Maintaining Client Relationships and Providing Evolving WooCommerce Services

Robbie (00:00):
Hello and welcome to another episode of Do the Woo. I’m Robbie Adair with OSTraining, and I am here today with my co-host Robert Jacobi. Robert, how are you doing today?

Robert (00:11):
I just had a great week at Cabo Press. I got to throw that out there because it was what could be worse than doing conferences in a pool for a week?

Robbie (00:19):
I know. I’m very jealous. All of you that were posting from Cabo Press, I was like, yes, thank you. I’m here working and you’re all in the pool listening to fabulous Talks. Great,

Robert (00:29):
Fabulous talk today, right?

Robbie (00:31):
Yes. We are going to have a fabulous talk today and we actually have a third co-host. We call ’em a co-host slash guest. We have Schubert Kuhn, and I dunno if I just said that correctly or not, who’s with WooCommerce? So Schubert, how are you doing today? I’m

Shubert (00:46):
Great. Thanks for inviting me on the show and it is Schubert Kuhn. Thank you.

Robbie (00:50):
Oh good. Yay. I did it right. So Schubert will help us talk to our guest and help us with questions with them, but he also might get a few questions himself. So we always like to keep ’em on their toes, that’s why I call him a co-host slash guest. And today we are joined with two people from Atomic Smash. We’ve got Matt Woodman, a k a Woody who is a UX UI designer, and we have Julia Eden who is over their client partner program. And so we’re going to speak with both of them. Matt, I’m going to start with you and I will call you Woody from here on out,

Matt (Woody) (01:21):
Please. Yeah,

Robbie (01:23):
So tell us a little bit about what you do as a UI ux designer there at Atomic Smash.

Matt (Woody) (01:27):
Yeah, of course. So I’ve been working with Atomic Smash for about two years now and my involvement in the projects that we’ve been working on really up until very recently has been when we’ve been working on brand new projects. We’ve been going from things like discovery phases and workshops, requirements gathering with clients through full UX and wire framing, empathy maps, user personas, then into UI design and also quality assessment as well, and just helping the rollout and getting it live. I’ve recently transitioned across to another team in the business working in our always evolving service, which is essentially it’s like a trademark service that we have at Atomic Smash and it’s essentially like a retainer model to evolve and improve websites over a period of time. And I’m working with Julia in that team as well.

Robbie (02:15):
Awesome. So Julia, so it sounds like you’re working on this project with Woody as well, but what else do you do? Give us a little background on yourself there.

Julia (02:23):
Yes, Julia, client partner. So it’s a combination of account management and project management. One of our USPS for our business is that we have client facing developers. So luckily my job is not too much technical translation to the clients. I can rely on them for that. Anything that gets a bit in depth, I can hand over straight to them. And in that way our developers and designers have a really good relationship with the clients. I come from a varied agency background as well and just really love working in Atomic Smash. It’s a bit of a gem agency for me, so really happy working there as well.

(02:55):
Julia, so it seems based. The least on the site that we’ve all had a chance to review that you focus on the customer journey and what does that look like from the Atomic Smash perspective, whether it’s standard WordPress or actually WooCommerce.

(03:11):
I suppose that reverts back to what Woody was saying about our always evolving. They do say that if you have the same website for and you haven’t touched it for over a year, then it’s old already. So we believe in if we have a project and building a website that we build A M V P and from there improve it based on data that we gather from our performance team. So we have analytics chaps, so do deep dive into stats and user testing and all of that feeds back into the journeys that we take to be able to improve the websites. And it’s really nice to be able to rely on hard data to be able to see if you do this, we should be able to improve conversions by this amount. And we find that sort of thing really helps the clients as well because they can take that back to board level and it actually translates into cold hard cash for them. So yeah, that’s always a winner.

Robert (03:59):
So you mentioned analytics and I know everyone listening is going to want to know what are those specific analytics that folks should be paying attention to?

Julia (04:07):
We use a combination of GA four and heat maps as well, and the designers and analytics people work together quite closely to be able to improve speed based on, for example, content. So we might do a speed versus content audit, which is my fun name for it, where they would use heat maps and to see what’s being used on the site most and on key landing pages to see which pieces of technical functions are perhaps way down the performance of the site. And then the designers would come up with better ways to be able to keep the functionality, to keep the same impressions on the user, but a different piece of functionality that might speed up the website. So that’s one way we would use that. And Woody’s just been working hand in hand recently with the analytics team as well, so he’s brushed up on his skills as well. So I bet he could answer some of those too.

Matt (Woody) (04:57):
I’ve got some points as well. Yeah, I think the way we frame ourselves as an agency, as we call ourselves a performance agency, so we’re looking at gathering as much qualitative and quantitative data as we can to make informed changes to a website and evaluate everything that we do. Obviously we are looking at conversions, but we’re also looking at, as Julia said, we’re using heat maps, we’re looking at bounce rates, we’re looking at session duration, looking at all the things that you would expect really from analytics to make sure that the decisions and the changes that we make are the best for the client and have a return on investment for them as well.

Robert (05:30):
Now I’m going to make a huge assumption that many of the clients are out of the EU or United Kingdom, and how does that kind of analytics testing, oh boy, what, he’s already laughing. How does that kind of analytics work with G D P R and all the privacy policies that exist?

Matt (Woody) (05:46):
Yeah, it was quite an assumption. I would say probably, I think the majority of our clients are probably UK based, so obviously we are, yeah, compliance is very important for all of the organizations and businesses that we work with. Really we can’t, with Google Analytics, we have to allow the user to consent to any kind of data that we’re gathering. So we’re aware that there’s always going to be gaps in what we do, but we have previously worked with other kind of analytics providers that are cookie less. I think Fathom is one that we’ve used before. I dunno if you guys have heard that. Yeah, it really depends on what decision. We give the client the best information that we can and then it’s their decision which service they want.

Robbie (06:30):
Did you find that Fathom didn’t give you as much information though? Is that why you also give the option of GA four as well?

Matt (Woody) (06:38):
I think there’s more familiarity with GA four and because Google is a well-known brand and a household name, I think most people expect that to be the service that they would be using for analytics. I’m not aware of any kind of reason why you couldn’t use another service and get just as good quality data out of it.

Robbie (06:57):
And so Schubert, you’re working with the WOO payment side of things.

Shubert (07:01):
Just a quick question about that. So when clients do come to you for a project, do they already have in their mind who they want to use in the solutions that they want to use? Or are they coming at it more, Hey, just build for me the best solution that meets these needs and it doesn’t really matter if it’s Woo Payments or if it’s Stripe or PayPal or whatever.

Matt (Woody) (07:25):
I would think that it’s fair to say that the best solution is always the best fit. I guess probably the deciding factor in that is going to be what kind of premium is taken from payments in terms of percentage fees and stuff like that. And perhaps you could tell us a bit more about Woo Payments because I don’t actually know how that compares to other providers.

Shubert (07:46):
So Woo, payments is the native payments solution for Woo. So it’s built and supported by Woo. It’s very tightly integrated with WooCommerce. And so within the same dashboard you can manage all of your orders, all of the operations of the store obviously, but then you’ll also be able to manage all of your payment operations as well on a particular order. You’ll be able to as a merchant, be able to quickly see what is the status of that payment, what might’ve happened if there was an issue, if you need to issue a return or there’s a dispute, you can do that all very easily within the dashboard or transaction fees are very competitive with everybody else. We all basically are at the mercy of all of the other downstream players. For online transactions, it’s 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction typically. And then for certain merchants of a certain size, we have a client service team that works directly with them and there might be some more bespoke pricing for those particular clients.

Julia (08:56):
I think from my point of view, some of our clients come with existing corporate contracts that they’re tied to for a while and then they inherit the forward going with that and then it can be quite hard to move away from that. But as an agency we do have certain, we’ve looked into the best partners that we offer our clients for, but various things. So definitely payments would be one of those, but also other ones are hosting and cookies and that sort of thing. So we do have a sort of bank of suppliers that we partner with and put forward to our clients.

Shubert (09:23):
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Robert (09:25):
And if I’m correct, if you have an existing Stripe account, can you migrate that to Loop Payments just to make your life easier?

Shubert (09:31):
So it is separate. Woo. Payments is built in partnership with Stripe. So we do utilize their backend. We leverage Stripe Radar, which is their fraud protection solution. For all intents and purposes, a lot of the features and functionality, if you will, is exactly the same as what you would get from Stripe with the added value obviously of Woo Payments is completely integrated in with the WOO dashboard versus Stripe where if you needed to do something, you have to go over to the Stripe dashboard with a separate login and handle it outside of Woo. Yeah,

Robert (10:09):
Which is brilliant because you’re not paying anything more for the benefit of utilizing Woo Payments. And so you get all the benefits of Right, plus an integrated WooCommerce experience.

Shubert (10:18):
Exactly. And that integration even extends to support. So if you have an issue with your store, you just call Woo and the Woo happiness team will jump in and be able to help you with your solution, whether it’s something wrong with your store or something wrong with payments. So it’s very nice for a merchant who might have an issue and they don’t really know how to resolve it, they can just go to one place which is woo to help ’em with that particular issue.

Robert (10:43):
Or if Atomic Smash has help me evolve my site, they’re going to be the first line of contact.

Julia (10:50):
We appreciate your support teams working with us, really. So yeah, our developers are really good at getting in contact with who they need to sort things out. The companies to stand up for us are the ones that have the best support teams that aren’t answer fast. And because for us then become the middleman between us and the client and the time between getting back and being able to sort something out and who’s willing to jump on a call and share screens and sort it out is really a big factor for us as well.

Shubert (11:17):
Yeah. Just a little bit more on that client relationship aspect. Do you see any big differences between dealing with, let’s say a really small client versus a very large multinational client that has many people that working on the same thing? Or do you basically find what their needs and demands are basically the same and we don’t really see any difference between these two?

Julia (11:44):
I think from our point of view, we then deal with different people within the company. So the smaller companies, we tend to deal with the owners and then that’s a sort of a different sense to work with and it can be great to really get in on the ground with them. But then the bigger companies were with E-com managers and digital web managers and they can be a bit more removed. For them. It’s a job. So they are sometimes less invested than the owners that we meet with. But also we then meet a whole bunch a different set of brains that’s actually really nice to meet. So if we talk to the e-com managers, their strategies are just really interesting to hear what their sorts of needs. And whereas you sometimes then you might meet a more digital, visually focused website managers, it’s different personalities and wants to actually come through from the people that we meet.

Robbie (12:37):
So I’m interested to know as an agency, and you’re working with these e-commerce clients and you’re using Woo, when you’re using Woo, and I don’t know if you use other products or not for your e-commerce, but we’re just going to talk about Woo today. But when you’re using Woo, are you finding any demand for headless applications? So in other words, are you guys doing any other types of applications that you are using WooCommerce Headlessly behind?

Matt (Woody) (13:02):
Yeah, mostly it’s integrated with WordPress. I would say I haven’t yet come across a project that’s demanded headless.

Robbie (13:11):
Okay. And Woody, I think you would know because they probably would be having you design the ui ux in a Laravel app or a React app or something that they’re then using WooCommerce through. So we’re just going to go with probably not since you haven’t done that Woody see.

(13:27):
And Woody, I know we talked about a little bit before the analytics that you guys were using, but you also mentioned Heatmaps. Do you find that Heatmaps help you make consistent changes for the customers in their layout of their site as well as their e-commerce part? Does it allow you to be able to adjust to your UI and UX to better serve the customers?

Matt (Woody) (13:51):
Definitely. I think what’s really important with the heatmaps is that we don’t take that data in isolation. We combine it with other things as well in order to ensure that we’re making the best possible decisions. I have a really good example actually of something we’ve just done very recently with some user testing where we tested actually one of the clients that Julia manages their website with quite a small sample of the users and found that there was a particular feature of the website that not a single person in the testing pool used. So then our kind of hypothesis of the back of that is, is this feature really necessary or required or can we remove some visual clutter from the page, clean up the UX experience and the UI and just smooth everything off a little bit. So then that’s where it’s really great opportunities to get heatmaps involved where we’ve got lots and lots of data and we found that, again, looking at it, it didn’t have very much interaction at all. Combining those two different types of testing and data together, we can bring a hypothesis and then prove that actually we don’t really need that feature anymore and we can remove it. And as Julia was mentioning before, taking things out often makes a page more performant, improves site speed, and we know that this has a big impact on UX as well.

Robert (15:06):
Want to really dive deep on that one. The yes, we would all love to know who the company was, but what was that kind of feature that other folks can take away from that say, okay, you’re building out an e-commerce site, just don’t bother doing this because in our experience, it has not been successful.

Matt (Woody) (15:21):
So the website in this website in particular, some of the pages are quite long to scroll. So we had a hypothesis when we first built the site that it might be helpful to have a jump navigation that would scroll users to different parts of the page to different headings essentially, or different sections. And yeah, we found that just users were perfectly happy to just scroll the length of the page, which again busts some myths around the fold and the fact that users don’t scroll because actually they do. We’re all used to using social media now with endless scrolling. So that behavior has become perfectly normal.

Robbie (16:00):
I think mobile, the increase of mobile use has definitely increased people’s scrolling just because that’s the way we do everything just about on a phone because of the small screen. So you’re used to scrolling. Yeah, absolutely. So I want to talk a little bit about the long-term relationship now that you guys, and I know you had to name for it, but your long-term relationship with your clients where you are, they’re basically, I’m assuming like a retainer, they’re a monthly client even after the build so that you can stay on top of what’s going on that website and be able to help them improve as you’re going along, which I’m always about this. I think that if you just build a site and dump it in a client’s lap, you’re really doing ’em a disservice. You need to stay along for the ride and fix things and figure out what’s working and what’s not. Julia, as a client partner, your role, is your role only to work with these type of clients where it’s an ongoing engagement there or do you work with one of clients as well?

Julia (16:57):
We are pretty flexible, but majority of my work is with my always evolving clients. But then we have a sort of separate section of clients that might only have support and maintenance contract. So then if they want a one-off project, they come through one of us then. And yes, Woody, you’d be more familiar with you, worked on the project side of things for a while, but we just generally found that as a way of working, they’re always evolving, is accelerating. And the project side of it, although it’s useful and successful, they’re always evolving, is accelerating much faster actually. It turns out to be what useful for clients, it’s what they want, it’s easier for them, it fits right into their kind of corporate strategies. It’s good.

Matt (Woody) (17:41):
Yeah, I think it helps to make their organizations more nimble so they can adjust to any changes in their market. They don’t have to save up a vast kind of pot of money to build a new website every four or five years or so. They can just make small incremental improvements, keep evolving the site and never really require completely new site again. And yeah, the performance, the data all feeds into it so that we can make sure that they’re getting as much out of their website as possible

Robert (18:12):
Basically. So how does always evolving look different than maybe what folks traditionally think of as support and maintenance?

Julia (18:20):
Our support and maintenance clients have Maintenance would be updating plugins and critical security and quite a few other things at the Chap zoo, I don’t want to say it’s limited to that because that’s their wheelhouse. And then of course support. We’ve got a bug, can you help us? That’s the a and e emergency section. So all of our clients have access to the support team, but some of them don’t have the always evolving section as well.

Matt (Woody) (18:44):
I think. Yeah, the always evolving is more about changes in business strategy and improving and optimizing on the conversions that the client is measuring.

Robert (18:54):
Yeah, that’s what I’m curious about how to dig into that. What does that really entail for the business, for content, for actual ui, UX and whatnot, because obviously that’s more than just support and maintenance.

Julia (19:08):
All of our clients have different needs and one of our first conversations we have with them and then ongoing really we do quarterly workshops to check whether their business needs are still the same as they were when they joined with us. Because sometimes they might be looking for a more sustainable website, sometimes they might be their business goals shift, they might be looking for a different anything really. So it’s keeping in touch with them and what they’re looking for and then feeding that back into the great team that’s behind me that can provide that.

Robert (19:37):
So you mentioned sustainability. I also saw that accessibility is part of the equation. Is that just we get that done at the beginning or do you make sure to with always evolving manage that in an ongoing basis?

Matt (Woody) (19:53):
It is definitely an ongoing process. All of the always evolving clients that we have, we built their website originally, so we will onboard and accept clients. Websites have been built by other agencies as well. We’re alongside the kind of strategic workshops that we’ll have quarterly, as Julia mentioned, we’re also providing audits to the client for performance UX accessibility really regularly throughout the year as well. And yeah, accessibility is a huge part of what we do as an organization, a big advocate for it as well. So we’ve just actually in the last week or so, I think we’ve just launched a campaign on our own website. I’ve written what I’d like to think is fairly definitive guide to the importance of accessibility in website ownership. So that’s something that we are currently putting out into the industry for people to read free and it goes through detail such as common mistakes that are made, the legal parameters within which websites need to be made accessible. Reframing the conversation as well because we know as specialists that accessibility is not just about tailoring to a niche group of people is about improving UX for everybody. And sometimes accessibility requirements come out of certain situations or environments as well as having certain impairments. Just trying to educate as much as we possibly can really.

Julia (21:19):
So because we have a very broad audience along the lines of what always evolving looks like, is there one thing that either you, Woody or Julia would like to add for other agencies and freelancers to really think about in a process that’s not just maintenance and

Robbie (21:39):
Support?

Matt (Woody) (21:40):
So I think what I feel like really differentiates what we do is that so many of our clients say to us that they feel like we’re a part of their business with them. It’s a really close connection that we work with these clients. It’s not a case of we only jump into action when they report a problem that they have. We’re constantly defining things that we want to change and improve for them, making suggestions, meeting them on a weekly basis, a monthly basis, quarterly, yearly is a constant kind of process of evolution and we feel like an integrated part of their team. Basically.

Julia (22:18):
I second that if we have somebody in the companies that leave, we feel like we’ve lost a part of our team, but something we get to know really well and we get quite sad of them might’ve been there for years and then they leave and we’re like, oh, we’re going to miss that person. So yeah, it’s really nice to have those close relationships.

Robbie (22:33):
Yeah, I would call it more of a proactive relationship than a support and maintenance, which is more reactive from the client side. So quick question about this, and you guys may or may not know this answer, but you could probably, especially Julie, you probably can make a bit of a guess. What percentage of your customer base would you think goes to no support and maintenance contract at all? A support and maintenance contract or onto your always evolving or ever evolving?

Julia (22:58):
Say we’re about half, would you say? There’s quite a few under the support MAs, but probably more on always evolving side.

Matt (Woody) (23:03):
Yeah, I think maybe ever is slightly more to the always evolving side of things, but I think the real proof in the pudding with the always evolving is that we have some clients that we’ve worked with for, I think the longest is eight years consecutively

Julia (23:18):
Since they started up.

Matt (Woody) (23:19):
And we’ve also never, once we have had a client sign up to that service and work with us in that way, we’ve never had a client leave it.

Robbie (23:27):
Wow, that’s impressive. That’s impressive. Very impressive. It sounds like you’re always evolving program that you guys have set up there at Atomic Smash is pretty amazing. Kudos to you guys for that. And I know Schubert, I believe has one more question to wrap us up here. Schubert, what would you like to ask them?

Matt (Woody) (23:42):
Yeah, hopefully

Shubert (23:42):
This will be, that’ll leave us all on a positive note, but I’m curious if you have an example of the most inspiring or the most exciting project that your team has worked on that really got you up in the morning that you just couldn’t wait to get back to it.

Matt (Woody) (23:57):
Okay. Yeah, probably one of the projects that I found probably more challenging and therefore got more satisfaction out of doing it was, and I won’t name the client specifically, but we very recently in the last couple of months finished a UX project with a very large charity organization that’s based nationwide around the uk. And for me that was quite a challenging project at times due to the actual scale of the organization and lots of different kind of users that they needed to cater to with very specific needs. But for me, a real motivation behind the workload I’m doing is I need to feel like there’s some kind of social good to it. So that was the kind of dream job for me, really.

Shubert (24:44):
Yeah, no, but I hear you Woody about feeling like you’re benefiting society or benefiting the world generally with the work that you do. So I definitely agree with that.

Robbie (24:56):
We are running out of time here guys, but before we get out of here, I would like to give everyone listening a chance to know how to get in touch with you guys or witty. You mentioned that you had written something, accessibility, so if you’ll also let us know where you’re blogging and whatnot, I’d love to hear that. And then Julia, I’ll let you tell us how to also get in touch with Atomic Smash. So Woody first you.

Matt (Woody) (25:20):
Yeah, so yeah, I would absolutely love to plug the guide that I’ve written, on our website at atomic smash co uk slash we need to talk about accessibility.

Robert (25:31):
Love it.

Robbie (25:31):
Yes. And Julia, how would somebody, if they wanted to reach out to you guys to maybe become a client or partner up, how would they reach you?

Julia (25:40):
Best way? Definitely through the website as well. We’re both on LinkedIn, it’s just quite big here. That way is fine as well. But the website is definitely the best first point of call.

(25:48):
Cool. And Shubert, if people are interested in Woo payments, what should they do to get in touch with you?

Shubert (25:54):
Probably the best way is just to go to the main website, WooCommerce dot com. There’s a chat bot that will come up if you have a question about Woo capabilities or you need some sort of pre-sales support, you can always reach out to our happiness engineers through that chat.

Robbie (26:08):
Fantastic. Alright, Robert, there’s also some events that are going on you were going to mention. I’m going to toss it over to you and let you talk about those.

Robert (26:17):
Thanks Robbie. I know there’s going to be a lot of word and Woo folk at a number of meetings coming or meetings like real conferences events in the next couple of weeks. So there’s of course the ICAN general meeting, which is also the 25th anniversary of ican, so that’s going to be insane. And that’s an Hamburg from my German friends and Domain days Dubai, as well as M S P Global at the Nuremberg Ring in Germany, the famous F one racetrack. So all those are happening in the next whatever this launch is probably about five, six weeks. Thanks Robbie.

Robbie (26:52):
Alright, that’s going to wrap us up today. Thanks to our guest and our guest slash co-host as well. And listen up to the next episode of Do the Woo.