FREEDyourMind

The ROI of Customer Satisfaction: Royal Canadian Mint Case Study

Big thanks to Robb Collins from the Royal Canadian Mint, Bill Zujewski from ATG and our own Kevin Ertell for the great webinar last Tuesday. Royal Canadian Mint shared a case study about how they use voice of customer analysis to build the business case for a redesign and adoption of an improved e-commerce platform. The improvements led to a 22% increase in online revenue and a 25% increase in customer satisfaction during one of the toughest holiday seasons in years.

If you couldn't make the webinar, you can watch the recording.

It's definitely worth a look if you're thinking about how to invest in areas of your website with the most ROI and how to measure the impact of the website on multichannel sales. 
 
Would love your feedback if you were able to attend or watch the recording after the fact.

 

Satisfaction with E-Gov Hits New High

Great news from the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) E-Government Index today: an all-time high. In fact, the highest score in six years of measurement and the biggest quarter-over-quarter increase ever.

Download the full, free report here.

So, to what do I attribute the increase?

1) We are almost a year into the most tech-savvy presidency in history. At times, it has seemed to me that President Obama has struggled to find footing with social media recommendations that could confuse priorities and shift attention away from the core business of e-government: communication information via the web. But I think this study is pretty convincing evidence that as he settles into his stride, his leadership is improving e-gov. The score didn't go up just a little bit. It went up 2% and almost 2 points to 75.2. This represents almost 300,000 citizen surveys, so an increase of two points and 2% is significant.

2) We did some analysis and found the longer a federal website has been measuring satisfaction, the bigger the improvements, over both the long term and short term. Those that have been measuring 5 or more years had the biggest increases, followed by those who have been measuring for four years, and so on. After all, you can't manage what you can't measure. So while the Obama administration deserves some of the credit, the truth is that the sites with the biggest increases have been watching these issues for YEARS, long before President Obama was even elected to national office. Federal web managers have been working HARD on this stuff, and there is a core group running e-gov that is really committed to listening to Voice of Citizen. They are committed to using e-gov to better serve the citizenry, and they can't do that without understanding what citizens want and need from their government online.

It's an exciting time for e-gov. While we will doubtless see ups and downs over the next quarters, satisfaction overall has been on the upswing, even outperforming some private sector industries. E-gov is one of the things that the federal government seems to be doing really well for the most part. There is always room for improvement, especially if expectations continue to increase. But there are a lot of individual sites doing very, very well.

Latest E-Gov Satisfaction Scores out on Tuesday.

I can't wait to share the latest American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) scores for e-government due out Tuesday.  The results are remarkable.  We are now three quarters into the new "technology savvy" administration, and it will be interesting to see if this has had any impact on the satisfaction scores. 

This report is useful and interesting for a couple of reasons:

1) We can see the trend in citizen satisfaction with e-government overall. The trend over the last six years is generally up, though the recent trend has been stagnation. Tuesday's report will shed light on whether any of the efforts of the Obama administration have come to fruition in terms of improving citizen satisfaction with e-gov initiatives.

2) We can see how indivdual websites are doing compared to each other, compared to the private sector, and compared to themselves over time. There are 104 individual government websites included in the report from virtually every agency and department. Each website gets a score on a 100-point scale; the higher the better. Anything over 80 is generally considered excellent. Which websites have made the biggest improvements over the last quarter? Over the last year? Which sites are better than Amazon and Google? Which sites aren't doing so well?

3) We can quantify the role of online satisfaction on citizens' likelihood to return to the site, recommend it, even use it as a primary resource. We can do this in aggregate for the federal government overall, and for individual sites.

The data is being compiled and reported as we speak--everyone is busily getting everything together for the release on Tuesday.

This report is useful and interesting for a couple of reasons:

1) We can see the trend in citizen satisfaction with e-government overall. The trend over the last six years is generally up, though the recent trend has been stagnation. Tuesday's report will shed light on whether any of the efforts of the Obama administration have come to fruition in terms of improving citizen satisfaction with e-gov initiatives.

2) We can see how indivdual websites are doing compared to each other, compared to the private sector, and compared to themselves over time. There are 104 individual government websites included in the report from virtually every agency and department. Each website gets a score on a 100-point scale; the higher the better. Anything over 80 is generally considered excellent. Which websites have made the biggest improvements over the last quarter? Over the last year? Which sites are better than Amazon and Google? Which sites aren't doing so well?

3) We can quantify the role of online satisfaction on citizens' likelihood to return to the site, recommend it, even use it as a primary resource. We can do this in aggregate for the federal government overall, and for individual sites.

The data is being compiled and reported as we speak--everyone is busily getting everything together for the release on Tuesday.

Entrepreneurs drive job growth

Interesting story highlighted in The Daily Stat from Harvard Business Publishing.  According to the Kauffman Foundation, since 1980 companies less than five years old have accounted for virtually all net new job creation in the US.  Entrepreneurs surveyed reported that in the past year more then 1/3 of the entrepreneurs reduced jobs while only 5% have added employees. 

Is enough being done to stimulate entrepreneurial initiatives and job growth at small companies ?

Social Media Segments

Social Media, the often talked about and yet still very gray and fuzzy area.  Wikipedia defines Social Media as follows:

"Social media is online content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. It's a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologues (one to many) into dialogs (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. Social media has become extremely popular because it allows people to connect in the online world to form relationships for personal, political and business use. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM)."

So, using wikipedia, a form of social media, to define social media.  Hmmmm...
This is a very broad definition and many things will fall underneath this definition. What should marketers do about social media?  The first step is to add some segmentation to the definition.

I would categorize social media into 3 areas:

1. Controlled Social Media: This is sponsored content within your own domain. This includes content that is sponsored by the company (site owner) such as interactive customer reviews on your own website, company blogs, etc.You can oversee and moderate this type of environment.
2. Sponsored Social Media: This is sponsored content outside your domain.  A company Facebook, Twitter page, YouTube channel, or a LinkedIn group are good examples.  You are in control of the messages in this segment of social media.
3. Viral Social Media: This is non-sponsored content outside your domain.  This is the category that keeps us all up at night--the comments and blog posts people are making about us  and the discussions that our customers are having about us  They are having them everywhere and we have no control over what is being said and what is being read.  We can try to monitor it, but we cannot control it.

The Controlled Social Media segment and the Sponsored Social Media segment are marketing driven.  Some efforts have been successful and although we have better ways to measure and manage these segments, many are still struggling to understand the value and impact these efforts have.

The Viral Social Media segment is out of our control.  Some have figured out how to monitor it and some have figured out how to count it.  But very few have figured out how to measure the impact it has and the value it provides us.

It is important as you move more down the social media path, you understand the difference between the three segments and adjust your plans, objectives and measurements to take into account all three segments.

What Drives the Best Quality Website Traffic?

Our new VP of Retail Strategy, Kevin Ertell (well, I guess he's not so new anymore) has a white paper out today about what kinds of customer acquisition sources drive the best traffic to retail websites. He did this analysis based on our Top 100 research, where we survey about 23,000 visitors to the top 100 retail websites (by sales volume).

The short answer? There is no short answer! You have to look at what drives the most traffic and what drives the best traffic. In the chart below (and in the white paper, available on our website as part of our Top 100 research), you can see which customer acquisition sources drove the MOST traffic (familiarity with the brand, promotional emails, advertising, word of mouth) and which drove the BEST traffic, meaning that it drove visitors who are more likely to buy (online or offline), recommend, and return to the site.

What most influenced your decision to visit the site?	% of respondents	Satisfaction	Likelihood to Return	Likelihood to Purchase Offline	Likelihood to Purchase Online	Likelihood to Recommend
Brand
Familiarity with site/company/brand	32%	77	84	66	76	79
Email Marketing
Promotional e-mail(s) from the company	13%	75	83	61	74	77
Advertising
Advertising: internet	12%	72	74	60	70	72
Advertising: TV, radio, newspaper, magazine	9%	72	75	65	69	73
Advertising: social networks	1%	66	67	63	67	67
Word of Mouth
Word of mouth: recommendations from someone I know	8%	74	79	58	73	77
Word of mouth: recommendations from a social networking site	3%	74	77	61	72	76
Word of mouth: product review website(s)	2%	71	74	65	70	72
Word of mouth: blogs or online forums	1%	67	72	52	67	69
Search
Search: search engine results	9%	69	71	55	66	70
Search: Link from a shopping comparison site	2%	67	70	55	66	68
Other
Couldn't find what I was looking for in one of its stores or catalogs	4%	68	73	67	66	69
Had a gift card I wanted to redeem	2%	70	75	60	71	71
Mobile phone text messages or alerts	0.3%	63	64	62	68	65

Kevin explores the value of social media customer acquisition sources and comes to the conclusion that while there is a lot of potential, they are still not the end-all-be-all you might think they are based on how much we talk about them.

The chart above represents aggregate data from the top 100 e-retailers. Tell me in the comments how you evaluate the quality of different acquisition sources? Have you integrated clickstream and satisfaction data so that you can compare and contrast traffic from specific sources? Tell us what surprised you most.

Congratulations to Dr. Fornell

Dr. Claes Fornell, the founder of the American Customer Satisfaction Index, and a Business School Professor at the Ross Business School at the University of Michigan, was recently given a great, and well deserved, honor.  He was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Stockholm School of Economics at its centennial celebration before the King and Queen of Sweden.  This took place at the Blue Hall of Stockholm City Hall, the venue that hosts the Nobel Prize dinner every year.

While not a stranger to honorary degrees, I am sure this one was even more meaningful to Dr. Fornell, taking place at such a prestigious location, by such a prestigious academic institution, in his home country of Sweden.

Without hesitation, Dr. Fornell is one of the smartest guys I know and is very well deserving of this honor.  His research in the study of the consumer is unmatched. Here is the rest of the story.

Without Dr. Fornell's work, we would not have the technology of the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) and therefore we would not have ForeSee Results!  So, while we at ForeSee Results don't have an honorary degree to bestow on Dr. Fornell, we do give him our admiration and gratitude.

Congratulations Claes!