If they've got more in their basket, you're doing something right.

A larger average order value is a hallmark of a happy customer—one who has found lots of items they need at a price they find convincing.

In a recent interview with Sean Mckee on our podcast, I was captivated by the results of two experiments in particular—two that had significantly positive effects on the customer's net position.

Sean's got 20 years under his belt as a director at Schuh (which is, for those of you who don't know, one of Britain's most successful and beloved shoe retailers with an annual turnover of +£230 million.)

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He has undoubtedly helped Schuh build one of the most user-friendly, customer experience-driven shopping experiences out there, and the culture of innovation on display in the below experiments shows why.

Each point has some solid takeaways for eCommerce and CX professionals, so sit back and take out your notepad.

1. "Customers who consumed faster deliveries, not only did they convert better, but they very often had a slightly bigger basket."

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At Schuh, they have a culture of measure, measure, measure.

Schuh also has lots of delivery options, ranging from click and collect to local, in-store collection and next day delivery.

Sean noted that more delivery options correlated very strongly with a propensity to spend more money. Indeed, the speed of delivery had a "very, very strong correlation".

In particular, Schuh measured the impact of next day delivery on conversion rate and found positive results.

But that wasn't all. There were several positives, some unexpected, such as an increase in the basket size.

Perhaps the warm fuzzy feelings increased the number of items each customer wanted, or perhaps if you're paying extra for delivery you want to get the most out of it, either way, more convenient, faster deliveries boosted basket size.

There were two more positives from the introduction of premium delivery:

• The customers returned fewer items;

• The customer contacted the contact centre fewer times to track their order.

So all across the customer journey, Schuh saw an improvement in behaviour. More sales, fewer returns, fewer complaints or enquiries.

To quote Sean: "It's brilliant if you can make a hundred customers very happy, but it's much, much, much better if you can make 50,000 of them happy."

2. Introducing video chat led to "a propensity to spend more money, an ability to convert that was a multiple of the normal website conversion and being absolutely delighted by the interaction."

Schuh introduced video chat into their customer service solution by teaming up with Vee24.

They would nudge certain customers to participate in a live desk agent, usually doing a one-way video where a sales-trained member of support would speak and direct the customer through their shopping journey.

The agent can physically navigate the site with the customer help, take them to a product, showcase things for them, drop things into the basket and help them up to a particular point in the journey.

After such positive results came in, Schuh went from a "healthily sceptical position" to a "warm embrace" of web chat as a means of customer-company interaction.

The Schuh team also went out of their way to measure profitability by desk and found it to be very profitable.

So we see higher NPS scores and more profits. It was certainly a win-win situation.

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