Welcome to our Meet the Partner segment. We have recently been catching up with Zuko, one of our strategic partners, to explore more about what they do, the services they offer to clients, and how Webtrends Optimize provide additional features and resources to support this.
In the below article, we interview Alun Lucas, Managing Director at Zuko.
Can you tell us a bit about what Zuko do/ what your goals are as a business?
Zuko are a form analytics software provider that helps organisations identify where and why their potential customers are abandoning their online forms & checkouts. Our goal is to make the web less frustrating, one form at a time.
What are the core services you offer and what impact do they have?
Our core service is a software platform that tracks user behaviour on forms and highlights where and why there is a UX issue that is costing the organisation money. Kind of like Google Analytics but designed specifically for forms.
We also offer complementary consulting services for those organisations that want to bring in specialist form optimisers to improve the conversion rate of their forms or checkouts.
What success stories/ results can you share with us that you are particularly proud of?
Due to confidentiality reasons we can’t share the name of this client but we did do a bit of work for a major financial services brand that was struggling to get people to complete their form.
By installing Zuko and analysing the data over a period of two months, the business were able to identify where and when users were abandoning their form and create potential solutions to fix these issues. Specifically, they made the following changes:
- Amended an error message that was causing user confusion and dropout
- Altered their validation to recognise and fix common misspellings of email addresses (e.g. converting “gnail.com” to “gmail.com”)
- Optimised the way the form rendered on mobile - reducing the size of elements that had been obscuring parts of the form
- Ensured that the touch keyboard defaults for mobile users were correct - making sure the right format was shown at the right time
- Changed the size of tick boxes that were delivering a clumsy user experience for both mobile and desktop users
The changes to the form had an immediate impact. They delivered:
- An 11% drop in completion time
- A reduction in user corrections of 37%
- A fall in form abandonment fell from 61% to 19%
- A doubling of the overall conversion rate from 39% to 81%
What advice would you give someone who wants to start testing, but doesn’t know where to start?
Start with your research - your analytics combined with qualitative research (feedback, user testing, etc). This should give you the biggest issues on your website / form that you need to improve (the “low hanging fruit” to use a cliche). From there it should be reasonably easy to infer the cause of the issues and to create hypotheses for your testing programme.
How does the partnership with Webtrends Optimize add value to what you can offer clients?
Zuko and Webtrends Optimize are naturally complementary. We know that test hypotheses based on user research are more likely to “win” than those based on other methods. Zuko is a user research tool that can quickly identify issues on forms and checkouts and help create those hypotheses that you can then feed into tests powered by Webtrends Optimize.
Once the test is underway, you can also view your Webtrends test variants in Zuko so you can see exactly what the effect on user behaviour your changes have.
If you had to pick one aspect of working with Webtrends Optimize as a key differentiator, what would it be?
The personal touch. Both Webtrends Optimize and Zuko pride themselves on being there for the customer and not acting like one of the big, faceless SaaS companies that won’t speak to you unless you’re spending a million a year.
This makes them a great team to deal with and we know we can work together to add value to the end users of both tools.
Who would be your favourite client to work with?
Financial services forms are our bread and butter (they are long, complicated and annoying) so anyone in that sector is always fun. We also have a decent amount of customers in the gaming, education, travel and eCommerce space.
What do you hope the next 5-10 years looks like for Zuko?
AI is the buzzword at the moment and we expect that it will continue to change the experimentation landscape. For Zuko this means using the technology to deliver insights even quicker and to integrate directly into testing tools so new tests (based on what the data revealed) can be delivered at the touch of a button.
And one for fun: If Zuko had a theme song, what would it be?
At the risk of seeming cheesy: Firestarter by the Prodigy.
Why? Zuko ignites form optimisation by identifying problem areas and sparking solutions
