Surveys

Surveys are really powerful ways of gaining great insight into your customers. Well managed surveys can help you get a greater insight into who your customers are, to some extent how they behave, but importantly what they think and why they do the things that you do. In the digital space there are a number of ways that you can collect customer feedback using surveys either on the site itself or by email if you have the relevant details. The cost of survey data collection can be quite low and there are many different survey technologies out there to choose from. But what makes a successful survey? Here are some thoughts:
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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…

This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com on 18/06/10 and is republished here with permission.

Having looked at some of the fundamentals around web analytics metrics over the past few weeks, this time I turn my attention to survey based data and metrics. Over the past couple of years there has been a growth in the number of organisations that are running on-site survey based voice of the customer programmes. These might range from simple “do it yourself” approaches using free or low cost survey software, to a packaged tool like 4Q or more sophisticated programmes like ForSee Results or iPercpetions. As with all things, you pay your money and you make your choices. Read more…

This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com on 23/04/10 and is republished here with permission.

When the graphs are going up and to the right, people are generally happy. Life feels fine when there’s good growth in the right kind of metrics and despite the tough economic trading conditions over the past 18 months, the digital economy has generally been doing OK. Here in the UK spending on online advertising grew by just under 5% in 2009 compared to 2008 with spend on Search up by just under 10%. Whilst that isn’t the kind of stellar growth seen in previous years, the indicators are positive. Business confidence amongst advertisers is higher than it’s been previously and we’re continuing to see growth in the active online audience (up 10% vs. a year ago), some of that being driven by the growth in population of social networking sites such as Facebook. Read more…

There are obvious attractions to conducting international surveys as conduits of quantitative research.

Not only will they extend your reach and influence geographically, but they also expand the size of your potential samples, while reducing costs considerably compared to securing a similar scope of respondents locally. Surveys do have obvious limitations against one-to-one qualitative studies, but with skilled questioning and efficient organisation, excellent results can still be gained for far lower overheads. Read more…

Even during recessionary times, the value of online transactions continues to increase. However, in a recent study carried out by Foviance, 44% of people surveyed said they didn’t buy online because they wanted to physically see the product. A further 18% cited the cost of delivery as a barrier to online shopping.

This white paper provides insight from over 100 respondents, into the buying habits and behaviours in the run up to the busiest time of year for retailers.  We probed respondents to understand their motivations, the barriers they are confronted with, and examples of best and worst websites that exist.

This paper highlights that customers are already using multiple channels as part of their purchase process dependent on what it is they are buying and the information provided at the various touch points. By enhancing the cross-channel customer experience, retailers can diminish the impact of the main barriers to conversion.

By Marty Carroll

This month’s newsletter combines November and December. In this last newsletter of 2009 we reflect on a difficult but eventful business year.

We saw customer experience play a critical role for many organisations strengthening their digital presence and cross-channel offering in order to provide the best possible levels of service for existing and new customers alike.

Looking back at 2009, Paul assesses how predictable the current landscape was at the outset, and then looks positively towards a tricky but exciting 2010. Meanwhile Amanda shares her insights from a conference on mobile, for those more concerned about sweating the small-screen stuff, and Lis takes a look down both sides of the narrowing divide between mobility and accessibility. Also, I look at the non-rational consumer, a lucrative segment.

Finally, Clare has been analysing our research into online retail habits ahead of the festive shopping season. If you would like a copy of the whitepaper as soon as it’s released, please e-mail info@foviance.com

I hope you have enjoyed your regular newsletters throughout the year. I’d also be very happy to hear from you directly with any feedback.

Marty.

In this issue:

• Looking back on 2009 and forward to 2010
• Researching the mobile experience
• The fine line between mobility and accessibility
• Tapping a lucrative segment: the non-rational consumer

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

An interesting report was published recently by E-consultancy that gives a useful insight into the state of play of the web analytics industry here in the UK. They surveyed around 700 people from “practitioners”, agencies consultancies and vendors around a number of themes including the use of analytics within organisations, the amount of investment being made and the use that people are making of the data that has been invested in.

When asked how many web analytics tool they were using within their business over 50% of people said they were using two systems or more. Quite often the scenario was that a company was using a paid-for tool and then were using Google Analytics as well. Relatively few organisations were using Google Analytic exclusively. This is a trend that I have observed as well, an organisation has a system from one of the major vendors and then also deploys Google Analytics “to see what it is like” because it’s free. This result throws up some interesting questions like: “is this a good idea or not?”. One the one hand you can argue that since it’s not costing anything, then what’s the problem? Maybe Google Analytics does some things better than the system that you already have in place. On the other hand software like Google Analytics might be free to buy but it’s not free to implement (that takes time and effort) nor is it free to maintain (that takes time and effort too). Given that many organisations find it challenging to properly implement and configure one web analytics tool, does it make sense to try and manage two?

The other thing that struck me about this is that two systems will inevitably been giving different results. So which one do you believe? There’s a saying that a man with two watches can never tell the time. I can understand organisation wanting to try out different tools but at the end of the day I feel its best to stick with one and make sure that it’s giving you what you need.

There was some good news from this report about the adoption of other tools, particularly Voice of the Customer tools. Over 60% of organisations said that they looked at customer survey data. I think that if this survey had been done a couple of years ago the number would have been a lot lower. It’s good to see that businesses are beginning to realise that you can’t measure the effectiveness of the digital marketing strategy just by looking at data that comes out of a web analytics tools and that you need other data, particularly customer insight data to fully understand what is going on.

There are some worrying signs from the report. Organisations admit that they are still often not tying up their data collection strategy to their business objectives and relatively few said that they were definitely getting actionable insights from their web analytics. Quite a number thought that a lot of the data they had wasn’t particularly useful for decision making purposes and the clue to the reasons why came when you looked at the resourcing of their web analytics programme. 45% of respondents didn’t have a dedicated web analyst and when you look at where the money is being spent, the biggest chunk is usually on the technology rather than the resources to extract the value from the technology. So it’s hardly surprising that organisations are finding they are struggling to get insight from their web analytic programme that leads to better decision making.

The signs from the report suggest that there is progress being made in the UK but more vision is required at the right levels of organisations to tie their business strategy and the measurement strategy together. Reasons often cited as being a major barrier to having an effective online measurement strategy included lack of coordination, lack of senior level buy-in, budget and resources rather than problems with the technologies. And I think that if there is a difference between what is happening over here on this side of the Atlantic to what is happening in the US, it is probably more to do with those factors than anything else. For those of you in the UK and the rest of Europe, it’s worth taking a look at the report and seeing how you benchmark.