Press

Note: Our team is joining up next week with experts from Postscript, KNO, Heatmap and more to talk about what experiences are required to meet elevated consumer expectations. It’s a great opportunity to press your vendors (read on and you’ll see what I mean).

The old Shopify mission of “arming the rebels” is probably a little tired now. And maybe, actually, it’s complete.

Shopify used to say this all the time as a way to position itself—through the brands that used them—against Amazon (or big retail more generally). Part of that was to give them the types of tools (and the quality of tools) that Amazon had built for itself; the types of tools that create customer experiences that, so long as the price is fair and the product is good, encourages a customer to come back.

Those tools pretty much exist!

In fact, one of our latest reports—Fractures in the Funnel—includes data that shows customers now have increasingly positive sentiment toward buying directly from brands and increasingly negative sentiment toward buying from marketplaces (like Amazon).

That’s a big win. But it isn’t a complete win.

As sentiment shifts, so, too, do expectations. That means continuing to deliver great customer experiences is now required to keep sentiment high. And while the tools are there, they’re not always being used—or not always being used in the way that can elevate customer experiences even more.

How do you solve that?

I’ve talked a lot before about how much room we’ve had at KNO to improve the way we speak about our product, promote features and explain their value in hopes of getting customers to use more of it. That responsibility is on us as a SaaS vendor more than it’s on a brand.

But it’s also an opportunity for brands to press their SaaS vendors.

One of the biggest hacks that exists for brands is to ask their SaaS vendors what they’re seeing from their other customers and what they’re seeing in their data. They often have far, far larger datasets than brands (or the accumulated datasets that a brand can gather from peer networks), and that volume of data can help keep brands ahead of consumer expectations.

It’s a cool way to partner, and I’d encourage you to think about it. And, if you want to press us, please do!