Don’t take my word for it – ask Avinash

As I typed that title, I realized what a nice ring that has to it…’Ask Avinash’. Hey Avinash, I want royalties if ever you market an ‘Ask Avinash’ site or service to the analyst or marketing community (I’m kidding – mostly). But seriously, it’s always nice to have elements of your methodology confirmed (see his Disclaimers & Disclosures) by someone who is ‘in the trenches’.

Avinash Kaushik works at Intuit, and is responsible for the business, technical and strategic elements of the Web Research & Analytics platform that supports decision making for Intuit’s 40+ ecommerce and non-ecommerce websites. He clearly is someone who understands the web analytics space, and more important the limitations of single solution toolkits.

Avinash recently posted a blog on his site – Occam’s Razor - titled Got Surveys? Recommendations from the Trenches that highlighted some very important issues about the importance of a sound methodology and proper solicitation for feedback when it comes to using the voice of the customer as decision support.

Two key issues he brought up that I wanted to point out (verbatim):

1) If possible partner with an outside company that can bring a full complement of expertise to the table. This has two great benefits:

You have to do less work, can’t beat that. Seriously though, you don’t have to create questions, you don’t have to master complex computations (often advanced statistics), you can benefit from best practices and all you have to bring to the table is your knowledge of your business.

You can stay focused on value add analysis rather than in distracting and time consuming tactical work.

2) Most surveys are done as a pulse read, we have a thought in mind, a question we want answered, a project we are doing and we do a survey. That is great. But surveys can be hugely powerful as a continuous and ongoing measurement system. Having surveys continuously deployed on your website will mean that you will always have your finger on the pulse of your visitors. More importantly it will mean that you can account for seasonality, external influences (like press releases or company events), marketing campaigns, God’s power etc.

This ties directly into a blog post from our own Duff Anderson - Voice of the customer – spring, summer, fall, winter, and spring…

Like I said, it’s always nice to have elements of your methodology confirmed by someone who is ‘in the trenches’.