Customer Experience Optimization Shouldn’t Be a Poker Game

Poker is a competitive game of skill, strategy and chance which has made and lost fortunes for people throughout the ages. In many ways, customer experience optimization is similar. A company hoping to delight customers and boost revenue, holds some of the cards in the form of user data, and may even have a great deal of skill when it comes to defining an optimization strategy. But there will always be unknowns, such as hidden customer interest, and other players in the game aiming to win that customer’s mindshare and money. And then there is also the luck of the draw, not knowing what cards you’re going to get dealt or if you made the right strategic decision.

The rules of poker are clear: No peeking! But in the realm of website optimization, the latest AI technology has in fact given us the ability to catch a glimpse of the other player’s cards and then to discard and redraw cards until your hand can win the pot.

Do A/B testing tools really improve the chance of winning?

In an effort to reduce risk, companies engage in detailed testing efforts before implementing optimization strategies. Traditional testing tools such as A/B testing and multivariate testing (MVT) are hampered by their reliance on the limited availability of time and traffic. Plus they’re inflexible—once the test has started, it can’t be changed. It has to run to completion in the hope that it will generate meaningful insight. If you made a bad bet you end up stuck with the hand you have, unable to do anything worthwhile with it and unable to win.

Now imagine a different scenario, one where you get to continue to change the cards in your hand, discarding ones that won’t win and keeping those that will. Because a deck has a limited number of cards in it, chances are greatly improved that you’re going to end up with a winning hand. This is the difference that AI-driven continuous optimization makes.

AI for a winning customer experience optimization

Today’s marketplace is too dynamic to expect to optimize the customer experience by only testing a few ideas. Aside from unique user preferences and customers seeking out relevant offers, competitors are also changing their tactics to get more attention and conversions. This means that customer experiences are a sum of dynamic variables that are constantly evolving. Optimization efforts therefore need to have the capability to evolve and keep pace too.

Evolv AI's Digital Growth Optimization solution is designed for ideation at AI-scale. This gives companies the ability to experiment with thousands of ideas and variations and get through the initialization stage faster. The benefit is that instead of having to wait until an experiment ends to see which ideas perform best, you already have an indication of the best performers within a few weeks. The experiment doesn’t stop there. More ideas are added to the top performers to further improve them, and those ideas not performing can be discarded. This enables a continuous optimization process which gets smarter over time and does so quickly and efficiently.

To return to the poker analogy, this means you can continue to draw cards to improve your hand and improve your chances of winning. It doesn’t take all the variables out of the equation to get the best result, it uses them to build a better optimization that can have a real impact on the customer experience and achieve targeted key performance indicators (KPIs). Evolv AI;s approach to optimization is different, harnessing AI technology to help companies achieve their growth targets. To find out more read: How to Think About Evolv AI.