FREEDyourMind

Honda.com Has Best Auto Website

Automotive websites have a tough mission: they need to inspire brand loyalty and encourage sales and dealer visits without actually selling cars online, since most people will obviously buy a car in person.  Their mission is not unlike other brand-based websites that don’t conduct e-commerce, but the auto industry doesn’t seem to pay nearly as much attention to the web channel as the consumer-packaged good industry, for example, does.

Therefore, we’re launching the inaugural ForeSee Results Automotive Website Satisfaction Index, and we released our first set of findings today. Read about them in the Detroit Free Press or feel free to download a copy of the study from our website.

Here’s what we found: On the ACSI’s 100-point scale, Honda.com did best and NissanUSA.com did worst. The industry aggregate was 78. Individual automotive website scores are as follows:

    * Honda.com: 80
    * Chrysler.com: 79
    * FordVehicles.com: 79
    * Chevrolet.com: 77
    * Toyota.com: 77
    * NissanUSA.com: 76

The study also found that Honda.com does the best job leveraging the website to get visitors to buy a vehicle or visit a dealer. Chevrolet.com, FordVehicles.com, and NissanUSA.com were tied for being the least likely to influence customers to purchase a vehicle. Visitors to FordVehicles.com were the least likely to visit a dealer.

Considering the fact that top e-retailers like Amazon have scores in the high eighties, these guys still have a lot of work to do. However, it is impressive that Honda is doing such a great job leveraging their website to encourage dealer visits and sales.

The commentary has some specific usability examples that may be of interest.

The State of Our Union is Strong

Watching discussion of all the thorny political issues raised in this campaign has me thinking about the state of our union. Since ForeSee Results was founded in late 2001, we have: 

• Over 28 million completed customer surveys measuring satisfaction with online marketing and e-commerce initiatives, including:
  • Over 9 million completed customer surveys in 2007.
  • Over 1 million completed customer surveys in December 2007.
  • Over 500,000 surveys presented in a single day last holiday season.
• More than 30 benchmarks, including:
  • Industry benchmarks like retail, financial services, healthcare, federal government, and product companies and
  • Functional benchmarks that measure specific aspects of an online experience, such as browse, checkout, fulfillment, etc.
• Over 550 active measures across dozens of industries
• Major new investment in functionality, technology, and delivery.

It’s great to see that the ACSI has become such an industry standard online, and it’s an exciting time to be in this business!

Satisfaction with E-Gov is Down

Every quarter, we help the University of Michigan with the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) E-Government Satisfaction Index. We measure more than 100 federal government websites to see a) overall, are citizens satisfied with online government initiatives and b) how satisfied are they with individual sites?

The answer this quarter isn’t great: satisfaction is down for the third quarter in a row, and now it’s at its lowest score in more than three years. You can get the report, with ACSI scores and analysis for 100+ federal websites here.

One of the reasons I think the scores are dipping is the lame duck effect. President Bush, love him or hate him, has spent administration time and energy on e-gov, through making it one of the five goals of the President’s Management Agenda and through other means. But there’s no certainty about what a new administration may mean for e-gov initiatives, and I think that may make them hesitant to make the changes they need to make to keep satisfaction up. Steve Barr, federal columnist for the Washington Post, told a colleague that he usually doesn’t see the lame duck effect until summer, but he could see that might be part of it. He also mentioned that a lot of agencies got their budgets late, and that could be part of the problem as well.

A scan of the presidential candidates’ websites shows that only Barack Obama has anything significant about e-gov as part of their campaign platform, and his point is more about using e-gov for transparency than for citizens' convenience and ease or for cost-saving measures. After a very quick look, I don’t see anything on either Clinton’s or McCain’s website specifically about e-gov. (Though, you can compare your NCAA picks with John McCain, a crucial feature neither of the other candidates offers!). So who knows what the future holds for e-gov. It seems clear that it will have to be a priority of any administration both because it can save the federal government so much money and because it should be the mission of any administration to be citizen-centric, which is what the web is all about. But 2/3 of the candidates don't seem to be thinking much about it yet.

Hopefully I’ll be posting more often in the coming weeks. We’re coming down off a crazy period that has had me running dawn ‘til dusk.