HiQ strengthens customer experience and digital commerce – Matti Vahtera appointed as Customer Experience Director

Matti Vahtera

At the beginning of his career, Matti designed advertisements. Then websites. Eventually, he became interested in what needs to happen behind the scenes before it even makes sense to build a user interface, and what needs to be going on in a person’s mind before they are truly ready to buy.

That path led him to the heart of ecommerce, and there have been surprisingly many stops along the way. Vahtera has been involved in building the online store of one of Finland’s largest specialty retail chains, and over the years he has met hundreds of Finnish online retailers, from one-person boutiques to the digital teams of large chains. He has also trained and lectured on the same stages as Finland’s leading ecommerce operators, and has partnered with the Digital Commerce Finland community for years, which brings together Finnish online stores and industry players.

A successful online store is the sum of many things

– For the customer, an online store should be as straightforward as possible. They find the product, understand its value, trust it and complete the purchase. Maybe they pick up something else along the way if they happen to become interested in the brand. But it takes a lot to get there. On the company side, the same simple thing may require thirteen different systems, six committee decisions and that one very essential Excel file whose existence no one really wants to talk about, Vaster says.

According to Vahtera, this is exactly why an online store can never be developed as a purely technical project. You need to understand the customer, the business and the technology, and accept the fact that all three are equally decisive for the end result. Buying is never just a technical transaction.

– As the saying goes, people buy with emotion but pay with reason. That is why the most important thing is to first identify the clear reason why customers would buy from our online store in the first place, and only then build the service and technology to fully support those reasons.

Emotion and design supporting technology

Vahtera’s background combines commercial design, service design and an understanding of hard data. He has experience in both consumer and B2B ecommerce, and in that unforgiving moment when a digital service meets the real world.

Vahtera is also known in the industry from the other side of the microphone: he hosts and produces the Asiakaskokemusklubi podcast, which has featured, for example, the customer experience directors of VR and Elisa, as well as a number of leading names in the Finnish brand and ecommerce field. Through the podcast, he has been able to look at customer experience work from very different perspectives and has noticed that the same challenges repeat themselves regardless of industry. Metrics and data are not enough if they are not actually used in decision-making, and good customer experience always requires commitment from management. It does not emerge solely as a customer service or marketing initiative, nor as a technical project.

Even the fastest and most beautiful online store in the world is almost worthless if no one actually buys anything from it, Vahtera points out.

That is the core of Vahtera’s work. He loves it when good design leads to real action. Less friction for the customer, more sales for the company. Good sales is good service.

At HiQ, Vahtera wants to apply this thinking to the development of online stores and digital business as part of HiQ’s Digital Commerce services, which cover ecommerce and customer experience projects from idea to implementation and further development. The same company that builds safety-critical solutions for defence industry brings the same precision to the development of ecommerce and customer experience. It sounds like a small and simple goal. Often, however, it is not.

What about your online store?

If you do not want your company’s online store to be technically functional but mostly a place where customers go to just to look around, Matti is the right person to sit down at the same table with you. He is at his best at the intersection where customer experience, technology and business collide at speed. He enjoys removing friction and improving conversion.

Over the years, Vahtera has seen the same phenomenon repeat itself in countless online stores: the product or technology are rarely the things that separate winners from losers, because in the end they are almost always copyable. What is much harder to copy is how buying feels from the customer’s perspective. That is why Vahtera sums up his life lesson like this: Excellent customer experience is a company’s only sustainable competitive advantage in a world where products and technologies can be copied quickly.

That applies at least as long as people make purchasing decisions.

Welcome to HiQ, Matti. If your company’s buying journeys need straightening out and you need measurable growth on the bottom line, explore HiQ’s Digital Commerce services, connect with Matti on LinkedIn or give him a nudge.

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