For most companies, customer experience is the single greatest predictor of whether they’ll get another purchase from their customers — or see them defect to a competitor.  It’s so critical that even virtual monopolies like cable providers and health insurers suffer when they fail at it.

Customer experience goes to the heart of everything you do — the value you provide, how you conduct business, and the way your people behave when they interact with customers and each other. You can’t afford to ignore it because your customers take it personally each and every time they touch your products, your services, and
your support.

This year, Forrester’s Customer Experience Forum will feature case studies, data, business models, and tools from its upcoming book, Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business. It will show you how leaders in industries like financial services, retail, media, and telecommunications take control of the factors that make or break customer experience at their organizations with tools including ecosystem maps and the six disciplines of customer experience.

In addition to its outstanding industry guests, it will deliver consumer data, analysis, one-on-one meetings with Forrester analysts, plus peer networking. These will give you the actionable insights needed to transform your company so that you can reap the full business benefits of the customer experience revolution.

Click here for event information and pricing.

That’s right – Board. As in it’s almost time to nominate new Board Members for the Digital Analytics Association (DAA).

The DAA is seeking committed, qualified and motivated individuals to run for election to the DAA Board of Directors. If you – or someone you know – would like to serve in a leadership capacity and help drive the strategic direction of the Association, we encourage you to respond to this Call for Nominations. The nomination period opened on Tuesday, April 24, 2012 at 12 PM GMT and will close at 23:59 PM GMT on Tuesday, May 8, 2012.

The DAA Board is comprised of twelve individuals. For the 2012-13 Board, there are five vacant seats up for election. The slate will consist of three Board seats and will be voted on as a block. Members have their choice to either vote for the Slate as a block or voting against the Slate by abstaining from voting for the Slate. There will also be two Board seats for the At-Large seats voted on individually.

Each member will be elected to serve a two year term effective July, 2012.

For 2012, the election will follow the process created in 2011. Read why the changes to the election process were made.

In keeping with the DAA’s globalization priority, one seat on the Board is designated as a non-North-American seat. That seat will be vacant for the 2012 election and is up for election this year. Non-North-American members may still choose to run for one of the vacant 2012 seats.

The Nominating Committee will carefully review the qualifications of each person for the purpose of nominating candidates, for both the Slate and the At Large seats, who are strategic thinkers with solid leadership skills, to create Board level diversity in geography and an appropriate balance of membership sectors and experience. A recommended Slate will provide the DAA with a Board that is selected to meet current challenges and to ensure that the Board has the experience and knowledge to address the changing environment.

Even if a member is not selected by the Nominating Committee, indicating your interest in serving in a leadership position will assist the Board when it seeks candidates for committee positions and future directorships. Being involved in a DAA Committee or Special Interest Group (SIG) is helpful to the digital analytics community and is beneficial experience for serving on the Board in future years.

Candidates must meet the following criteria to be eligible for nomination:

• Member in good standing (paid member) of the DAA.
• Four years industry experience as a practitioner, consultant, vendor, or educator in digital analytics.
• Exemplifies leadership qualities by way of teaching, presenting, writing or dedicating volunteer time to the benefit of the digital analytics industries.
• Ability to provide strategic direction relative to the expansion of the association into the full digital analytics industry.
• Significant senior management experience from large enterprises and with previous board experience.
• Provides an up to date résumé that summarizes work and education history and provides authorization to edit and publish for review by members.
• Provides a letter describing why they should be nominated and responds to nominee questions.
• Strong communication skills.
• Proven managerial experience.
• Is able to commit 10 hours per month to activities related to their role on the board and signs acknowledgement of Board Member roles and responsibilities.

The nomination period opened on Tuesday, April 24, 2012 at 12 PM GMT and will close at 23:59 PM GMT on Tuesday, May 8, 2012.

Nominations will be accepted by emails submitted to the Vote Administrator and Mike Levin, Executive Director. Detailed instructions are available in the Election Process Document.

Candidates for election will need to submit the following:

Subsequent to meeting the eligibility requirements, the nominee must provide background information supporting their nomination as a member of the Digital Analytics Association Board. Background material should not exceed 1000 words. The following information should be provided:

GENERAL INFORMATION:

• Nominee name
• Nominee job title
• Nominee company
• Country in which company is located
• Nominee Sector – Product or Services; Consulting/Academia; Practitioners
• General background/bio
• An up-to-date résumé that summarizes work and education history and provides authorization to edit and publish for review by members.
• A signed Acknowledgement of Director Responsibilities Form [pdf]
• A letter describing why they should be nominated and responds to the following nominee questions.

• What major contribution will you bring to Digital Analytics Association and its membership?
• Why should members vote for you?
• Where do you think the Digital Analytics Association should be in the next two years?
• How can you specifically assist DAA with the expansion to the digital analytics industry?
• What is your vision for DAA long term?
• What is the biggest challenge facing the digital analytics industry?

The list of nominees and the supporting background material provided will be posted to the Digital Analytics Association member Web site. This information will be available to all Digital Analytics Association members for review and consideration.

Voting will open on Monday, June 4, 2012 at 12 PM GMT. Voting will close at 23:59 PM GMT on Monday, June 18, 2012. Only votes received during this time will be counted as cast.

The vote will be independently administered by Virtual, Inc., (the ‘Vote Administrator’) Digital Analytics Association’s management company.

• The vote will be administered by a secure website.
• Only one ballot can be submitted by each voting member.
• Only the votes received during the specified timeframe will be counted as cast votes. Late ballot submissions will not be accepted.
• All votes will remain confidential

For more information, please refer to the Election Process Document or contact the Vote Administrator by email or by telephone at 1 (800) 349-1070 or +1 (781) 876-8933.

Brands within the hospitality industry are constantly evolving as they respond to consumer needs, market conditions and changes in the competitive landscape.  In response to years of a struggling economy, many of these brands aimed to increase their value proposition by offering more services to their guests, lower rates or more loyalty program benefits. However, in order to stay competitive, brands need to constantly strive to understand their customers, what motivates them to include them in the consideration set, and ultimately, what it takes for them to return and develop loyalty. 

Websites are often the first experience consumers have with a hotel brand and become a frequent interaction point for return customers. Thus, the website experience can serve as a strategic tool for gathering information about your customers’ perceptions based on their overall experience with the brand. With this in mind, it’s important to retain a brand’s DNA – or raison d’être – as the underpinning of any customer feedback strategy in order to foster and sustain longer term brand impressions.  Just as important is making sure that websites are an integrated component of the full marketing platform and delivering on visitor expectations, which is critical for brand building and customer retention today.

How can you turn online customer experiences into brand building?

Create synergy between channels

A brand’s website has evolved from being an extension of the marketing mix to a central component that is often the primary source of revenue generation. However, regardless of where the website sits in the brand’s overall strategy, synergy across all communications channels is key. This means that the creative elements and the brand essence it conveys must be the same as with what is being delivered through other media such as television, print, and social networks, so that consumers receive one consistent message and impression that they associate with the brand. A uniform strategy across all platforms facilitates brand recognition and ensures that consumers understand the brand benefits, which ultimately helps drive brand loyalty.

Align what they see with what you’ve got

The online channel is an excellent way to showcase what your visitors can expect if they book with you. Consequently, the copy and images used on your website should reflect your brand personality and quality. For example, if you are a luxury brand, using cartoons will likely not align with your brand image; if you are a midscale brand, you might want to communicate the value you provide by highlighting the services you offer in a clear and compelling way. Regardless of where your brand sits in the spectrum, however, remember that your visitors will judge you by what they see on your website. Therefore, it is worthwhile to invest in quality images and multimedia in order to “put your best face forward” so as to bolster the image that your brand projects.

Strike the right balance between information and clicks

The majority of visitors to a hospitality website are Lookers – they are information seekers. Therefore, focus on providing sufficient content to meet visitors’ needs. The good news is that most hospitality brands excel in this area, relevant content often surfaces as the highest scoring element of a website, according to the Q4 2011 iPerceptions’ Hospitality and Tourism Industry Report.  But many hospitality websites struggle when it comes to supplying the additional layer of more detailed content that the visitor is looking for, such as information on hotel services, room amenities, and so on. This is because there is a fine line between providing enough and too much information, such that the latter could result in a cluttered page view, thus overwhelming the visitor and making their online experience less pleasant. Therefore, it is important to understand the kind of information your visitors are looking for, and to display that prominently or make it easy to access. At the same time, brands must understand that no one likes to have to click through layers and sub-layers of menus to find what they need; however, this will be somewhat inevitable due to the architecture of a website as well as available real estate. Ensuring that navigating to this information is intuitive goes a long way to meeting visitor expectations, and ultimately, promoting likelihood to return to the website.     

Another important point to consider is how well the website responds to the needs of the visitor .In the same report, responsiveness, which involves aspects of the experience such as searching properties and availability, progressing through the booking funnel, website functionality and performance – is the lowest rated and most influential driver of the visitor’s overall experience. Further, the research shows that technical difficulties encountered when using a website are the leading catalysts for pushing visitors to a competitive site. Therefore, ensuring that the website is functioning optimally, room inventory is up to date and that all features are working smoothly are key to maximizing website satisfaction and boosting chances of conversion, and in the longer term, brand loyalty.    

 Let your website visitors be your consultants

Hospitality brands are always striving to understand what is important to their customers and what they can do to meet their needs. There are many ways to gather this information, but the most reliable and expedient method is to simply ask your customers what makes them tick, and online Voice of Customer (VoC) research is a great way to accomplish this initiative.

The advantage of online VoC research allows brands to interact directly with their customers – or potential customers, in the context of their current website experience. With the website experience fresh in their minds, the feedback they give will be accurate and not based on memory from an experience they had with your brand some time ago. Keeping the benefits of online voice of customer feedback in mind, however, there are some best practices in terms of what kinds of solutions to implement and questions to ask (as well as how to ask them) in order to get the information you want.

1) Understand your objective: It is important to understand that the type of solution you put in place plays a large role in the type of feedback you will get. For example, if you are looking to inform the site strategy, a representative sample of study participants will most accurately measure the consumer experience so that you can understand strengths and opportunities for improvement. If you want to address a particular issue or business need (ex. evaluate a microsite, new property page, feature usage, etc.) targeted sampling delivers a focused audience so as to optimize site initiatives.  This can be approached survey style or feedback style depending on objectives. Finally, if you want to know what needs to be fixed immediately on your website, comment cards (page level feedback) are the way to go as the bias is more negative since website visitors use them as a sounding board to share what is bothering them. Different VoC solutions serve specific purposes, and each plays a role in telling you what is happening on your website to help you build a stronger brand.

2) Respect your customers’ time: Once you have decided which VoC approach you want to use, the most important rule of thumb is to keep your online research as short as possible. This is true when website visitors fill out a survey on their desktop computer, and even more critical when responding to a mobile survey.  Research shows that after about 40 screen interactions, respondent drop off from a survey is exponential. (Source: iPerceptions Online Research and Predictive Modeling; Solicitation, Data Collection, Methodology and Supporting Numbers, 2006)

If the survey is too long, respondents are more than happy to let you know through the feedback mechanism itself, and this not only compromises the results you are trying to gather, but leaves a negative brand impression as well. Therefore, when it comes to the initial structure of the research, less is more; get the answers to the most burning questions first, and replace them with others as needed.

When designing an online survey, keep questions short and easy to digest – your website visitors don’t want to have to pull out a dictionary in order to understand what they are being asked. Moreover, if you talk over your visitors’ heads, they’ll not only abandon the survey, they’ll abandon your brand because they’ll think that you don’t understand them.

It’s best to keep the number of answer choices to a minimum. When your visitors have to scroll through a long list of possible answers, they become overwhelmed and impatient and simply choose the first option on the list. This pollutes the quality of your data, and also annoys your visitor.

3) It’s about them, not you: With this in mind, make sure to ask your customers questions that will help enhance their online experience so that they will want to not only book with you, but return to your website in the future and refer it on to others.  Understanding all areas of their experience is important to build your brand impression, because any snags your customers hit along the way can lead to frustration and thwart chances of booking in the short term, and repeat visits in the long term, which carries the risk of negatively affecting their brand opinion.

Therefore, iPerceptions developed a practical and intuitive strategic framework designed specifically for evaluating various elements of the online experience. Dissecting the experience through this model helps pinpoint website strengths and opportunities, and identifies which parts of the experience have the strongest influence on those longer term outcome measures that lead to website adoption and brand loyalty.    

Website feedback can keep you ahead of the curve

The increasing competitiveness within the hospitality industry is here to stay, making customer loyalty to any one brand that much more difficult to secure. Since brand experiences occur within the online channel – often primarily – this medium represents an excellent portal through which brand impressions can be nurtured, as well as a vehicle to listen to customer needs in order to stay ahead of the curve and promote brand growth.

• Have a Private Suite (#425) - to meet with and demonstrate our latest solutions to prospects and clients
• Host a Learning Lab entitled “Master the Art of Listening and Watch your Business Thrive”
• Participate in a Cornell Research Panel, alongside some of the biggest names in the industry

iPerceptions is a silver sponsor of the event and will be exhibiting its wares at booth #120.

Check out the complete lis of session here. 

Get a 20% discount off the registration price by entering code IPERTO1220 when you register online. 

In addition to giving website traffic a voice, iPerceptions offers session-level integration with Adobe, Tealeaf, and other best of-breed web analytics solutions. Drop by and also meet a strong advocate of such integration in Jim Parker, Director of Global Online Analytical Tools & Infrastructure at Dell, whose team has leveraged iPerceptions webValidator solution and integration capabilities with Adobe and Tealeaf, to help them increase conversion, reduce operational costs and lift brand experience.

Jim will be available to discuss Dell’s success and share advice with you at our booth on:

• March 21, from 6:00 pm to 7:30 pm
• March 22, from 12:00 pm to 1:30 pm

Even if you miss Jim, you can still stop by our booth to say hi and get complementary USB flash drive bracelets and Fernwood mint chocolate sandwiches (a famous Salt Lake City treat)!

The iPerceptions team hopes to see you at the event!

Giving mobile traffic a voice

Marketers value the ability to understand their website traffic. While they may infer much from observing visitor behavior, sometimes it’s more effective to ask the visitors directly. The mobile space requires the same insights in order to improve strategy, design conversion tactics and cater to the diverse needs of the mobile market.

Mobile visitors respond to surveys at the same rate

An initial concern was that visitors would not respond the same to random invitations on arrival served via mobile platforms as they do to traditional website invitations, which garner a 2-5% response rate. However, it turns out that mobile invitations yield results within the same range, meaning marketers can attach the same confidence to their mobile VoC analytics as they do to their traditional VoC analytics.

Note that we used and recommend a more succinct mobile survey; the average completion time on mobile was 2.2 minutes versus 4.8 for the traditional site survey.

Over two thirds of mobile visitors are “first-timers”

In our sample case, the majority of mobile visitors self-identify as “first-time” visitors, the opposite of what we find on the traditional site. While the new/returning ratio is reversed, we continue to find that new visitors produce slightly higher Overall Satisfaction ratings compared to returning visitors. This can be attributed to the larger share of new visitors coming to learn about products, which is typically a higher rated purpose of visit.

First-Time Visit

Visitors hesitant to purchase on mobile devices

iPerceptions maintains that the key to properly interpreting website results is understanding visitors’ intentions. This perspective has helped us optimize the visitor experience for thousands of websites. 

Our sample case demonstrates that the main purpose of visit (i.e. learn about products) is platform agnostic. This is advantageous as it gives marketers the ability to implement similar strategies for both traditional and mobile platforms. Further, the outcome metrics and KPIs by which these strategies are measured can be similar, if not identical. However, the share of visitors who came to purchase on the mobile site is lower than on the traditional site, demonstrating a reluctance to purchase via mobile. That, or “faster” tasks lend themselves better to mobile, while more involved tasks are reserved for the traditional web. These differences may ease over time, as more consumers acclimatize themselves to the notion of mobile purchasing. It should be noted that this slower adoption mirrors the online purchasing behavior seen during the infancy of online shopping, a condition that has since resolved itself.

Purpose of Visit

Traditional website visitors still more successful

Where our sample case displays significant differences between traditional and mobile is in the success rate of visitors completing their stated purpose of visit. Traditional site visitors are performing much better than their mobile counterparts across all purposes of visit. The traditional web allows “learners” to complete their purpose at a much higher rate, and mobile browsers seeking “support” are falling significantly behind their traditional web peers.

Task Completion

These results can be attributed to one, or a combination, of three things: First, content is insufficient to meet mobile visitors’ needs, which may have been misjudged to begin with. Second, poor mobile design fails to meet mobile visitors’ usability requirements. Finally, the technical limitations of the mobile platform are forcing designers to create new designs that do not meet the expectations set by the traditional web platform.

Visitors accept new mobile platform shortcomings

It is interesting to note that, despite lower Task Completion scores for mobile, and the typical correlation between Satisfaction and Task Completion, mobile visitors produce higher satisfaction scores than traditional web users. This suggests that mobile visitors may be more accepting of weaknesses in the newer mobile platforms, giving mobile designers sufficient time to respond and optimize their design to meet expanding user demands.

Overall Satisfaction

The following information is based on immediate post-experience feedback from 87,273 mobile and traditional site visitors between January 23 and February 21, 2012.

This blog post was written by Lane Cochrane, Christopher Pam and Erin Polka.

iPerceptions is a Showcase Sponsor of the event and will be exhibiting at booth #119, where we will be giving out:

• 4 GB USB Flash Drive Bracelets
• 2 OZ Boxes of Fernwood Mint Chocolate Sandwiches 

Come for the free gifts, and stay to learn how iPerceptions integrates with Adobe solutions, providing enhanced analysis and insight. 

For more information about the Summit, click here.

The reuslts support everyone’s “gut feeling” that mobile visitors have different expectations and experiences than traditional visitors. However, the extent of these differences will surprise you.

Curious to see the results? Stop by the iPerceptions booth (#100) and pick up a copy of the report.

But don’t wait! The report will only be available in-print at eMetrics San Francisco, and only while quantities last!

Wishing you an educational and inspiring conference.

iPerceptions is a silver sponsor of the event and will exhibiting its wares at booth #100.

Check out the complete lis of session here.

Get a 20% discount off the registration price by entering code IPERSF1220 when you register online.