Conviva : From the World Cup to Your Shopping Cart

Keith Zubchevich, President and CEO, Conviva – a real-time digital intelligence and experience analytics platform – discusses why understanding customer behavior is the key to delivering seamless digital experiences that build loyalty, from live sports streaming to online shopping.

FROM THE WORLD CUP TO YOUR SHOPPING CART

Every brand has experienced a customer experience going south at exactly the wrong moment. When that happens, you have a very short window to fix it before the damage is done.  

In live sports streaming, that moment has a particular intensity: when it comes to a penalty shootout, goal, or pass that you’ll tell your grandkids about, a few seconds of frozen screen for a viewer who’s been watching for 90 minutes can be painful. 

I know because I’ve worked on these events for two decades – five FIFA World Cups, 10 Olympic Games, and 14 Super Bowls.  

What I’ve learned is the signals that tell you something is wrong come from watching the consumer, not the system.  

Are they switching devices? Dropping and reopening the app? Pausing in a way that doesn’t look like a deliberate rewind? Each of those behaviors tells you something specific about what’s happening to their quality of experience. 

This year’s FIFA World Cup has even higher stakes for US streaming providers because the tournament is being hosted across North American stadiums for the first time in 30 years.  

A Harris Poll study found that half of Americans plan to watch at least one match on TV, streaming, or social media.  

And more than a quarter of Americans say they only recently started getting more interested in soccer as a result of this year’s FIFA World Cup.  

As such, a live event – watched with friends at home or in a pub – creates a new category of fan in real-time, and their experience better be great! 

THE SAME HOLDS TRUE IN E-COMMERCE 

Just like when streaming video, how a shopper interacts with a website, app, or artificial intelligence (AI) agent tells you everything you need to create a good experience.  

As a brand, your job is to read those signals and remove any friction that stands between them and a satisfying purchase. 

Consider a shopper thinking about buying a couch to host friends for the World Cup. Before visiting any retailer, they ask ChatGPT: 

• What length of couch do I need to seat six people comfortably? 

• Is a deep couch good for hosting? 

• What are the most popular cloud couch alternatives? 

By the time this shopper lands on a retailer’s site, they’re not browsing – they’re confirming. 

Conviva’s agent-to-agent (A2A) commerce report shows that 83 percent of AI-referred traffic in e-commerce lands on a product description page, and 100 percent of those that purchase have checked out in a single session.  

Ultimately, the brand who sees the AI referral, understands the questions that led there, and removes every obstacle between shopper and checkout is the one that wins.  

Conversely, the brand that offers conflicting recommendations or a mismatch in price is the one that loses the customer and sours their perception. 

CREATING GREAT CONSUMER EXPERIENCES 

What makes this hard isn’t identifying the signals in isolation – it’s understanding them as a sequence – a trajectory of behavior that reveals where the person is in their journey and what they need next.  

The shopper who asked the agent to recommend a deep, pillowy couch and then went silent is exhibiting a different signal than one who asked the same question and immediately added the item to their cart. 

The World Cup viewer who buffered briefly and kept watching is having a different experience than the one who dropped the app and reopened it from a different network. As such, the isolated event does not carry meaning – the sequence does. 

For any company in the business of creating consumer experiences – which I’d argue is every consumer brand – here’s what you need to think about as you launch new digital touchpoints: 

1. Measure from the outside in. 
2. Treat experience as a continuous trajectory rather than a series of discrete events.  
3. Act within the window when a moment can still be saved.  

The technology available to brands today is truly incredible, so it should be used to create experiences that keep your customers coming back.