Examples of A/B Testing in an Offline world

The data that is available in the online market now allows marketers to optimize, test theories and learn constantly. The theories that are used to optimize daily online programs can also be used in the offline world. The theory behind A/B testing is basically eliminating guess work by allowing you to test your hypothesis against the current market state.

You can use this idea to increase optimization in your store experience and call centers by maybe printing out advertisements and catalogs.

This will help you gather information on your customer’s preferences and help you improve on the services and goods you offer.

Just as on your website, every visitor to your store is a potential buyer. Instead of this visitor getting to interact with your website, they get to directly interact with your space, products, services and service providers.

This will give you an opportunity to come up with new strategies to increase sales and also gives the chance to implement them.

Here are examples of areas where you can apply A/B testing in your offline business:

Retail

You can conduct an experiment where your test whether you can increase your customers’ purchase values by putting some items at the checkout point with staff prompts.

This is a situation where half of your staff at the checkout station ask the customer whether he/she would be interested in purchasing more items and point out the selected items while the other half do not ask their customers the same question.

At the end of the day you can review the collected data from the experiment by reviewing the average purchase value from each checkout employee.

This will help you determine whether your customers appreciated being persuaded to buy items or if they wanted to be allowed to choose what they wanted to buy.

You should realize that optimization is not really about increasing sales but about increasing ROI.

Call Center

When you decide to optimize the process involved in answering queries and solving issues on the phone with the aim of reducing the number of resources needed in your call center will have a positive impact on your business’ RIO.

The most effective approach to test would be giving your call center employees a script which they would follow when dealing with customers.

This will help increase the number of calls that the employees can take in a day thus increasing the effectiveness of the call center.

This also has a downside to it as it will reduce the personality of your call center employees which will have a negative impact on the feedback from the customers about the value of the call as well as their perception of the company.

This negative impact can be avoided by applying A/B testing where you divide tour employees into two groups, unscripted and scripted.

At the end of the day you can analyze the customer feedback on the calls from both groups and determine which method was most effective.

It is a little bit tougher to measure the optimization success of an offline A/B testing that it is for an online test as one does not have analysis tools at his/her disposal.

For you to be able to access the effectiveness of your test you should conduct a customer satisfaction research by using a survey whether it’s in retail or the call center examples.

You should ensure that you keep the survey sweet and short. Phrase your questions in line with how you intend to use the data you acquire.

I hope you found this article satisfactory and it was of help to you.