Recognise Customers as Individuals, Part 2

This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com and is republished here with permission.
In my last column I discussed the need for organisations to develop a more customer centric approach to the development of their online channel and outlined a simple framework to help organizations improve the quality of the customer experience. Underpinning this framework is the need for a range of quantitative and qualitative measurement and analytical techniques as customer insight is a key component of delivering improved customer experiences. This time I’ll be taking a brief look at some of the tools in the customer experience toolkit.

The key thing I think is to recognise that just in the same way that organisations can no longer afford to develop “one size fits all” approach to their online channel, they also need to recognise that you can’t have a “one tool fits all” approach to understanding and measuring the online customer experience. For far too long businesses have been reliant solely on web analytics tools to track and measure what is happening on their websites. When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail and part of the frustration that organisation sometimes have with web analytics tools is that they trying to use them for tasks which they are not very good at. In terms of understanding the user experience at its simplest level the questions you are trying to answer are:

• What happened?
• When did it happen?
• Who did it happen to?
• Why did it happen?

I’m not suggesting that these are the only questions that need to be answered but they form the foundation of most analytical enquiries. It’s also as important, for example, to understanding why things’ don’t happen, a point I’ll come onto later.

Web analytics tools are great for answering the “what” and the “when” questions but less great for answering the “who” and the “why” questions. To answer these questions we need other tools in the toolbox, some quantitative in nature and others more qualitative. For me, some kind of survey or direct user experience feedback tool is really important. This is the true “Voice of the Customer”. A basic approach is to be able to answer the questions:

• Who comes to the website?
• Why are they there?
• Were they able to do what they wanted to do?
• If not, why not?

The last two questions are the pivotal ones – were people able to do what they wanted to and if not, why not? We are not talking here just about questions of site functionality but about the whole experience, or importantly the user’s perceptions of that experience and what it should be like. This may have nothing to do with the functionality of the website itself. The last question is where they may invite users to comment in words rather than just tick boxes or provide scores or ratings. This is a rich vein of information that truly get’s the heart of the customer experience. These days you can get text mining tools to help shift through these written comments and to pick out the main themes and patterns in what people are saying. They can be good but frankly the best text mining tool is the human brain and by quickly scanning through the various comments that people have left you can get a real sense of what the issues are. These may be nothing to do with the website itself but may be around the product offer or availability for example. One travel company I’ve worked with used had a major problem with customer satisfaction whenever it sent out customer direct mail. The problem was that the offers being advertised in the letters were not easy to find or replicate on the website, mainly due to a lack of communication between two departments. The customers were expecting a seamless experience that wasn’t being delivered. I think reading and taking notice of these user comments is so useful that I set up scheduled reports for clients to drop the comments into their email inboxes every Monday morning.

Another useful diagnostic tool is the breed of so-called “customer experience management” tools that allow you to capture and analyse the individual users’ session. The capability to track and replay an individual’s actual session on the website has been around for a while. Tealeaf is probably the most established provider in the market but other players are also emerging, albeit from different start points. The challenge with these types of tools can be the sheer mass of data that is captured and available for analysis. It can be like looking for a needle in a haystack. The trick is to have some way of uncovering potential customer experience issues and then diving in to the session replay data to see what actually has been going on. A useful development is the integration of these systems with other measurement systems such as web analytics tools or voice of the customer programmes. This allows the analyst to start at a higher level and then drill down into the detail, for example, by isolating all the sessions where the overall satisfaction score was less than 5 and then reviewing a selection of them in detail to see what exactly seemed to be causing the problem.

Most of the techniques covered in this article have been quantitative in nature or have started from a quantitative approach. Quantitative methods are necessary but rarely sufficient to understand the user experience. Next time I’ll take a look at a selection of qualitative approaches to understanding and optimising the user experience.