Why Businesses Must Prioritize Digital Experience with Christian Burne, Oshyn
Explore the world of digital trust and its critical role in creating exceptional website experiences.
The only way they're going to come back to you is if you're the only place
where they can get it.
But if they can get it somewhere else and they're not getting a good experience
on your website, then they'll go somewhere else.
I'm Jonathan Gandoff and welcome to the Content Cocktail Hour, powered by Aud
ience Plus.
Our mission is to shake out the deepest secrets of B2B marketing professionals
and stir up fresh conversation.
All to help you connect your brand with the right audience at the right time.
Let's raise a glass.
Welcome back to the Content Cocktail Hour. This is Jonathan Gandoff here, co-
founder and CEO of Audience Plus.
I'm thrilled to be joined today by a CTO.
I think it might be the second CTO we've had on, not the typical title we have
here, but I'm excited for this conversation.
Myself, more of a technical marketer, probably Christian, not near as technical
as you.
So I am excited to learn a lot from you today, but we're thrilled to be joined
by Christian Burns, CTO of Ocean.
They just released a really cool piece of content. I think there's some lessons
there that we as marketers can glean.
I might mention some of those throughout today's conversation.
We're going to dig into the results today and see what we can all learn from
that report.
Christian, before we jump into that conversation, maybe in your own words, tell
us a little bit about you and your role at Ocean.
Sure. First of all, thanks for having me, Jonathan. I appreciate it.
I'm my role at Ocean. I'm the Chief Technology Officer. I lead all of the
technical delivery of our projects.
We're a service provider for companies. We do mostly websites and digital apps,
mobile apps, and built around their marketing strategy.
We do the implementation. So in my role, I'm focused on our team creating high
quality software scalable websites for our customers,
high performing, secure, and that's the genesis of this digital trust index
report that we created.
Awesome. We're going to dig into that, but Christian, this is the content
cocktail hour.
So before we do that, I have to ask you, where are you enjoying drinking
nowadays?
Oh, well, I'm here in Southern California. We have a great little brewery
called Beachwood Brewing Company,
and they have one called 28 Hays. That's one of my favorite beers right at the
moment.
So craft. Is it a hazy IPA? Yeah. Love that. So actually, in a previous life, I
helped founder,
Burry, which I've talked about a little bit on this show. So I'm always down to
trade some Burry tips and tricks.
So love that. I'll have the next time I'm out there. I'll see if I can find
that one.
Great. Well, let's jump into the digital trust index. You previewed it a little
bit, but maybe let's just start there.
What exactly was it? What led you to want to create this index and maybe just
give us an overview of what the report is
and what led you to it? Sure. Yeah. So it's called the digital trust index and
the the overarching objective of the report is to show the
companies how their website stacks up against other websites across three key
areas.
The three key areas are performance, accessibility and security. And these
three areas together build up what we call the digital
trust that a brand has created with their consumers by doing really well in all
three of these areas.
They're establishing a strong bond of trust with their users, allowing them to
feel great when they come back to their website over
and over again that the company is caring for their digital hygiene, their
digital data and making sure that they're having the best
performance, the best experience possible. And if they don't do well on these,
then basically what we're trying to tell
companies is you're actually sending a message to your users that you do not
care about their digital experience by not taking good
care of these three areas. So what we do is we run a scan. It's only metrics
that we can glean from the outside.
So of course, we're not going deep into the inner workings of these websites
like we were not able to say, you know, how are they,
how are they storing the data on their servers and we're not doing that, but we
're able to identify how they're taking care with their experience
between the website and the user's browser, gathering all the signals we can
from that and scoring companies websites based on that information that we get.
I love where you mentioned there about like the trust factor that you're
building with your visitors, your users.
Like I think we all know the extreme version of how that trust is broken, you
know, in data breaches or hacks, but like more like implicitly,
like how does that play out when somebody's not doing a good job on performance
, accessibility and trust?
Like, what are the signals that we?
Yeah, you know it. It happens. It happens without you even thinking about it.
When you're on a website, you click on a link and you go one, one thousand, two
, one thousand, three, one thousand.
It's not there yet. Bam, you're off. You're going somewhere else. You know, it
's not it has to be there. And when it does render on the screen for you, it has
to look right.
So looking right means you have to make sure that you're testing across all the
browsers, but that's the easy part testing across browsers.
People who have some disabilities, I'm getting older now. I'm almost 50. I'm
looking at websites and oh my goodness, this text is too small.
Or they put white text on a picture that has a light blue background and you
can't read it.
So it's not even doing those things means that customers aren't getting the
experience that you want them to get. And you know, if you do that too many
times that happens, they're going to go somewhere else.
You're not going to come back to your website. Yeah, I like, I love that. Like,
it's almost subconscious. That experience of like a page is taking slightly too
long.
Like, I'm not being like, oh, this brand isn't worth anything, but I'm kind of
like impatient and like wondering like how legit is this site? Like, it is very
almost, yeah, like a subconscious like experience that we're all having as that
visitor.
Right. And customers have options, you know, like if you if the experience, the
only way they're going to come back to you is if you have the only you're the
only place where they can get it.
But if they can get it somewhere else and you're they're not getting a good
experience on your website, then they'll go somewhere else.
Yeah. And we as marketers, myself included, I think we're probably too often
indexing on no pun intended on brand and look and feel on how creative is our
site.
I think sometimes we are probably guilty of overlooking the accessibility, the
performance, etc. on the site.
So what were some of the big findings for you? What kind of made you raise your
eyebrows as you're going through this report?
What are some of the maybe key takeaways that you and the team found from this
exercise?
Well, one of the things we found is that unsurprisingly companies that have had
data breaches, had security issues, they rank high on on the security score.
But surprisingly, that doesn't mean that they score high on everything else. It
means they really drilled down and dive down on on doing well on security, but
not necessarily taking care to to think, okay, I'm thinking about this about my
entire customer experience.
They really just fixed a problem. So that's kind of part of what we're trying
to get across with this is think about it holistically.
Think about that message you're building for your customers. Nobody has
everything taken care of. There's always some somebody is underperforming on at
least one of the indexes.
And typically everybody has accessibility here. So that's a key area where
companies need to improve their users experience on the accessibility side.
10% of the companies have 40 or more contrast errors and 135 warnings on their
website. So there's lots of areas of improvement that can happen here.
It's also across industry. There's not really one industry that was better than
another. And within industries, there's going to be a high degree of variation.
And the thing is, Jonathan, this is really kind of not difficult to fix. If you
know what's wrong, you can fix it pretty easily. It's not like a multi-month
project to address these things. So they all can be addressed.
So why don't businesses know? Is it just an education matter of education or is
it a matter of prioritization? Why don't businesses know how easy some of this
is to fix and why are they doing it?
It's prioritization for sure. People aren't taking this as seriously as they
should. And that's why we're trying to shine a light on it.
But there's also a skill gap. Lots of IT teams do not have the skills to be
able to do this. I can say it's pretty easy because this is something we do all
the time.
But if you're an internal to a company, you may not know exactly how to do it,
but you might not know how to even measure it.
And so that's why we have this free tool on our website that lets companies go
and type in their URL and get these statistics for their own website so they
can measure it themselves on an ongoing basis.
I love that. Yeah, I love that you're kind of giving away that knowledge. We'll
be sure to get that link in the show notes and encourage everybody to go check
it out.
Maybe on that note, you mentioned this report was Fortune 1000 Brands. What
about companies who are smaller, maybe just smaller than that, or maybe
companies that are just starting out or going through a website project?
What advice do you have for them from what you've learned here from the Fortune
1000?
Well, we've split it up by industry, so you can look in the report and see how
companies, the Fortune 1000 in your industry are performing or in the closest
industry to you are performing.
And you can measure yourself your own website against that. So I definitely
encourage people to go to our site.
And there's lots of tools on the internet that you can use, not just ours. Ours
happens to be one that brings these metrics together.
Most of the other ones you'll find are separate. You'll have an accessibility
checker or a performance checker.
But they all work well and largely it's a lot of the same data.
But go there, scan your website, and if you're a marketer, ask your development
team, "Hey, here's some things that I think we should fix."
And if you're a developer, it's really things that you could probably Google
and fix pretty quickly if you're motivated to make it happen and get it done.
I know what I'm going to be doing as soon as we hit stop here. I'm going to go
check that out.
Maybe a bit nervously or anxiously, but I'm going to go check that out for
myself and our new site also.
We use this in a lot of our new relationships as a way to both establish stress
, but also set a baseline for what we can do to improve and lift every system we
touch.
The first thing we do is scan our customers and then incrementally just try to
improve it over time.
That's what we recommend every company do. You could do it all at once, but you
don't have to.
You can do it over time. The saying is something like, "You can't improve it if
you can't measure it."
So just start measuring it and improve it over time.
Measure what matters. I love that.
It's a kind of shared, very like, externally shared benchmark or like success
metric that you get to share.
Exactly.
We had a little bit of prep conversation before hitting record here.
I can't believe I didn't bring this up as a topic.
I'm going to throw this curveball at you, but we're 13 minutes into a
conversation about tech.
We haven't mentioned AI yet. Maybe from the CTOC. I'm just curious.
Especially as it pertains to like web experiences, right?
I know there are extreme opinions, hypotheses out there that websites will go
away with all things.
AI and AI chat. How people are building websites is being changed.
I'm going to throw this over the fence at you.
I'm not sure if there's an explicit question here, but what impact is AI having
on everything that you're doing at Ocean and with your customers?
And then maybe I'd be curious from the CTOC.
How are you staying on top of how quickly everything is changing underneath us?
It's true that it's a large force in the industry right now, and it's true that
it impacts many different aspects of what we do.
So just straight from the content creation side, we create a lot of content
around our knowledge and our experience.
And that has the introduction of AI is led to lots of conversations about how
to use it, what is the best practice for using it.
And we used to have difficulty getting our engineers to write content, and now
they write all kinds of content.
They write so much content that our marketing team is like saying slow down.
You're creating more work for me by generating all of this AI content because
we don't want to be the company that goes out there and just has a bunch of
generic AI content too.
So our marketing team has to go through that.
Developers are delivery team, our developers are using it more to enable their
code to make them more efficient, more effective.
And that's a good use of the capability.
Also in the scanning of the websites, there's lots of AI capabilities in the
tools that we use to help our customers keep them secure and highly perform it.
So a lot of code scanning capabilities that we use as part of our daily work,
and that all gets brought in.
The bigger picture though is will we actually still be building websites
anymore?
And I don't have an answer to that. I don't know if anybody has an answer to
that, but we have to keep our pulse on what's happening to make sure because
that could change the whole pattern of customers publishing websites for users
to consume.
If that changes all of content marketing, it changes all of SEO, it changes how
customers find brands.
So that's much bigger. We keep our eye on that, but also we still have to
deliver every day for our customers.
And our customers are demanding us to be more efficient by leveraging the
software, do more with less.
And that's essentially what we're trying to do and how we're trying to leverage
it right now.
I think it sounds like the you, it's kind of the opinion I've tried to inform
to.
I've always said, I don't want to inform an opinion too strong on AI that I'm
not able to change it at a later date.
Like I don't want to die on the wrong hill when it comes to AI.
And I think like there are a lot of people that they're planning their flag on
what AI is going to be or what it already is.
And I like that you're kind of taking an open-minded approach to it of like we
're going to keep our eye on it.
We're going to be up to date on it, but like we also have to deliver day in and
day out for our customers.
We're going to use AI to deliver better results for our customer.
And I think that's really, I appreciate that perspective.
Yeah, I don't have any customers who've asked us to, you know, me and a couple
coworkers and I were talking about what if there's going to be such a
personalized website that you go to a URL and every piece of information you
see is generated by AI.
And when you click on something, the next piece of the next web page is
generated by AI.
Every request, every URL that a customer sees, that's not like out of the realm
of possibility.
You can see, you can envision that that happening.
So, you know, I don't have any customers asking us to do that yet.
So maybe they will.
Yeah, it makes my brain melt a little bit.
So we'll save that topic for a follow-up episode because that's what I started
getting to know.
It's crazy, but I think you're exactly right.
And I think like the logic is all there.
I was talking to somebody about this last night.
Like it feels so far-fetched, but then you start talking through the logic of
some of these big changes and you're like, oh, no, that logically, all the
steps are there.
It's crazy.
There's a clear line between where you are now and where that could be.
It's no longer like fuzzy or undefined.
So, Christian, this has been a lot of fun.
We do always ask all of our guests, what's an unpopular opinion that you have
as it pertains?
Typically, I say, B re-sales are marking, but from the CTOC, I'll kind of let
you take it in whichever direction.
You feel like you've got the hottest take on, maybe.
Yeah, well, one thing that we hear a lot about in digital marketing and website
creation is that customers asking us about composable and headless websites.
This is the pre-AI area, pre-AI-generated website era.
That's the era we're in now.
And the good old days.
Right.
One opinion that we, that we, Ocean has out there is that headless websites
aren't for everybody.
It does have a significant benefit on performance.
There are ways that you can get performance without going headless.
Headless is the easiest way to get the largest performance gain.
But that has to be an important aspect of your digital experience for your
customers in order for you to do that.
It's a large change in how you manage and maintain your website.
So it's just not for everyone.
And I think you need to understand the implications before you dive in and
change your whole digital experience to a headless or composable digital
experience.
There are benefits and it does make sense for a lot of people, just not
everyone.
Yeah, love that.
I think that was one of those things that became very popular very fast.
I think some people just adopted it because it was becoming very popular very
fast.
We go through these cycles on a lot of things.
So I appreciate that advice and perspective.
Christian, if people want to learn more about Ocean or learn more from you,
what's the best way to do that?
Oh, okay.
Well, just go to our website.
That's the easiest thing.
So www.oshyn.com.
This is, oh, it's backwards.
Oh, it's a try and calm and then for the digital trust index, it's ocean.com/
trust.
Cool.
Love that.
We will get all those links in the show notes.
I encourage everybody to go run their own scan.
Christian, thanks for sitting down, taking time on the content cocktail hour to
hold our watchers, all of our listeners.
Until next time, same time, same place.
Cheers.
Thanks.
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