Customer Satisfaction

National Complaints Day: The need for ‘honest listening’, re-inventing corporations and Club Penguin…

Today, apart from being Friday 13th, is also National Complaints Day. Research conducted by ComplaintCommunity suggests that over the course of today more than one and a half million complaints will be lodged across the UK.

Against this backdrop, I was fortunate enough to bring together a variety of people from the public sector, retail, financial services, customer experience and social media monitoring to discuss the impact of social media on complaints specifically, and customer service more generally. Read more…

This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com on 01/07/10 and is republished here with permission.

Last time I looked at some of the characteristics of data collected from surveys, particularly data collected from surveys run on websites where you have no control on who is answering the survey. Generally this lack of control can cause some bias in the data which can cause some issues if you are looking at the aggregated reports. For example the data on the profile of visitors (i.e. gender, age etc) that you collected from survey data may not actually reflect the true profile of visitors to your site because of the different propensities of different groups to respond to surveys. So, does that mean that survey data is useless? Not really but it does means that it needs to be handled with a bit of caution. Read more…

Recently, I had to make a BACS transaction so I rang my bank and made the transfer of funds without any problem. However, within a few minutes, my mobile started to buzz – it was a text from my bank confirming the BACS transaction. My first response was surprise, as my bank had never contacted me this way before. My thoughts then turned towards security, wondering if this was some sort of scam or SMS advert. Read more…

CA Calls for European Businesses to Wake Up to ‘Web Stress’ or Risk Losing Customers and Sales

• World’s first* neurological experiment into poor online customer experience proves existence of ‘web stress’
• Brain wave analysis indicates that consumers need to concentrate 50% more than normal when using a badly performing website
• Two most stressful points of the online sales cycle are search and checkout

* Based on extensive desk research in February 2010. Read more…

To explore ‘web stress’, CA partnered with Foviance to see if application performance had an impact on buying habits and consumer behaviour online.

Using an EEG (Electroencephalography) cap and sophisticated neurological and physiological testing equipment, volunteers were wired up during the study and had their brain wave activity monitored. Everyday tasks online such as finding and buying items were tested by the volunteers.

The results revealed that search and checkout were the two most stressful points of everyday processes carried out online, resulting in the volunteers exhibiting a heightened level of ‘web stress’. This type of stress results in more than three quarters of customers abandoning websites before they have completed the task that drove them to the site in the first place. To download the whitepaper a valid e-mail address is required, however Foviance will not contact you unless you specifically request it.

We’ve previously mentioned the browser wars and the Microsoft anti-trust browser case, and this week sees the initial limited roll-out of Microsoft’s “web browser choice screen” for European users. In a nutshell, the European Commission ruled that bundling Internet Explorer (IE) with the Windows operating system was a big no-no and forced Microsoft to give users the choice of which browser they wanted to use. Read more…

This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com on 29/01/10 and is republished here with permission.

 Whilst on the topic of the last 10 years in web analytics (www.clickz.com/3636166) one of the major positive shifts in the past few years has been the emergence of the “Voice of the Customer” market. For far too long organisations tended to be too “site centric” in their approach optimising online performance believing that the solution lay in just knowing “what happened” and “when it happened” as opposed to “who did it” and “why they did it” – or more often than not “why they didn’t do it”. Read more…

It’s Sunday morning, and at 7.18am I am fast asleep. My alarm is set for 9am, but I don’t get to wait for the alarm to go off because I’m rudely awoken by a text message. It must be important, I think, for who would text so early on a Sunday? The answer is…my mobile phone provider. For some reason they seem to think it’s perfectly reasonable to send a text message at 7.18am on a Sunday, and the message is ‘no reply’ so I can’t even complain to them about it. Read more…