Tuesday, January 18, 2011

The customer's always right

What's not to love about Voice of Customer (VOC) data? It's so much easier to figure out what a customer was up when they just come out and tell you, instead of looking for patterns in clickstream data.

Yet whilst it's great when your customers tell you why your site sucks, it can be depressing too. Surely it's obvious where that information is, you cry - it's staring you in the face on the home page! But as we all know, the customer's always right, and what's obvious for us won't always be for them: we need to go and fix the problem. Standard stuff. However, we can do more with this information. As well as monitoring how satisfaction and other customer metrics change after we make these changes, we can also track the comments too.

Building categories from the comments made allows you to not only track the improvements you've made but also keep an eye out for future issues. For example, you could create a category based on feedback which suggests the user can't find the information they're looking for. This could allow you to compute a metric which calculates the percentage of "lost" responders. You could pivot these by visit purpose, or traffic source to get an idea of where the issues are. Some tools allow you to integrate your VOC data with your analytics package, so it could be possible to build segments based on these responders, to overlay on your clickstream data. Maybe they can't find it because it's below the fold on their screen size?

Of course, you don't have to just stick with those who "can't find stuff", you could segment by more vitriolic comments, technical problems, basket problems etc. So take a couple of paracetamol, be brave, and explore your VOC data!
Real Time Web Analytics
Feedback Form
Website Feedback