Humii launches, first online platform to bring mystery shopping into the 21st century
Leading retailers already saving hundreds of thousands of dollars thanks to humii’s move from vague Net Promoter Score (NPS) to in-depth analysis and meaning
A conversation over the side fence between neighbours living on the beautiful South Coast of NSW – one a senior Deloitte software engineer, the other a seasoned tech entrepreneur - has led to the creation of humii, Australia’s first online platform that combines cutting-edge technology with the power of real human analysis across the entire online shopping experience so retail leaders have the insights they need to make the big decisions.
With over 5.5million Aussie households shopping online in January1 and retail businesses continuing to grow their digital footprint at a rapid rate, humii gives retail leaders in Australia a way to consistently measure their own performance plus track against competitors. To do this, humii collates data from real people and analyses its meaning, resulting in tangible revenue increases for its clients.
Touted as a challenger to the widely used market research metric Net Promoter Score (NPS), tech entrepreneur and humii Co-founder Lee Ritson says humii is bringing mystery shopping into the 21st century.
“Having the information of ‘why’ customers are doing what they are doing, and not just the ‘what’ they are doing, is the humii difference. Through humii’s analysis, one retailer was able to identify the misspelling of their core product ranges when cataloguing product metadata on the website.
This error led to products not being displayed properly in search results, costing the retailer an estimated $200,000 in revenue for the quarter. We have seen a shift in the conversion rate at the point of purchase of just 1% for a humii client equate to hundreds of thousands of dollars of extra income.”
“We also know that 1 in 3 consumers say they have rejected a purchase because of unsustainable packaging; in today’s environmentally conscious world this matters and that’s why we evaluate the packaging materials used by retailers too,” Lee concludes.
humii is centred around the humii score, which is calculated by aggregating results from the analysis of real people across the full end-to-end online shopping experience which humii calls it’s ‘8 dimensions of Online Retail’ - covering Search & Discovery, Pre-Purchase Support, Checkout & Payment, Dispatch & Delivery, Product Evaluation, Returns & Refunds, Post-Purchase Support, and Loyalty & Retention.
Fashion-forward jewellery brand, Lovisa has already experienced the humii effect and are benefitting from a greater depth of understanding about their customer experience journey as one of humii’s first clients.
Lovisa Chief Executive Officer of Americas and Global Digital Trade, Edward Park comments that, as humii is more than just numbers and charts, its insights allow Lovisa to view the customer journey in granular and personal detail, from initial search to engagement and retention.
"Given Lovisa's focus in evolving to a consumer-digital first organisation that provides seamless experiences, enhancing emotional connections and building relationships to maximise customer lifetime value across every aspect of the customer journey, humii has provided direct customer perspectives.
“Some areas of our digital business perform exceptionally well, while others require attention – now we can pinpoint the latter more clearly, with humii’s insights our brand is more equipped to exceed our customers’ expectations by shifting from a transactional approach to a frictionless, authentic and a more personal shopping experience in delivering the Lovisa difference."
humii Co-founder Andy Evans, a former Director of Platform Engineering at Deloitte, explains there are many points along the journey where retailers can either delight or disappoint a customer – and what’s good one day might not be the next.
“A recent study revealed a staggering 49 per cent of people have abandoned their shopping cart because the extra costs at checkout were too high.2 humii’s real life, real-time data shows us that retail businesses are in fact losing tens of thousands of dollars in revenue from online sales because of extra charges at the cart.”
“We were also astonished by how many opportunities Aussie retailers were missing out on to delight their customers, particularly post-purchase. There’s so much focus on getting customers through the checkout but what next? For example, many retailers outsource to sub-par logistics providers, or allow their support response times to drift out, or simply stick with the same old clunky returns process they’ve always had, without any concern for the impact this is having on customer loyalty. Meanwhile new competitors are walking in every day and eating their lunch!”
For more information about humii and how it works please visit www.humii.co.
References:
1. Australia Post February 2022 insight report: https://auspost.com.au/content/dam/auspost_corp/media/documents/ecommerce-industry-report-2022.pdf
2. Baymard Institute: https://baymard.com/lists/cart-abandonment-rate
