Versori Voices: Chloë Thomas 🗣️

Welcome to Versori Voices – our weekly series spotlighting fresh perspectives and real-world innovation. Each edition delivers practical insights, strategic thinking, and a behind-the-scenes look at how impact is made, straight from the people driving change.

This week we feature Chloë Thomas, a best selling Author, International Speaker, and host of both the Award-winning eCommerce MasterPlan AND Keep Optimising Podcasts. Chloë is one of the Top 24 Voices in eCommerce 2024 (Dark Matter), and her podcasts are regularly included in lists of the top eCommerce & marketing podcasts in the world. Chloë Thomas has been in eCommerce since 2003, and there’s barely a part of the eCommerce landscape she’s not got involved with. One thing she’s always done is solve eCommerce Marketing Problems.

Q: What’s one eCommerce trend you think people are underestimating right now?

A: Qualitative Customer Research. As the noise grows on all our marketing channels, it's becoming ever harder to grab the attention of our customers, and future customers. Add to this the growing power of the algorithm in our advertising tools - and you really start to understand the huge power that creating the right creative now has. It improves advertising ROAS, and it helps you cut through and gain visibility in all channels from email to TV, to radio, to organic social. You can't create the right creative without understanding your customers (and key segments of customers). If you want to get them to take action, you need the creative (text, graphics, photos, angles) that really speaks to them. It isn't easy - and it's impossible without qualitative customer research, that's then turned into a comms strategy. 

Q: What’s one key lesson you’ve learned from your years in the eCommerce space?

A: What drives customer behaviour doesn't change. It's still easiest to get them to do something by offering a great discount, but that doesn't make it a good idea! They still want distraction-free checkout, they still respond to story, and help, and great copywriting.  How consumers behave doesn't really change - it is just the channels, and their patience with ‘bad’ experience that changes.So we're basically still trying to do exactly the same thing. But now the tools make it a lot easier to improve customer experience, and understand exactly what they want.

Q: From your experience, how can retailers better evaluate which tools or platforms are worth the investment?

A: First, be clear on how any investment is going to improve the business, which probably means improving the customer experience. Although that might not be the immediate impact - eg driving efficiency in customer service doesn't immediately improve CX, but it does when the team have the time to give better service levels and respond faster. Second, involve all the teams who are impacted to find out the costs and benefits of the change to the WHOLE business, not just your area. Third, once you've found an area worth investing in - be careful in your tool choice. There are 1,000s to choose from now. You want to make sure it definitely delivers what you need, that it's price competitive, easy for your team to use, integrates with your existing systems, and that the team behind it are as helpful as you need them to be. Speaking to other users is critical.

‍Q: How should eCommerce businesses prioritise their tech stack when scaling operations?

A: Profits and efficiency are the name of the game at the moment and you can't drive those without great systems, teams, and tech.

How important tech stack changes are depends on how you're doing with the other two… new tech isn't going to change a team problem, nor is it going to magically improve your systems. Look at the whole scenario - where are our weak points, where are our opportunities? And most importantly when you're scaling - where are the small bottlenecks that are about to become big challenges?

Frequently, that would be things like:

• Manual tasks that should be automated (prioritising the orders to be picked at the start of the day)
• Areas where agentic AI could take some of the load (dealing with “Where is my order?” queries)
• The time it takes to pull together reports
• Systems that limit who can access the data

Don't forget to involve everyone in the planning of any upgrades to make sure you get team buy-in, and that no critical factors get missed.

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To be featured in a Versori Voices article, reach out to sophie@versori.com!