Digital commerce specialist Astound Commerce launched its Value Exchange Index dashboard (VEI) today. The offering marks a new era in the measurement of brand performance across digital commerce touchpoints, with the always-on dashboard auditing real-time data from over 50 major brands. VEI reveals brand experience capabilities across digital commerce touchpoints via web and mobile channels, and across a range of retail verticals including apparel, beauty/personal care, home/garden, footwear and gifting. The data assesses specific metrics, allowing Astound to apply a Value Exchange Index score to brands.
Through VEI, Astound evaluates the full buying cycle for dozens of top brands monthly, from initial product search to post-purchase, so that the full commerce process and customer journey can be evaluated and understood—and the value that brands must deliver is realized.
100 metrics were identified as core to the customer journey. From there, each metric is categorized into six unique, primary indicators, representative of top-line, universal consumer expectations:
- Mobile—brand dedication to consumers’ mobile-first mindset
- Personalization—relative success in providing individualized shopping experiences
- Customer—degree of consumer-centricity
- Item—effectiveness of attributes that focus on product details and discovery
- Efficiency—success in providing streamlined and frictionless shopping experiences
- Go-Getter—efficacy in implementing innovative features
Metrics are further assigned to one of three main touchpoints: Messaging, Shopping, and Service. The sum total of the touchpoints determines the brand’s overall score. The scores reflect brand and industry strengths and weaknesses, assuring an accurate portrayal of the present, while simultaneously pointing to future probabilities.
Additionally, a number of metrics deemed fundamental contribute to what VEI analysts internally call the Baseline Indicator. These particular metrics address the minimum capabilities that a brand must encompass to maintain a nominally functional digital commerce site. A brand should score high on this indicator to assure its site experience measures up to acceptable consumer standards—a score of 65 percent, for example, would be cause for concern. Of brands currently assessed, The Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Ralph Lauren currently hold top honors when it comes to providing the best digital commerce experience.
“While consumer journey research has always been an important element of digital commerce marketing, both for us and the industry as a whole, Astound’s VEI takes it to another much more granular and accurate level,” said Michael Kahn, Global CEO, Astound Commerce. “Through a range of products and metrics, we are considering the buying cycle from the consumer’s point of view, allowing us to pinpoint where brands are succeeding—or, more importantly, where they still have work to do.”
Newer elements will be integrated into VEI on an iterative basis. One feature currently under development is Pivotal Moments, a set of metrics focused on specific slices or groupings of touchpoints that identify the precise points in the customer journey that affect behavior. Astound is also refining a weighting system for its metrics, given that metrics vary in their relative value to the buying cycle.