Jim Sterne: Ask And Ye Shall Receive

Guest Blogger: Jim Sterne, President, Target Marketing of Santa Barbara

I'm a web analytics guy. At least that's how I look to the outside world. I wrote a white paper in 2000 about the possibilities of web analytics. I wrote a book called Web Metrics in 2002. I am the producer of the Emetrics Summit, now in its fifth year, and I'm the founding president of the Web Analytics Association (WAA).

All that sort of pegs me as a man who knows all the ins and outs of tracking clickthroughs and pageviews all the way to revenues. But I am not in the same league as Mr. Web Analytics Demystified, Eric Peterson or the double handful of brilliant bloggers that grace his blogroll. Oh, I pay attention to them - close attention. But my expertise is not how to capture a specific bit or tune a page tag. I'm a strategy guy - and I care about customers.

"The customer is always right."
"It's the customer, stupid."
"The customer is king."

I take these truths to be self-evident. So, when I discovered that there was a new way to understand the customer - web analytics - I got all kinds of excited. That excitement boiled over into lots of activity, trying to get people to see the power of this new tool. But something got left behind. While we were so focused on optimizing the sale, we forgot to optimize the customer experience.

There was an interesting debate at one of the WAA board meetings. I was pretty sure that what webmasters really need is a way to understand whether their websites are working - for the customer. You can measure reach and frequency of attention. You can measure clicks and conversion. You can measure sales, revenue per sale and ROI, but if you really want to make a website work, you've got to do right by your customer.

But my fellow board members voted me down - and they were right to do so. The Web Analytics Association has enough on its plate dealing with web analytics. There's not enough bandwidth to take on usability, customer satisfaction, email marketing and - oh yes - the Voice of the Customer.

There are enough devils in the details to keep an entire department busy - and an entire industry association busy - when rolling out and maintaining a web analytics tool. But I see a slightly bigger picture. I see a suite of tools that work together and at the heart of them - the first tool in the kit - is that which captures the voice of the customer.

In my previous life, as a non-e-marketing consultant, I would tell Marketing VP's that it was not their job to know what their customers wanted - it was their job to ask their customers want they wanted. Because as soon as you think you know what they want, as soon as you stop asking them, they change. They go with the flow.

I believe this. It's in my bones. Sure, customers are not going to invent new, breakthrough stuff. They don't know they need an iPod until everybody else has one. But what about the 99.999% of the rest of it? They do know how they like to buy. They do know how they like to shop. They know how they like to compare products and how they like to return products.

Avinash Kaushik is one of the most insightful and intelligent web analysts I've ever met. On his excellent blog, Occams Razor Avinash said it best. "80% of the time you/we are wrong about what a customer wants / expects from our site experience."

Avinash describes his work at Intuit as dealing with website experience, behavior and outcomes. Outcomes are the goals the company sets - selling software. Behavior is all about the clicks. But, says Avinash, if he only had one of the three to work with, it would have to be the customers' direct feedback and customer satisfaction.

This is from his post Overview & Importance of Qualitative Metrics:

But, no matter what tool you use, the best that all this data will help you understand is What happened. It cannot, no matter how much you torture the data, tell you Why something happened. This is the reason qualitative data is so hyper important. It is the difference between 99% of the website analysis that happens that yields very little insights and the 1% that provides a window into the mind of a customer

Ask the customer for their opinion and they'll tell you where it hurts. They'll tell you why they can't find your own products on your own website. They'll tell you what one piece of information kept them from signing up for your newsletter.

When Avinash spoke at the last Emetrics Summit, he said if he can move the needle on customer satisfaction, that's the best gauge of all. Make them happy, and the money will follow. Simple. Brilliant.

Ask and ye shall receive.

That's why Bryan and Jeffery Eisenberg's book Waiting For Your Cat to Bark sings to me. Focus your website experience on your customers. Don't figure out how to sell to people - figure out how they like to buy. Simple. Brilliant.

And then those web analytics tools will show you their ROI by telling you if you have fixed the problem and eased your customers' pain.

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