FREEDyourMind

Psychopathicos

You must check out Ron Shevlin’s great post today on his proposed Psychopathicos Index.

It’s a natural bestseller!

Voice of Customer Analysis

At a recent conference, I heard a CMO say that what she liked best about her customer satisfaction vendor was that she got a list of open-ended comments every day. It made her feel like she had her finger on the pulse of what her clients were thinking and saying and feeling. Her vendor would lump comments in to positive or negative buckets for her, so she felt like she’d have an early warning sign if the tide started to shift against her company.

Like most things in life, getting value out of open-ended comments is unfortunately a bit more complicated than that. You need to be able to take customer comments in the right context—not giving too much oil to the squeaky wheel, not ignoring the people who are mostly happy except for a few small issues that can and should be addressed just because they don’t complain loudly enough.

A comment by itself is just a loud voice. We want to hear that voice, but we want to hear it in context.

1. How satisfied and how likely to buy are the people leaving those comments? You might get a cluster of comments complaining about prices, but when you crosscheck the comments with the satisfaction scores, you see that all the people who are complaining about prices are likely to buy anyway. Should you be scrambling to change prices in that case?

You might get another cluster of comments with mild complaints about fulfillment, only to find out when you cross-reference their comment with their likely future behaviors that this particular complaint is actually keeping people from coming back.

Which of those two issues should be top on your agenda?

2. Let comments shed light on things you already know are a problem, but don’t let them decide what the priorities should be. Just looking at comments is not a scientific way to determine what the real issues are. But comments can help you hone in on things that your scientific surveys have already identified as problems.

The key here is to be able to weight voice of customer. Every customer is important, but not every customer’s voice should be equal when you’re making business decisions. You have to have a way to make what you learn in open-ended comments actionable, and using customer satisfaction to analyze and group open-ended comments can help you do that.

The Trouble With Page-Level Surveys

It’s becoming more and more common for companies to deploy opt-in page-level surveys in order to hone-in on problems with specific pages.

The problem is that if something isn’t working for you on a website, you don’t complain on that page, you complain when you are good and frustrated 3 pages later. The first time something doesn’t work, you aren’t necessarily going to pipe up and tell someone with an opt-in survey, you’re going to poke around for a few seconds and try to figure it out on your own.

The results can be misleading.

ForeSee Results Acquires Red Spade

We’re thrilled to announce our first acquisition—a Chicago usability consulting firm called Red Spade that we had heard great things about from their clients like Best Buy, Borders, JC Penney, Lands End, Walgreens, and DTE Energy. ForeSee Results uses the methodology of the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) to help online businesses determine which areas of online improvement would have the greatest impact on satisfaction, likelihood to purchase, loyalty, word of mouth and ROI. By adding usability audits, we’ll be able to provide companies with specific prescriptive information based on usability best-practices about the changes they should make to increase satisfaction and influence customer behavior. The ACSI methodology will focus the usability audits so that companies don’t have the expense of a site-wide audit. Jennifer and Kay over at Red Spade are moving their office from Chicago to join us in Ann Arbor on October 1, and we can’t wait to integrate them into the team!

Customer 2.0 Conference!

Today kicks off the first day of our  first Customer 2.0  Conference in Ann Arbor—a chance for our clients and others to learn more about how their peers are applying the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) online.

I’m looking forward today to hearing from Eric Peterson about how voice of customer data fits into an integrated web analytics system. We’ll also be hearing from clients like Best Buy, Citibank, Borders, DTE Energy, and State of Michigan about how they’re using their data to improve online operations and ROI. More later!