Sean Burton

Is there a direct correlation between your customer experience and your revenue? Can we talk about the ROI of customer experience with any hard evidence that will back up our perceptions and justify business expenditure on customer experience work?

Rather than treating your customer research investment in isolation, identifying where your business has to pay for research, analysis and testing, it’s possible to view your investment from the opposite angle – if your business chooses not to work on customer experience, what problems will you experience, what dropouts will you see on your website, and what value is being lost as a result of you not conducting any research?
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A brand is more than a logo: it’s a statement of what a company stands for, and what it won’t stand for; it embodies the company’s personality. But that personality is an amalgam of millions of tiny actions carried out by employees. Suppliers, customers and other stakeholders don’t judge a company by how shiny its emblem is: they judge it by how its employees behave when they encounter them.How can companies with diverse and dispersed workforces communicate their values consistently internally, to ensure that employees can always be ‘on message’? Read more…

I’ve been using Windows 7 beta (build 7000) for a couple of weeks now, and I have to say I’m hooked. I’m running it on an old IBM z60m and I’m finding that the laptop has now become my work machine of choice over my newer laptop running Windows XP.

So why is Windows 7 so good? In many ways it is very similar to Windows Vista – the most recent debacle of an operating system from Microsoft. Cosmetically it is extremely similar, but Windows 7 has a few very significant differences – the main one being that it simply works. Let me explain….

Coming from a technical background I’ve always had a certain sympathy with software development especially something as complicated as an operating system. Microsoft rarely gets the credit it deserves for producing software that works across such a wide range of hardware. That said, Microsoft Windows and Office are probably the two pieces of software that drive me up the wall – not because they are bad bits of software but rather that I use both continually. As such any problem with writing the document impacts my work and it’s Word that gets the blame.

So onto Windows 7. From the moment of installation things were pretty smooth. Clear instructions, minimal intrusion, and swift installation. Starting Windows 7 for the first time was something of an adventure and the first thing you notice when you see the desktop is that the taskbar has changed. Whereas Vista kept the taskbar similar to Windows XP, Windows 7 has taken a different approach. One of the most common issues for me is window navigation. I often have five to 10 programs running with usually at least 20 windows open at any one time, as such trying to find which window contains what you’re looking for can be a bit of a challenge. Windows 7 does away with the usual window buttons on the task bar, but rather groups all windows together from the same program – not dissimilar to the Dock on an Apple Mac – allowing you to easily find the content you’re after. Right-click on any of the programs a small menu allows you quick access to common features. For example Internet Explorer shows a list of recently view pages, and Media Player gives you easy access to your media and various controls.

Under Windows XP I found the grouping feature to be extremely painful, but in Windows 7 it works extremely well as you can see a small thumb nail of the windows contents when you move the move over active programs.

Additionally, Microsoft has added a few minor tweaks. You can now move a window over to the far left of the screen and it will maximise to half the screen width. Do the same with another window on the right-hand-side and you can easily compare windows side by side. A simple but actually useful feature. The ‘Show desktop’ feature is now activated by moving the cursor to the bottom right of the screen which temporarily makes all windows fully transparent allowing you to see all files on the desktop – again simple but effective.

The ‘Start menu’ remains largely the same as Vista with the focus on search. For anyone using Windows XP this feature is a real god send as it allows you to quickly open programs, files, services simply by pressing the ‘Windows’ key and then typing. Whereas in Windows XP I created loads of short-cut icons, this feature makes life a lot simpler and tasks quicker to complete as I don’t have to resort to the mouse of have to remember loads of keyboard short-cuts.

So far all of the programs I’ve installed have worked seamlessly, and the focus with Window 7 certainly seems to on creating something that actually works. Even on an older machine Windows 7 running in all its visual glory feels faster and more productive that Windows XP – I’m not looking forward to August when the beta runs out and I’ll be forced to return to XP.

Across out hosted infrastructure we’ve seen a steady and continual increase in the use of Window 7 beta since Microsoft made the beta public on the 9th January and if it’s anything to go by Microsoft is onto a winner with Windows 7 – let’s hope that they don’t ruin a promising start by offering complex and inappropriate licensing!

So why am I so excited about this? Well the key reason is that Microsoft has clearly listened to the criticisms of Vista. If I were cynical then I’d say that they had little choice following the disaster that was Vista, which should have been good but was let down by numerous niggles each of which dented the overall experience. And here is the real lesson. Windows 7 is enjoyable to use – it’s a positive experience a bit like the first time I used an Apple Mac. Rather than the usual computer experience of trying to do something and eventually finding it sitting three menus deep before the computer promptly crashes, Windows 7 feels smooth. It is easy to use and guides you through tasks efficiently, but also has loads of small intuitive features that are not big marketing opportunities but are clearly there simply to make life easier! And for that single fact I applaud Microsoft – credit where credit is due.

For a great in-depth review have a look at: http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/23/windows-7-beta-in-depth-impressions/

The balance between privacy and personalisation has always been a delicate one. When you visit a web site, you want to see things that are relevant to you. However, the methods used to allow this are often controversial or ineffective. On one side sites can allow users to customise their experience by personalising the home page or choosing types of content. On the other side, behavioural profiling can be used to push relevant content.

Each approach has its benefits and its drawbacks. At the end of the day very few people can actually be bothered to personalise a web site, unless they use it extremely frequently. And if they do personalise the contents, they may miss out on other tangential topics. Behavioural profiling relies on tracking an increasing number of interactions that the user has with the site or sites, and as such is controversial.

Behavioural targeting is in use by a number of Ad networks, where behaviour on content specific web sites, determines the type of adverts that a person will see when they visit content generic web sites. There are numerous technical challenges with this, but privacy tends to be the focus. The idea that website ‘B’ know what I did on website ‘A’ can be a bit off putting for many users, particularly if they don’t receive any benefit.

Over the last 12 months, facebook has been in the press regularly for their deployment of behaviourally targeted ads. There has been a significant end user backlash against the monetisation of the social web site, with many against the idea of targeted adverts. But in June of this year facebook has turned the model on its head by allowing users to vote on the adverts that were displayed (link to story). In my opinion this is the first example of a more general trend in online advertising. The ability to vote on ads instantly changes the simple concept of display advertising to a far more semantic engagement. Even if a visitor votes negatively, their engagement with the advert has significantly increased. This increased engagement requires additional thought and will therefore improve awareness and more importantly retention. As the old adage states “all news is good news”.

In addition, eye tracking studies conducted by behavioural targeting company Tacoda have shown that behavioural targeted adverts result in 17% more engagement when compared to contextual targeting (adverts based on the contents of the page). Further more, it was found that following the first exposure the advantage increased to 54%. This was supported by an experiment conducted on the FT.com website, where they found 193% lift in awareness and 178% lift in recall for behavioural targeted adverts when compared to simple run-of-site adverts.

However, it is vital that the relationship is transparent and built on trust. The customer must remain in control or else the company risks alienating the customer. Behavioural profiling companies, such as Phorm and NebuAd have suffered significantly in the press following concerns over public acceptance. NeuAd’s CEO has recently stepped down, with the company looking at alternative strategies. Phorm has seen a significant drop in its share price, and its trials with BT remain extremely controversial as the behavioural profiling is at the ISP level without any customer control.

The technology now exists to allow highly targeted forms of marketing. Companies can effectively merge their marketing and communication strategies, allowing them to selectively contact people about products they might actually be interested in, rather than forcing marketing to everyone via broadcast techniques.

It is clear that behavioural targeting can be extremely successful if deployed correctly. It can be beneficial to both sides: the consumer is exposed to adverts or products that will likely be of interest to them; and the company improves the return on its marketing investment by targeting people that are more likely to respond.

The key to success lies in trust. The consumer is king and their experience is vital. In the current economic climate retention of valuable customer is important, and in the fickle world of the web experience is everything.

The art of web analytics has solved many of the mysteries behind customer behaviour, but some wonders of the web remain. This year, I aim to unravel the secrets behind four of them and you are invited help with the research.

Together, we can crack the mystery of cookie deletion. If users are routinely cleaning out cookies, you could find that you have significantly fewer unique visitors than you previously thought. Indeed, a study by Jupiter Research in 2005 concluded that 10% of users delete their cookies daily, 12% do so monthly and a whopping 17% remove cookies every month. Our own studies with WebAbacus have compared the number of randomly generated permanent first-party cookies with the number of registration IDs, which is a good way to tie cookies to real people. The ratio over a month has been about 1.179 cookies per ID, but this has been increasing year on year, suggesting that more people are deleting their cookies on a regular basis. Further investigation is clearly needed.

Cookie blocking is a related issue. First party cookies are those set by the site the user is visiting, and they tend to be considered more trustworthy than third party cookies, issued by another site such as an advertising provider. Our preliminary figures suggest around 0.2% of visits are blocking first party cookies. Additional research is need to compare this to third party cookies, and to broaden the sample size. It’s not always possible to use a registration ID to increase the accuracy of web analytics, so it is essential that websites can understand the margin of error in cookie-based statistics.

Most web content is free to view, often funded by advertising placed against it. With the rise of the Firefox browser, which is easy to customise, there has been concern that more internet users would block advertising using plug-ins such as Ad Block Plus. Some media sites are blocking Firefox users altogether, but with ad blockers becoming more widespread for Internet Explorer, this will no longer be viable. Some sites suggest that 10-15% of their visitors use ad blocking, but our own preliminary figures suggest around 1.2% of visitors are blocking adverts. We would be interested in hearing from companies that would be willing to help with further research, including those that do not run advertising.

The final wonder of the web is tabbed browsing, which has become more popular with the growth of Firefox and the introduction of tabs in Internet Explorer. Opening content in tabs enables users to hop about the site more easily and read some content while other content loads. From an analytics point of view, it means the clickstream recorded can include illogical leaps between unlinked pages. By noticing differences between the page referrer and the previous page downloaded, it can be possible to tell whether the current page was requested in a tabbed session. Further research is needed to work out how many people use tabs, and what effect it has on how they navigate websites.

As I said, you’re invited to participate in this research. Data can be collected using WebAbacus, results will be fully anonymised, and traffic levels will remain confidential. If you’d like to learn more about what’s involved, please email me without obligation.

When I was at school, there were two types of mathematics: pure mathematics was about learning abstract number work by rote; and applied mathematics was about modelling the real world.

Too many companies are locked into ‘pure analytics’, where they gather numbers, and slice and dice them, but don’t put them to work. Companies that average activity across the whole site, or use measures like visit numbers and hits, are probably locked into this mindset.

For some time, we’ve offered visit scoring. This awards points to different activities on the site, so that companies can measure how engaged someone is. Each visit is scored according to the pages visited and activities that take place. A customer that just paws through the bargain bins is probably worth less to you than a customer who searches for an expensive TV and looks at a few results. Visit scoring enables companies to focus on potentially profitable and unprofitable visits and to adapt the user experience to increase customer participation. The next step is visitor scoring, which scores individuals over time, and considers how often they shop, how recently they shopped and their life time value to the business.

Using visitor scoring as a starting point, companies can introduce customers to others with similar tastes. This can drive social networking, so that site members are automatically introduced to others with similar tastes in products or hobbies based on pages viewed and items bought. This could be a good way to increase participation from those members who only pop in when they receive an invitation from a friend. People can be matched according to how they want to engage with the site too, so that you don’t pair up someone who’s online every day with someone who only logs on weekly.

Customers can also be matched on review sites. When I read bad book review posted by another customer on Amazon, I don’t know whether the reviewer has similar tastes to mine, so it’s hard to trust the review. Visitor scoring offers a simple way to benchmark how similar customers are to each other, so that they know how closely their tastes match and how much they can rely on each other’s reviews.

There will be privacy concerns, but Facebook’s plug-ins have shown that if there are benefits there, people are prepared to share their private data with anyone who can enable them to interact with their friends and the internet in new ways.

When company regulations and rules were printed and bound in thick books, the personnel department (as it then was) always suspected that nobody was reading them. Now all this information is on the intranet, the human resources department (as it now is) can see exactly who’s reading what and when. They rarely bother to look, though.

While the marketing department might be adept at analysing traffic on the website, few companies apply the same web analytics technology to the intranet. It’s a missed opportunity.

By analysing what people are looking for on the intranet, companies can refine the navigation and personalise the site so that each department can quickly find what it needs most often. Companies can find out if staff are trudging through the site without finding what they want, only to resort to the contacts list to ask someone to answer their question. Those contacted could be invited to contribute their most frequently asked questions to the intranet, so they are spared constant interruptions and everyone else can find the information they need more quickly.

Where forums are provided to share information, those who contribute most can be identified and made formal champions for internal communications. They could help to convert lurkers into active contributors, and help to circulate news offline too.

By linking the internet and intranet, companies can identify the most popular webpages for employees, by department. That information can be used to provide quick links to top sites, or even to bring news feeds into the intranet to stop duplicated downloads wasting bandwidth.

The intranet also provides a safe environment for testing features and content destined for the public website. Staff will be less phased by company jargon than the general public, but can otherwise help to highlight any problems on the site before it’s exposed to external scrutiny. Intranets tend to control access by user ID and password, which means all the data held about an individual can be tied to their behaviour in the browser. Companies can see whether features on their website are harder for older people to access, or whether response varies by gender or education.

Another advantage is the ability to experiment with profiling and behavioural targeting. Because it’s an intranet, you have access to a wider variety of different data sources, all of which you own.

Since everyone can be personally identified, it’s also possible to use analytics to police use of the internet during work time. While companies are well within their rights to exploit any information available to them, they need to communicate the personalisation benefits that analysis can provide to staff. The intranet will be boycotted if staff worry that Big Brother is counting every click.