Avinash Kaushik: The Importance of Customer Feedback

Guest Blogger: Avinash Kaushik, Author, Speaker, Independent Consultant & Analytics Evangelist.

The VP of a Fortune 100 company recently asked for some advice. They were heading into their peak selling season that would last only three months max, and they only had an ability to measure revenue from the website, nothing else. They did not have any web analytics tool.

Her question was: Which analytics tool do you recommend because we want to improve our website and increase sales?

My answer: Don’t implement a web analytics tool, implement a short website survey that would be hyper focused on hearing the customer voice, and three things specifically.

Surprised?

There were a number of factors behind my recommendation but one of the main ones was that if you want to move really really fast and you don’t know anything then it is better to ask the customer what you should do rather than implement a tool and try to figure it out based on clicks. You will get better insights, faster than you can imagine.

Web analytics is awesome (you do expect me to say that don’t you! : )), is has to be a critical part of your web strategy because it can yield great insights. But for the fastest way to understanding customer problems there is nothing like asking the customer herself / himself (and yes it will lead to improved revenues).

Consider this example, a simple illustration of a website that has only five pages and only six visitors:

Three of the visitors enter the site at the home page (Page 1) and the other three further down in the site (as they are often wont to in this world where Search Engines and SEO rules the roost). Then each Visitors clicks around to find what they want.

If you had this extremely simplistic customer experience illustrated in the Path Analysis report of your Analytics tool would you get any insight from it? Possibly not. Now imagine what would happen if your website had more than five pages.

A great way to get into your customer’s heads is to ask them and go from there.

The three magical questions mentioned above? Here they are: 1) Why are you here today? 2) Were you able to complete your task? 3) If not, why not? (Open ended text answer).

You can quickly imagine if the same six visitors had answered these questions? You would have gone from scratching your heads to taking action in a quick five minutes.

Qualitative analysis is the perfect spouse for Quantitative analysis, it is a perfectly symbiotic relationship and you can benefit from it.

If you want to learn more please sign up for the upcoming iPerceptions seminar on April 12 (click here to sign up). It is a great opportunity for you to learn about the power of qualitative analysis powered by surveys. You might decide to use iPerceptions or a different solution, but if you attend the seminar you’ll learn about the methodology and see the compelling value proposition that iPerceptions offers.

Please share your feedback and experiences via comments (or email me at blog at kaushik dot net). Thanks.

Comments