.
Quite simply this is in the worst, and ineffective provides irrelevant, skewed information that loses earnings and page loading time because of all the calls to third party solutions.
That is not being alarmist — it’s a version of Chinese whispers. Does the recommendation module know what when looking the customer rejected or approved? Does the ad system know the consequence of searching and browsing?
According to a recent BBC article,almost half of us won’t wait more than three seconds for a page to load and ” a half second difference in page load times can make a 10% gap in sales for an online retailer.”
With numbers like that, if they are able for their store, retailers have to ask themselves to go backwards and forward to those different modules and plugins.
United we stand, divided we fall
1 method of addressing these communication challenges would be to utilize the APIs (Application Programming Interface) that many of these providers provide. This lets different providers communicate with each other. However, they don’t remove time lags and idiosyncrasies of each algorithm also, of course, will require more development time.
The perfect aims to deliver these services together, to unify them by addressing the ‘product vulnerability’ components of a website and doing the work correctly.
This has numerous advantages:
- Highly applicable experience for the customer so increased conversion rate, devotion, AOV.
- Faster page loads therefore higher conversion speed
- Lower development costs than integrating multiple vendor applications
- better coverage due to unified data
- Fewer contracts to handle.
Retail, and Retail, is aggressive. Attracting traffic to a website costs money and effort, therefore it is critical that this money isn’t thrown off by providing a slow, insignificant experience.
IT departments across businesses are seeking ways by unifying the way it’s collected, stored, interpreted and used to unlock the power of the data. Love them.
