FREEDyourMind

Measuring How Website Drive Demand for Consumer Brands

This Wednesday, we're doing a webinar with Lacoste about how they are using their e-commerce site (first launched in 2007) to both support online and offline sales while also encouraging affinity to the luxury brand.

Maryssa Miller, Director of E-Commerce for Lacoste, will share her case study about how online customer satisfaction data has helped Lacoste gauge customer expectations and guide improvements that increase both sales and demand for the brand.

In addition, Sucharita Mulpuru with Forrester is joining us to discuss the challenges faced by consumer brands that sell direct and through retail partners. She's going to talk about the role customer metrics can play in mitigating channel conflict.

It's a free webinar. Click here to register. Maryssa is great and always has a lot of really interesting insights. Her session was one of the highest-rated session at our 2008 User Conference.

Interview with Omniture

We've been working with Omniture for a long time now, integrating our customer-satisfaction-based VOC data with their clickstream data to provide our joint clients (like the Atlanta Journal-Constitution) with deeper and more valuable insights into online behavior.

Chris Parkin interviewed me for his blog recently.

ACSI Results: Google Rules the Roost Again

Here are a few highlights of the ACSI E-Business Report, released today (and every August) and measuring portals, search engines, and news & information sites:

• ACSI scores for the e-business sector are way up: up 5.5% to an all-time high of 79.3 on the ACSI's 100-point scale. The jump is mostly due to Google's huge 10% increase to 86, the highest score ever achieved by any company in the e-business survey.
• Yahoo! had a brief lead over Google last year, but dropped 3% this year. The company has been dealing with too much to make customer satisfaction a top priority.
• Ask.com is down just a bit after a huge increase last year, but still maintains a huge improvement over time (they are up 19% since first being measured).

What I see is a fundamental shift in the way people are using and accessing the Internet. Search engines are gaining market share faster than portals as people move increasingly towards using search AS a portal to the internet. I think this shift is going to marginalize companies whose main business model is related to more traditional portal functionality, and we see that marginalization predicted by the ACSI results.

At this point Google and Ask.com are the only two e-business companies being measured by the ACSI that are enjoying any significant growth that has been sustained over time. Since satisfaction is a proven predictor of financial success, loyalty, word-of-mouth recommendations and even stock prices, the other measured companies should really watch out.

Get a free copy of the full report here.

So do the results surprise you? Were you expecting such a huge increase from Google this year?

ACSI Results Tomorrow

Keep an eye out for the ACSI scores for e-business companies, which will be released tomorrow morning and which are usually well-covered by the media. The following portals and search engines will be rated on the ACSI's 100-point scale in terms of how well they satisfy customers: AOL, Ask.com, Google, MSN, and Yahoo! These numbers are closely watched by analysts and investors as they have been scientifically proven to predict financial performance, loyalty, and even stock prices.

Last August, Yahoo very slightly edged out Google for the first time. Any early predictions for this year?