FREEDyourMind

Kellogg's Case Study Webinar: Online Customer Satisfaction

Whether or not you made the LaCoste webinar last week, I hope you'll join us this coming Thursday for another webinar with Kelloggs.

Paul Iagnocco, Director of E-Businesses at Kellogg, is going to talk about how customer satisfaction metrics can guide evaluation and decision-making for a website that is not primarily used for e-commerce. He'll talk about how to address the needs of different audiences across multiple brands and how to effectively use the website as a promotions channel. I think he'll be talking mainly about his experience with the main website (kelloggs.com) as well as with two brand sites (keebler.com and morningstarfarms.com).

If you run a website that is not primarily used as a sales channel, I think you'll find his insights pretty interesting. The webinar is being done in conjunction with the AMA, and you can register to attend here.

Simple Tips on Managing Website Visitor Expectations

Here's how I define satisfaction:

Satisfaction = What You Get + What You Expect

So one of the ways to manage satisfaction is to manage visitor expectations. A couple of examples:

#1  We work with a CPG brand site that sells all its products through third party retailers. The retailers themselves set the prices, and so the brand site itself doesn't have info on prices. Through surveys, they found out people are coming to the site for 3 reasons: 1) to find a product 2) to check out specs 3) to get a price. Based on this intelligence, the web team had been fighting corporate policy to try and get permission to post prices, which just wouldn't work. Finally, they decided to just make a note on the website, letting  visitors know that they won't find prices and why. This turned out to be a simple solution that effectively managed expectations.

#2 We work with a service company that provides an online price quote engine. However, you cannot actually purchase the service online, because the business model is to funnel business to local offices. So not only can you not complete the transaction online, when you try to, you get a screen that says to "call local office" which could even imply that you've made a mistake. People were getting annoyed that they had been through the whole process online only to be routed to a local office at the end.  Our recommendation - inform the visitor upfront about the quote process rather than try to change the business model.  It was a really simple idea that hadn't been considered.

#3 Many retailers  forget to update their promotions (both on site and email) based on product inventory.  How would you feel after receiving an email promoting that hot new product you want and after visiting the site and seeing that home page promotion of the same product only to find out when going to check out that the product is out of stock.  Your expectations are not met and you leave dissatisfied.  Isn't honesty the best policy? Don't promote those out of stock products.

If your visitors or customers are  unhappy with an aspect of your website, our advice is usually that if it is an item that has a high impact on your overall satisfaction, you should change it or improve it however you can. However, sometimes for practical or business reasons that just isn't possible. You know what they say--the best offense is a good defense. Sometimes the best defense can be to manage expectations.

Justifying Creative Risk and Innovation with Metrics

Shane Atchison (of Zaaz) made a point in his keynote address at our True North conference that has had me thinking: you can use metrics to justify (and even encourage!) creative risks.

Creative types are sometimes the last people to want to rely on voice of customer feedback, but trust me, it can help make the business case for innovation. If, for example, you want to take some design risks or innovate a new feature or function on your site, your VOC analytics can show upper management that customer sat with those elements is low, and that changing them could have a huge impact on retention, loyalty, and purchase behavior. Then the proof will be in the pudding: make the changes and see how the numbers shift.

One of our clients, Ask.com tried their first "3D" redesign as an AB test against their existing site design. They were able to use our satisfaction data to register higher satisfaction and project higher loyalty and retention for the new design. They took it all the way to the top and used the satisfaction metrics in their business case because over the years, they've seen customer satisfaction be a leading indicator of loyalty and retention. They got approval to roll out the last design last April . . . to rave reviews. Satisfaction with their site continued to climb, validating the innovation from the site visitors' point of view.

True North: Day 2

I have a million things I want to blog about after sitting in on these two days of sessions with clients. I'm not so good at the "live blogging" thing, but a quick recap of Day 2, in the meantime:

We had a great session on how to keep management's attention on the customer and on satisfaction metrics, with insights from Bert DuMars, from Newell Rubbermaid, Jack Dunlavery from Citi Credit Cards, Kevin Ertell from Borders, and Pam Hedman from St. John Health. (If any of you other than Bert have a blog, let me know so I can link to you!). These folks had some great ideas on how to do this . . . my favorite was termed "infiltrating minds," and I'll have to do a separate post on that one!

Next up was a great case study from Bruce Rogers at Forbes on how they used a Usability Audit to fine-tune performance of their luxury travel site. It takes a brave man to let Jennifer Bailey, our lead on usability, air his "usability violations" for the greater good and education. A few people told me this was one of their favorite sessions because they saw how actionable the usability audit can be.

We closed the morning with a great case study from Maryssa Miller at Lacoste, who showed why customer satisfaction is just as important, if not more so, for a luxury brand whose customers may have even higher expectations of the online experience. She showed us how some very, very simple insights into what their customers want and expect has had a big impact.

I told my marketing team this morning--this conference was so great that I think we should do one again next month! They shot me a dirty look for that one, but truly, we all had a really good time and hopefully learned a lot from each other.

How Kellogg Uses Customer Sat To Measure Website Value

Brandweek Magazine did an article this week about how we helped Kellogg quantify the contribution of several of their key brand websites on long-term customer loyalty, brand perception, and overall customer relationships.  This can be a huge challenge for brand managers—how do you tell if the website is strengthening customer relationships and influencing their future behaviors if you can’t measure that in terms of online sales?

Well, you do so by applying the methodology of the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), which is the only metric that has been scientifically and academically proven to be predictive of loyalty, ROI, and future financial performance.  When you can’t measure sales, you can measure satisfaction, which predicts the future behaviors that lead to sales.

By using the actionable data that the ACSI methodology provides, Kellogg was able to make several changes that resulted in tangible rewards and quantifiable proof that their websites were actively helping build customer relationships and influence loyalty.

And hey, I can't resist saying it, now they're grrrrreeeeat!

 

Webinar With Border's Books

We had a great webinar with Kevin Ertell (VP of E-Business) at Border’s last week. Even if you missed it, you can click here to hear the pre-recorded session.

We’ve worked with Kevin back in his Tower Records days and more recently at Border’s, where he’s been developing an e-commerce site that will launch in early 2008 to compete with Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com.

 

The webinar focused on how he has been measuring the impact of his comprehensive e-newsletter program on loyalty, and how he’s using voice-of-customer feedback to redesign the Border’s site in anticipation of the 2008 launch. Kevin also spoke at our Customer 2.0 event in Ann Arbor in early September, and is always great at offering colleagues really practical, tactical solutions for the challenges all e-retailers and e-marketers face.

St. John's Use of Customer Sat Metrics

Check out the recent article about the value of measuring customer satisfaction online, written for Health Leaders Magazine by Pam Hedman at St. John Health System, a group of 8 hospitals and more than 125 medical facilities in Michigan. St. John is a client of ours–they’ve been measuring customer satisfaction online for about four years now, and wanted to share how customer satisfaction metrics helped them figure out that:

• the composition of site visitors was entirely different than what they expected, requiring changes to the site to address the needs of very specific audiences that weren’t previously considered significant
• improvements      to search more than to any other area of functionality would have the      greatest ROI
• improvements needed to be made to a transactional component of the website, resulting in a 138% increase in site traffic and a much better understanding of what was driving customer acquisition and retention.

Pam also talks about how she used customer satisfaction data to justify budget decisions and secure the funding she needs for web initiatives. Thanks, Pam, for the great article!