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Andy Evans: We cover everything along that whole journey. There's about 150 metrics that we capture from start to finish. If there's brands out there that are doing 24. 7 support and are responding with real people and giving strong answers, then that's the benchmark you're being measured against. There's a thousand things that you could be working on in a business. What actually sticks out to customers? What's causing them the most pain?
[Voiceover]: Welcome to Add to Cart, Australia's leading e commerce podcast that express delivers all you need to know in the fast moving world of online retail. Every week, Nathan Bush from E Suite and an E commerce industry expert will share the news, research and insights that you need to know to keep you at the top of your game and of course keep your customers Adding to Cart.
Nathan Bush: Hello and welcome to Add to Cart. My name is Nathan Bush, host of Add to Cart and director at E commerce talent agency E Suite. Now, if you've ever worked in retail, you will definitely know that feeling of dread that comes over you when your boss says the mystery shopper is due to visit that week. I think I still have flashbacks right now for my time at Big W. Well, things have come on a little since those days and my guest today has developed a mystery shop service specifically for E commerce. Andy Evans is the co founder of Humi. That's H u M II Humi, who combine cutting edge technology with real human analysis to evaluate a retailer's customer experience and provide valuable insights. With around 200 retailers on board already, including Rebel, Sport, Lovisa and the iconic Humi. Take the Mystery out of nailing an amazing customer experience using over 150 metrics. In this chat, Andy shares the challenges of wrangling their team of mystery shoppers. How they advise their clients on where to take action first and why Andy thinks NPS is dead. Very controversial. Why NPS is dead. Long live the Humi score. So thanks to our partners Shopify plus and Paclio, here's our conversation with Andy Evans, founder of Humi.
Nathan Bush: Andy, welcome to add to cart.
Andy Evans: Cheers Nathan. Thanks for having me, mate.
Nathan Bush: Pleasure. We saw each other at online retail which explains why my voice is like this right now. How did you go at online retailer?
Andy Evans: Yeah, you know, awesome. For us I think obviously a big couple of days, it's, you know, getting together and seeing everyone in person. For us, meeting a lot of people for the first time was great but it obviously means a lot of talking. I, I think I was commenting to someone just the other day. I've said the word mystery shop more times than anyone should ever say in their entire life. So yeah, similar to your voice was a bit croaky for a while, but feeling good. It was a great event. Got a ton out of it. A lot of good connections.
Nathan Bush: It was a really good energy, wasn't it?
Andy Evans: It was, yeah. I think everyone just getting around each other after a long time. I can't remember the last time I'd been to a sort of in person event like that. It's like we've just sort of crawled out of a cave a little bit. People, you know, we're almost going back into that COVID wave again and people getting a bit cautious. So who knows what happens over the next couple of months. We might have struck a little, you know, run a little gauntlet between Covid waves there to get that event on. So no, it was great fun and
Nathan Bush: good to see you there. So we've, we've given a nice little touch there on mystery Shop.
Nathan Bush: But can you explain to us you
Nathan Bush: are here as the co founder of Humi, what the hell is Humi?
Andy Evans: Essentially what Humi is a new way for retail businesses, retail leaders, particularly in E commerce, to measure the health of their customer experience. So mystery shopping, look, the whole idea of this business and the concept spawned from that whole traditional mystery shopping where people would know about that. Someone goes into a store, they poke their head in, they walk around, they check the lighting, they look at the stock. Was there a funny smell or the staff nice to them? They'll answer a few questions and then they'll submit that off to a head office. Of the retail business or whatever. And if they've done a good job, they'll get a congratulations. If they haven't done a good job, one of the bosses will walk down and get grumpy at someone because they haven't done their job properly. So in the last couple of years, E commerce, as everyone knows, has just gone crazy. I don't want to make references to the pandemic. Everyone knows what's gone on that's driven that. But a lot of businesses that were traditional bricks and mortar may not have had to care so much about their e commerce channel. It was could have been a little poor cousin that sat off to the side. It was 10% of your business. You didn't have to worry about it too much. You know, flash forward a couple of years, it's now 25% of your business. If you're sitting on a board or you're an exec in a business, you have to care about your e commerce channel. So a lot of what happens in e commerce is really complex. You know, we're talking about websites and user experience and for people who are from that background, that stuff can be quite daunting. Really hard to understand. I'm from a tech background, it's fine for me. But I appreciate that people who don't come from that background can struggle. You're sitting in these board meetings, you're getting these complex reports, bounce rates, time on site, all that kind of stuff can be daunting and hard to explain. So what we really wanted to do with this business was simplify things right down and essentially take the simple model of an in store mystery shop and apply it to e commerce businesses. So hence that's where humies come from. And we are quite literally doing exactly that. You know, we have teams of people out there who are purchasing things online, getting them shipped out to their house, and then we're reviewing and scoring that entire process end to end. And the net result of that is we're able to provide retail businesses with reports that can give them very clear and direct actionable data on what it is they're doing well, what they're not doing so well, what customers are actually saying about the experience, and from a completely unbiased perspective as well. So there's no value add for us in whether you're doing well in certain areas or not so well. We just give it to you very straight and clear. And it's stuff that a retail business leader could look at very simply and go, okay, I need to go and have a Chat to Jimmy in the warehouse and ask him why it's taking us five days to dispatch our products, whereas our competitors are taking two days. So it's designed to be very simple. It is a simple model and that's humi in a nutshell.
Nathan Bush: So you've mentioned that it's taking an old model, which is the old Mystery Shop model, and you're doing it very simply. Why doesn't it exist today before you?
Andy Evans: Yeah, it's a good question, I think, a little bit to the point of how much of your business is being done through online. So perhaps there's an element of a point in time. It's much more important, it's much more of a focus now, E commerce is, than it has been previously. So there's the point in time angle, perhaps partially pandemic driven. Also, there's some logistical challenges around wrangling. How are you going to go about doing this? How are you going to mystery shop online? How's that process going to work? It's not as simple as just walking into a store and filling in a form and walking away. So for the past 12 months, we've been proofing out this model and this process of how we're going to. How do you build a. You know, we're designed and set up to operate at scale. So we've got people who are mystery shopping for us up and down the east coast at the moment, and we're growing that team out. But, you know, how do you wrangle them and how do you navigate a process where they can shop online, pay for things, get it shipped out, answer questions, keep track of what they're spending and, you know, making sure someone doesn't run off with a card and buy something they shouldn't. There's a whole lot of logistical challenges that we've had to navigate. You laugh at that, but, you know, we've had a few fun experiences along the way.
Nathan Bush: Come on, share one, share one.
Andy Evans: Yeah. That team, we've tried a lot of different people, different demographics. We're trying to make it as reflective of the Australian market as we possibly can. And it's like anything, you try a few things here, you go down a few different avenues. It doesn't work. So, you know, I think like any business, you get a few bad eggs along the way. People try to get away with things that they. They probably shouldn't. But, you know, we've got it pretty well refined now. That team of analysts, we've got almost 50 in that team now and looking to continue growing that and, you know, the more people we have shopping for us online, the. The greatest sort of diversity we can give to customers.
Nathan Bush: So, so talk us through the process from a retailer's perspective, from how they brief you through to what kind of data or detail they'd expect to get back and how regularly.
Andy Evans: Well, our standard service is designed to work like a subscription. So it's an accountability thing. You know, you can think about it like a. And always on external, unbiased audit of your business. So a lot of customers that we're working with, we're shopping a lot of the market at the moment as well, and people wouldn't even know that we're shopping them because we work anonymously. And that's to kind of build up our data set and evolve and to be able to give proper, solid benchmarking to our customers. But how it works is we can literally kick off shopping as soon as we've got an agreement to do so from a customer. At the moment, we'll shop continuously. Our standard services will do three shops a week, and then we'll provide a report at the end of each fortnight, which has essentially the last fortnight's worth of data in it. So it's kind of enough reports, enough information that you can look at and digest it easily without spending a week trying to understand what's in there. You can look at it and read it in sort of five or 10 minutes. That's what it's designed to do. You can identify where the hotspots are and then actually go and action it. You've got a couple of weeks to turn some things around before you get your next set of data coming through. So we've launched only in January and we've had customers working with us since March. And, you know, we're noticing a lot of stuff is coming through as trends. You know, it's very clear because we rotate our shoppers and we guarantee you won't get the same shopper within. Within a monthly period. So you're getting different perspectives and it's, it's just interesting to see the, the trends that come through. You know, a lot of people saying the same thing about a business over and over again. A lot of people tripping over at the same, the same points in a process. So really interesting insights that we're getting along the way.
Nathan Bush: If you're listening to this at your desk, take a moment to assess. Am I really comfortable? This was the problem that the team over at Desky was solving with the launch of their ergonomic Standing desks and office equipment. But here's the twist. It was actually Desky that weren't comfortable with launching their business on Anything else but Shopify plus, that is with the huge work from home spike in 2020, Desky gave themselves six months to launch with Shopify plus and they did it in three. They achieved an increase of revenue up to 1000% and an increased conversion rate of 187%. No word on whether they did all of this standing up the whole time. Very impressive. If that's the case, to read more of Desky's story and see other case studies, visit the customer section on shopify.com au/
Nathan Bush: can you name drop any of the retailers that you're mystery shopping at the moment?
Andy Evans: We're doing about 200. Like in total businesses that we're shopping, it's about 200. So I mean, customers we're working with, we've got a few pretty big brands that we're working with as customers of ours at the moment. I'll name drop a couple. I hope they're okay with it. But look, Rebel Sport, the one that we've been working with for a little while now, we've just started working recently with the guys at Oryton and Lovisa, one of our first customers on the platform back in March. Obviously they're doing super high volumes Lovisa and doing a lot of great stuff. So really helpful for us kicking off early. They've had a lot of great feedback on the product and we've been able to really give them some great perspectives from customers. It's really hard to get elsewhere.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, that's great. And you're not dealing with kind of mom and pop shops there, you're dealing with sophisticated retailers. So even from a benchmarking perspective, that must be great in some of that data that, that you're gathering to help new retailers coming on board or to help people go, yeah, where are you sitting? Are you okay? Or you're off the mark.
Andy Evans: Yeah, exactly, exactly. So, and that's, I suppose part of the model is, you know, our shoppers, we're not just kind of confining them to any one demographic. So you don't just shop fashion. I mean, our focus has been fashion initially. We've started doing a lot of others over the past couple of months and broadening out into other markets like outdoor and a lot of footwear as well. But, but they're shopping everything, you know, it's not just confined to one segment. So then they'll shop, you know, Brand new entrance to the market. They'll shop some smaller businesses, they'll shop a lot of the bigger ones as well. They'll shop ones that have been around for a long time that might have a, you know, maybe they've got some aging tech or some clunkier processes. It's, you know, they're being sort of agitated by new entrants to the market or disrupted along the way by new players. So they see the full spectrum. So if you're coming on as a new, a new business, you know, it's interesting for us, if we've seen some new business come into the market, we start shopping them straight away so we can, we can have a look at them and we can kind of turn up and say to them, hey, here's what we've picked up about your, your process. But yeah, it's a really interesting way to get a kind of a broad perspective of how you measure up against other businesses.
Nathan Bush: And when you're talking about shopping, are you going from all the way back to discovery, say Google search or however customers mainly getting through to the site, all the way through to checkout, potentially even refunding?
Andy Evans: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So and one of the big things about our process and you know, coming into the e commerce space there is a lot of focus on a lot of platforms that do a lot of focus on the, on the pre purchase experience. So you know, things that are on your site, you know, analytics on site, you know, a lot of great plugins and things you can do around a customer journey up until the checkout. But we found there was a huge lack of focus on what happens after the money goes over from PayPal into the bank account. So we do everything from right up front from the Google search. So it's literally the first thing we do. We'll look for a retailer, go on site, interact with the website. We'll interact with support channels, we'll play with the search bar, the navigation on site. We'll then check out, look at the process of registering on site, loyalty programs, pay for the item. It'll then be in the period of waiting for the product to get shipped out. You know, tracking notifications that happen along the way, dispatch notifications from retailers, then the product arrives. We'll look at the product itself, a bit of evaluation. There was a damage when it arrived. Was it wrapped in a thousand layers of sticky tape that you had to go and get a knife and cut through to get into the package? We then will go through for the majority of processes. We'll Go through the whole returns and refunds process as well, which is such an important and often overlook part of the experience at the moment. You know, interact with that and see what that, what's that like? And then once the parcels ship back to the retailer, we'll then have a look at what the post purchase support experience looks like at the end as well. So we cover everything along that whole journey. There's about 150 metrics that we capture from start to finish. And when we provide that data back, we don't just kind of give it to businesses as a big sort of dump. You know, here's your data, go off and do what you will with it. It's broken down into nice little segments which we call our eight dimensions of online retail. So it's very clear for a retailer to look and say, okay, look, my shipping component is really good. We're getting products out fast. Customers are being, you know, their expectations are managed through our messaging. But hang on a second, our returns and refunds process is terrible. You know, we can't, it's taking forever to get the money back to the customer or we're asking them to print off forms and fill in all these labels and whatever it could be. So it's a good way to say, okay, here's where we need to focus our attention.
Nathan Bush: It's so important because I've seen my fair share of e commerce audits focus on the website and to me that's just a digital audit, that's just a website audit. But what you really need to do is treat it as a retail transaction, which it sounds like you're doing now at the end of that, I understand retailers get a Humi score. How do you calculate the Humi score and do you benchmark that or compare that Humi score to competitors for context?
Andy Evans: So the Humi score just mentioned, then we capture about 150 metrics along that journey. So essentially the Humi score will give a business a measure of how healthy their e commerce customer experience is. And what we've done is we've taken all of those metrics and we've used a swag of industry data, some of our own internal research to go through and weight those different things along the journey. So which parts of the journey have the biggest impact on customer experience? So for example, we know that high shipping costs has a huge impact on why people might jump out and bounce out of the shopping cart and go somewhere else. So that gets a really strong weighting compared to some other things on the website. Might not get such a high rating in that. So what we've done is we've weighted all those metrics and then we essentially aggregate all the data. So you've got all these people out there that are shopping your site continuously. All that data is flowing into to us. We essentially use an algorithm that we've built that, that feeds in all of the data plus the weighting to roll it up and give you a nice simple score out of 100 so you get a Humi score out of 100 that you can then use. We benchmark you against everyone that we're currently shopping on our service. So you can see where you sit there. We also give you unique segmentation so depending on when you sit. So we've broken those down into pretty fine grained little buckets now. So it could be trend fashion or footwear, could be outdoor. And then we also give brands the opportunity to pick from a select bucket of competitors that they would like to look at as well. So if we're not shopping them, we'll shop them and then you can then say, okay, here's where I sit in comparison to the five brands that I see as my biggest competitors. And that's something that's come to us from feedback from customers, something they've really wanted. And that type of thing is adding a huge amount of value. Because at the moment businesses don't get visibility on where they sit. People will sometimes say, oh, we mystery shop our own site. And it's like, okay, that's useful, but how close are you to your own website? You know, you live and breathe this thing so you're going to navigate it in your own way. Whereas customers who are fresh and don't shop it every day will come out at a completely different lens.
Nathan Bush: So yeah, it's not the same. When you mystery shop your own site. I always say you've kind of got, when you're going into an E commerce business, you've got two weeks to get honest feedback and fresh eyes on a site and the improvements before you just become desensitized to it because you're in there every day.
Andy Evans: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So just on the score I was just going to say, so we, we give them an overall score but then we also break it down into those eight dimensions I mentioned earlier. So you not only get benchmarking at the, at the overall level, but you get benchmarking at the individual level. So you can say, for example, okay, I'm as an example I used before, I'm doing really well in my shipping but not doing so well in my returns and refunds. So.
Nathan Bush: And you mentioned that you can constantly see trends in what you're finding the Australian e commerce market at the mom. Where would you say of those eight dimensions most of the improvement needs to go right now?
Andy Evans: There's some obvious ones. I mean we started shopping online in September last year. So we shopped through that really hard period across December, January and where things were really whack. I know things are still not great at the moment, but shipping warehouses were all sort of backed up and I think it was around the time there was a. A big ship got stuck in a canal somewhere far away.
Nathan Bush: So there was trouble all over the
Andy Evans: planet and the trends were just clear. Everybody's, everybody's delivery times were just thrown right out. So that was a really interesting one to watch. We've seen it come steadily down. We've got data that shows the decline of that and it's kind of plateaued back out again now, which is really interesting. Look, some of the really obvious areas I mentioned before returns and refunds is one that's super polarizing, one that's kind of light and day between what's good and what's bad. And this just kind of speaks to the whole how, I suppose progressive and how much innovation is happening in e commerce at the moment, how hard it is for businesses to keep up. Because we see a couple of years ago some businesses will get refunds back to a customer in a couple of days. Some businesses will refund the money before you even send it back. And then you've got sure, everyone would have seen the guys from refunded that enter the market and suddenly start offering refunds instantaneously. So the bar, that benchmark that was there previously of a couple of days, which was pretty good for customers, I used to think that's great. I get my refund back in a couple of days. Suddenly that benchmark just gone up. So it just exposes everybody else who wasn't already at that benchmark is now considered dinosaurs in that space. Some businesses will refund at the end of the month with a monthly batch banking fee. That happens at the end of the month and that's just not, not meeting expectations anymore. So returns and refunds is a really big one on site support's another big one that we see is really polarizing between what's, what's good and bad. So it's kind of almost a ticket to play to have live chat on site. But you'd be surprised, you wouldn't be surprised A lot of people might be surprised that some businesses don't even have a live chat, or if they have it operates at funny hours or they try to get by just on bots. And again, the bar, there's so much competition in the live chat space now. You know, customer expectations are that they'll have a usable live chat that's going to give them responses, but also give them responses when they want to shop. And, you know, people like to shop outside business hours. They like, sometimes do it in the morning, sometimes they do it at night. So if there's brands out there that are doing 24. 7 support and are responding with real people and giving strong answers, then that's the benchmark you're being measured against.
Nathan Bush: I could imagine that there's this temptation for some of your clients to want to hit a tick on all 150 metrics, but at the same time, my gut instinct would be that if you hit all 150, it's probably a good way to go out of business pretty quick because you're investing in all areas of the E commerce experience. How do you weigh that up to go? Look, we can't be at the excellent level at absolutely everything. Otherwise we'll run a really inefficient operation. How do you know where to put your efforts and where to hold back and maybe not meet those benchmarks in some areas?
Andy Evans: There's a couple of ways that I'll answer that. I think the first is obviously the way we look at the score initially is to come at it from which parts of the process have the biggest impact on customer experience. So look, the whole thing is around coming at this from the perspective of customer lifetime value, not just conversions. You know, how do you hang on to your customers and make them loyal and sticky is an important thing. But also what's important will differ for each business as well. So the scoring and the approach stays the same. But some businesses might say, hey, you know what, I don't care so much about our shipping being slow. If you're a sustainability business, you know, slow shipping is a big thing. A lot of their customers might say, I'm happy to wait for products to come to us. So it might be something that, you know, even when we're giving the data that says, you know, you're taking a while to get your products there, they may not care about that. So what's important will definitely differ depending on the business and what they care about. Absolutely.
Nathan Bush: And I think that's really important to have in mind is like, you can have an audit.
Andy Evans: It doesn't mean you've got to hit
Nathan Bush: everything, but you've got to know what's
Andy Evans: important to you exactly. And it's about staying on top of it as well. You're never going to get to perfection because by the time you've moved the needle on something, the benchmark will have changed on something else. It's impossible for everyone to be perfect at everything.
Nathan Bush: I can imagine that this set of data that you bring, and I love how you mentioned boards and decision making groups would be pretty fresh and pretty new for a lot of those people because they're not in the trenches on E commerce or even shopping E commerce every day. Have you had any experiences of retailers who have had, who have made drastic changes to their business based on what you've presented to those decision groups? Yeah.
Andy Evans: So as I said, we started working with, you know, in March. There's been a lot of, a lot of what we find is a mix of low hanging fruit, things that you can change kind of fairly quickly and turn around. Other stuff is very systemic. It can take. If you've got a slow dispatch process, you could have some real challenges going on. You could have a shared warehouse, maybe you've got an outsourced warehouse or it just takes a long time for things to happen. And going and changing a warehouse provider is not an overnight fix. Look, we've got low hanging fruit, I call it low hanging fruit, quick fix type stuff. You know, there's a ton of good examples of that that we found. I'll give you a couple. So we had one of our customers, a US brand, launch an Australian website. You know, launch the website, off you go, push out all the marketing. And then we, we started shopping, shopping them on launch and noticed that about 50% of our shoppers were landing on their US website, getting all the way to checkout with the products and then going to pay and getting a pop up saying, you know, we don't ship to, to Australia. So we were able to give them that information. Obviously they could go back to HQ and make the changes to fix that. But you can imagine the number of people that would have landed there outside of what we're doing. A few other ones, as I mentioned earlier, we interact with the search on site search and we go pretty deep into how that works because we know about the challenges business face around cataloging products. And if someone misspells something or how do you give them personalized search results? It's a whole crazy world there. But we had one example, one of our Customers selling Levi jeans. Levi's, Levi apostrophe S. Or is it Levis? You know, depending on how you type it. But what we found that if you just went in there and typed it out, apostrophe, it wasn't showing up in search results. And. And that had been sitting there on the site for a few months, they reckon over three months and cost them like upwards of, you know, in the hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of business, because Levi's is one of their big sellers. So there's a lot of stuff that comes up that is, you'd think it's very simple and trivial, but until you have someone actually looking at it, and that's something that a customer is probably not going to tell you about, I didn't find Levi jeans. They're probably just like, these guys don't sell Levi jeans. Yeah, there's a thousand stores. You can go online and buy Levi jeans.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, that's a really cool example. And I can imagine that this is beneficial not only as a regular checkpoint to mark performance over time. Do you also get people using you as part of their testing plans when they're launching new websites and new experiences?
Andy Evans: Yeah. So that's again, something that's come out of this that we probably didn't foresee being as much of a thing. But shopping and kind of a b. Testing big changes is something that's coming up a lot. So if you're going through a re platform, one of the things I always think is really important is you're in a business and you think you know what's important and what's the priority for you. But a better way to go about it is rather than go in your own gut feel or your internal team and actually ask others what they think about your business and what's most important to customers. So, you know, using this service as a way to not only test the experience before a rollout and then see what it's like after. And, you know, did you get an uptick here? Did you do something that was positive, but also as a way to validate and prioritize what you're doing as well, has been a really useful thing. So there's a thousand things that you could be working on in a business. What actually sticks out to customers, what's causing them the most pain? And why not? Why not put that at the front of the queue in terms of your backlog of things that you want to work on? So that's been really useful. And again, something that we didn't foresee would be as big. But you know, every business is going through some sort of replatforming or some sort of E commerce transformation and it's just a really useful way for people to have a starting point. You know, you got this data now, okay, here's where we're going to start the focus. Here's where we are, here's where we need to go forward and here's where we're going to spend our money. Essentially,
Nathan Bush: you've refreshed your website. The new range is about to drop. You've never had more customer service options. Hey, but take a look over there. That boring pile of packaging boxes.
Andy Evans: Ugly.
Nathan Bush: Time to give that some love. Luckily, Paclio is here to bring some joy to your customers delivery and unboxing experience. It's been ignored for way too long. With vibrant colors, cool designs and eco friendly credentials, there are no more excuses for boring boxes. Even better, Paclio is Australian owned and operated with same day dispatch and 14 day returns. There's nothing boring about that. Check out the Paclio range of E commerce packaging options@paclio.com that's Paclio P A C K L E O paclio.com.
Nathan Bush: Is the Humi score usually a replacement for another score like an mps, or is it usually in addition to what retailers are already using?
Andy Evans: One of the big reasons for this business, you know, looking out is kind of coming into the retail space and looking what's out there on the market at the moment. Obviously nps. Everyone knows and has used NPS at some point in their lives to, to measure customer experience. We're really coming at it as essentially an alternative to the nps. I think if you talk to anyone in E commerce about NPS scores, anyone who's actually picked it up and looked at it or use it in anger, they'll tell you that straight to the point. It's a waste of time, to be honest. We know that NPS scores are generally responded to by emotional customers. So people are really happy or really, really sad. When the NPS scores calculated, they actually rip the middle of the score out to begin with anyway. So you don't get the the neutral feedback. But also NBS respondees are still your customer. You're still asking people who are shopping your store so they're naturally biased. They're shopping your store anyway. Wouldn't you rather get perspectives from people who aren't shopping your store and understand what they might want that might hook them into your store? It's a much better way to come at it. And also it's a single question. Everybody knows the process, probably. But on a scale of 1 to 10, would you recommend our product or our service to a friend or colleague? That question asked at different points in the journey, It's a single question. So what we see a lot is people will have this NPS score. It could be good, it could be bad. It's 50, it's 10. Maybe it's negative. But what do you do once you've got that? So I've got an NPS score of 25. Okay. What does that actually tell me? Doesn't tell you a lot. Where do you go after that? So because it's so high level, it's this number that kind of doesn't have a great deal of detail to it. It's hard to know what your next steps are with mps. So with a humi score, if you've got a really good score or a really bad score in a certain area, you know what to go and do next. I'm underperforming this particular area. Let's go focus on that. Let's go and fix it. So we're really sort of trying to offer a more viable, more useful alternative to the nps.
Nathan Bush: I reckon you need humi shirts that
Andy Evans: say don't use NPS in anger.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, exactly.
Andy Evans: Sing a song to it.
Nathan Bush: That's right. He's a bit of Oasis. I like it. Is there a challenge for you then from a scale perspective? Because NPS is great from a scale everyone can blast a survey to all customers can set up at regular intervals. Great. We talk to all customers, whether they respond and to your point, get a fair representation of all customers at all stages. But is there a challenge for you in that you've got a group of in person shoppers located up and down the east coast and now that you've done 2,000 shops, I can imagine that some of your shoppers are pretty sophisticated now and might not represent the average shopper who logs on and shops kind of, you know, three or four times a month. Is that a challenge for you?
Andy Evans: Yeah, it's a good question. And look, it's something that we talk about a lot internally around the how sophisticated do our shoppers get? And where we've landed is we want a real balance, you know, a real mix of, you know, the average shopper and I guess a professional shopper. So we've got some people in the team that have done 150 plus shops, you'd call them a professional shopper because they're buying sort of 10 items a week. Online, they've seen all these different businesses, so, and there's a lot of value in that because they can. Their perspectives and the comments and feedback that they're providing is really nuanced because they're going to be, you know, the bar for them is going to be higher than most people because they've seen the great experiences, they've seen the really bad experiences. So there's some challenges there. But we want that network of shoppers to be as reflective as the Australian market as well. So, you know, it's, it's a lot of people that are doing it as a, as a second job, a sort of viable job that you can do remotely, shop online anytime you like. We've got people that just say, we absolutely love this. We thought initially that we might have a bit more of a challenge finding analysts, essentially, shoppers do this job, but it's, we haven't advertised, you know, we've got almost 50, we've got a wait list of about another 50 at the moment. It's just people somehow find the job application on our, on our website and submit it, even though we haven't pushed it out anywhere. So I think it scratches an itch for a lot of people as well, shopping online and even though, even though it's not their own money that they're spending when they buy stuff. So it's been an interesting process.
Nathan Bush: If we've got E commerce managers out there wondering if they've been mystery shopped, is there a way to tell?
Andy Evans: No, absolutely not. Maybe six months ago. But we do a lot of, we go to a lot of lengths to make sure that we're not easily discoverable. So anonymity, making sure people can't game the system is really important to us and even if someone did cotton on to it being us, they wouldn't find us again.
Nathan Bush: Used to be my fear, working in retail when I was going through university and school, that threat, this could be the mystery shop. It used to be a real, real hang over your head moment.
Andy Evans: Yeah, absolutely, yeah. I. Look, I worked in a supermarket for, for a long time when I was in high school in uni and I remember the same thing. You know, they tell you the mystery shop is coming sometime this week. So everyone would just panic for a week. You know, it'd be a week of just living in fear, thinking you're going to lose your job.
Nathan Bush: But now you could be anywhere, shopping at any time. Oh, it's worse now, it's worse now. All right, I got the hardest question left for you. For last, what retailers do you think are delivering the best online customer experience today?
Andy Evans: That's a really good question. We actually keep track of this internally and obviously share this with the team internally. So the why is because we're shopping them using our process and they have FUMI scores. So that's how I think they're giving the best customer experience look. Sitting on top of our list at the moment is homebody, Sephora and the Iconic.
Nathan Bush: Okay.
Andy Evans: Out of a good few hundred Aussie retail businesses that we're shopping that have stores here, that's the three that are sitting at the top. So, you know, obviously everyone knows the Iconic. A lot of their focus is getting stuff done really fast and that's a priority for people getting their goods really fast and getting returns done really fast. Their customer service is awesome. The segmentation is great. So, you know, they've kind of been the benchmark for a long time, so no surprises seeing them there, for sure.
Nathan Bush: Tell me about homebody.
Andy Evans: I don't know a lot about that women's fashion business. I think they just got a really sort of slick site and experience. Whatever they've done, they've just nailed it. It's interesting to see who shows up near the top of the list that you wouldn't expect. By the time we've had sort of 10, 15, 20 people go through the shopping experience for a brand and you get enough data there. It's funny who you see sort of popping up and I suppose that's the game at the moment. There's so many options and. And opportunities for businesses to go and do something unique and individual and disrupt what's there. You never know who's going to offer the best services. So, yeah, it's interesting to see them there as well. I was surprised as well. Yeah.
Nathan Bush: Oh, I love it. I love when you can come out and share that data. That's fantastic. I reckon there's a good white paper in that for you somewhere.
Andy Evans: Yeah, we've talked about. There's plenty more to come on that for sure.
Nathan Bush: That's brilliant, Andy. I love the model. I think it's really smart because there's
Andy Evans: a few things there.
Nathan Bush: It's that there are very few benchmarks in e commerce. True benchmarks. I think everyone's scrambling to know what good is. So if you can help people with that, that's fantastic. But also there's that struggle between information that's understood by the e commerce team and e commerce managers, which is often very specific and technical, and that which can be translated into a Board level and I think the way you described that was really nice to be able to take that low hanging fruit action but also make big strategic decisions. So I think that's really exciting.
Andy Evans: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Nathan Bush: What's next for yourself and Jamie?
Andy Evans: Yeah, look, we, as I said, we're still very early days for us, so we're actually going through a capital raise at the moment for us which is going to essentially help us build out a lot more features into the product and continue to push forward with a whole bunch of new features for our customers. Also help us with scaling. We've got plans to push out into the US early next year. So, yeah, really sort of fun and interesting times for us. A lot of focus on trying to grow that network of mystery shoppers and make sure we get a lot of diversity in there as well. But yeah, look, we're out there growing relationships with new partners all the time, so looking to talk to as many people in the business as possible and just kind of learn and get feedback and sort of iterate and improve. It's a really fun time. We're obviously a small startup at the moment, but it's, you know, all the feedback from the industry has been really strong and I think people genuinely get the need for this. And I posted something out on LinkedIn at the end of Online Retailer last week. You know, and I know I mentioned before around the fact I've said mystery shopper, you know, a thousand times in a couple of days, but when you say that to people, the natural reaction is, you know, why doesn't that exist? Are you sure that doesn't exist already? And so people sort of naturally understand that there's a need, which is a really exciting thing for us to get such positive feedback. So, you know, we, I think everyone in our team's brains are just bursting with ideas and things we'd like to do next. So, yeah, we're keen to talk to as many people as possible.
Nathan Bush: What an exciting time. Now who do you want to talk with especially? This is your chance for a plug. And how can they get in touch?
Andy Evans: Anyone, honestly in retail business at the moment that wants to move the needle forward on their experience? I mean, we, we're working with quite a few smaller brands as well. So I mean it's designed to be pretty accessible. We've got a couple of different options to work with businesses on different price points that work for them and models that, that work. We're also offering once off health checks if a subscription, something that, that you're not keen to Jump into so you can get a sort of a health check on how your business is going at a given point in time. So, yeah, at the moment, retail businesses that want to improve and essentially anyone who's customer obsessed and wants to know more and get that feedback and use it. If you want to get in touch with us, look, send us an email. Hello at Humi, ping me on LinkedIn. I'm happy with either way. Always up for a chat or a coffee or whatever it might be.
Nathan Bush: That's brilliant. And that's Humi. H U M I I H U
Andy Evans: M I I. Yeah, that's it.
Nathan Bush: Andy, thank you so much for sharing the story. I got a feeling we are only at the start of it. I can't wait to see where you go and can't wait to see that white paper when it's released.
Andy Evans: Yeah, thanks, Nathan. And look, honestly, thanks a lot for having us today. I really appreciate the chat. No, it's great. Cheers, Andy.
Nathan Bush: It's one of those offerings that once you hear about it, you wonder, why isn't anyone else doing this? But I think what Andy and the team are doing can add a huge amount of value with relatively little effort or investment on the part of a retailer and I think that sets them up pretty well for success. Here are the biggest takeaways that I took from my chat with Andy. Number one, you can't effectively mystery shop your own site. And I've stood by this for a long time. If you're an E commerce retailer, you will know your site like the back of your hand. Great in some ways, but when you're trying to put yourself in the shop, the shoes of a brand new customer looking to buy something, not so much. You've probably got about two weeks as a new team member before you start getting conditioned to what's on the site. Give the site to your finance team, your grandma or the Humi team. They will find things that you will never find because you're too close to it. Number two, shop the whole experience in a world where UX is studied down to the most minute pixel. I mean, pixels are all the same size, but you know what I mean. The end to end customer journey is often ignored because it's not always visible. Sending payments, getting deliveries to the door, looking at packaging, processing returns. These are all crucial parts of the customer journey that aren't tested enough, in my opinion, but are crucial for a great customer experience. Number three, prioritize your pain points. There are a thousand things that you could be working on to improve your e commerce business, but starting with the things that cause your customers the most grief makes the most sense and you've got to hear it from your customers. In my experience, working out what is high impact to your customers against what is the lowest effort or lowest cost is a great place to start.
Nathan Bush: Map it out
Nathan Bush: to get the highlights of today's episode, head on over to add to cart.com and sign up for our free newsletter each Tuesday. We will send Monday's episode summary links and discount codes for you to go next level on. And if you're looking to explore your next e commerce opportunity, come and Visit us at eSweet. We're a dedicated e commerce talent agency connecting the best e commerce talent with the fastest growing brands in Australia. Head on over to eSweet talent.com where you can download the free e Commerce Salary guide and sign up to our weekly e commerce job emails. Thanks for listening and until next time keep those customers adding to cartoon.
