FREEDyourMind

Announcing a Beautiful, Bouncing . . . New Technology!

ForeSee Results is proud to announce our latest innovation, CS SessionReplay, introduced today at eMetrics in San Jose.

CS SessionReplay is a brand new technology that lets you record and watch actual site visitor sessions in our Online Portal, enabling you to extend the benefits of your ACSI-driven satisfaction analysis of key visitor segments down to the individual respondent level. In other words, let satisfaction data and open-ended comments show you which sessions will be useful and relevant, and then watch what your users are actually doing on your site, including their mouse clicks and movements, page scrolling, form entry, and all interactivity with a website (all while adhering to the strictest privacy and security standards). It even skips over idle time so that you're just watching the good parts, just like TiVo for your website!

Here's a link to watch a video showing you how it works. Caution: it starts playing as soon as you click the link, so turn your volume down if you don't want to blast everyone away! It's about a minute long. CS SessionReplay Video. (Look closely and you may just see Jim Sterne and Eric Peterson!)

The clients that are already using it are finding it's a great way to get usability insights without the cost or artificial environment of a usability lab. The addition of CS SessionReplay to existing customer satisfaction analytics and usability services allows ForeSee Results to provide a single, unified platform which links recordings of visitor sessions, customer satisfaction scores and impacts, comments and feedback about a site, and third-party data--all in one place--which is good news for companies who want to simplify without losing functionality or analytics capabilities.

We bought the technology from Nitobi last year and have been working furiously to integrate it with our platform and get it ready for prime time. It finally is, and we couldn't be prouder. Great job to everyone on our technology team and product team, who did an amazing job creating a valuable solution for companies struggling in a recession.

Perception is Better Then Reality

I had an interesting conversation at an industry event a short while ago that is worth sharing.  To protect the innocent, let's use the name Sam.  Sam was questioning the value of voice of customer analytics.  His premise was "why do I care what they say, I care what they do.  Satisfaction, attitude and perception are soft and fluffy.  Give me hard data that I can rely on, clicks, hits, page views, conversion rates and sales."

My answer -- perception is reality, better yet, perception is better then reality.

Well, what do you think?  Which is correct?

Let's dive a little deeper.  I can understand where Sam is coming from.  Real numbers are good.  I know when I am looking at our financials I want real numbers, not opinions and perceptions.  I know when I am looking at the shrinking stock market, I want real numbers, not excuses and opinions.  So why do I want perceptions, intent, attitudes and opinions when talking about something as important as the success of my website. 

There is more to the visitor then today.  There is tomorrow - what the visitor will do in the future - will they return, recommend my site to others, will they be loyal?  There has been a lot of work done in years past on the lifetime value of a customer.  That is an important concept. 

What the visitor will do in the future is directly dependent on their perception of the experience today.

The visitor may have bought today.  But will they buy tomorrow?  If they were satisfied they will. If they were not satisfied they won't buy from you in the future - they will go elsewhere.  The visitor's perception of the experience (their satisfaction) will determine what they do in the future.  Their perception of the experience is far more important then the actual and factual experience.

Shopper Satisfaction Holding Steady During the Holidays

We released our second weekly holiday benchmark this morning.

Here's the bad news: satisfaction is still down year over year. But there is a real silver lining, and that is that satisfaction is maintaining from Cyber Monday--it has not fallen off in the week after one of the biggest online shopping days of the year. In fact, purchase intent is higher this week than it was at any point during November. If you're looking for good news in a bleak landscape, this is it!

I think all of us watched the good results from Cyber Monday and wondered if that was it. Did people do all their shopping the weekend after Thanksgiving to take advantage of deals? Would we see shopping fall off the rest of December?

I think we have all adjusted expectations--we are not going to see 15%-20% year-over-year increases like we have in years past. But everything I'm seeing tells me it also won't be as bad as some predicted at the beginning of the season.

But perhaps the bigger story than what will happen to e-retail overall is what will happen to individual retailers. Our benchmark covers more than 80 retailers, and we've collected more than 330,000 e-retail surveys over the last 5 weeks (more than 70,000 just in the week after Cyber Monday). When we're looking at that many shoppers of that many online retailers, there is going to be a huge range of satisfaction--some retailers as high as 90 (on our 100-point scale) and some are, well, a LOT lower than that.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: an economic crisis can be a huge opportunity for e-retailers to solidify loyalty and to really differentiate themselves in terms of customer satisfaction. Really, for anyone in any industry to do so. Satisfied customers are the last to leave, no matter how tight their personal finances get.

KPI's Are Old School: Let's Focus on KSI's

A lot of smart, good, well-respected people talk about key performance indicators (KPI's), including Eric Peterson's excellent Big Book of KPI's. So I don't want to knock KPI's. And for a long time, KPI's have often been an excellent measure, but of performance, not necessarily success.

Maybe this is an issue of semantics, but I don't think so. I want to make a case that KPI's should be supplemented with KSI's (key SUCCESS indicators).

When you're measuring performance, you're looking at what has already happened. Things like how long it takes a page to load, how many visitors, bounce rates, search results . . . all those things reflect what has already happened.

The problem is, we measure what we know how to measure: performance. Measuring success is a much harder thing to get your mind wrapped around. Sure, you can measure sales as an indicator of success, but even that reflects what has already happened. Conversion rate is another good example that tends more towards being an indicator of success than just performance, but again is backward looking. And for that matter, conversion rate can often be a very misleading metric.  If you've ever heard me speak, you've probably heard me ask: how can you steer a car in the right direction if you're always looking in the rear-view mirror?

The bottom line is that behavioral data is backward looking. Important data, yes. Valuable data, yes. Insightful data, yes. But it doesn't help you as much as it could. The other issue is that behavioral data doesn't really measure the success of the experience and therefore the long-term value to the organization.

Satisfaction data, when measured correctly, is forward looking. Academic studies show that certain satisfaction methodologies can actually predict the future. They can tell you what your customers are likely to do tomorrow.

Some examples of KSI's: satisfaction, purchase intent, likelihood to recommend, likelihood to use the website as a primary channel, etc. In other words, KSI's = future behaviors.

The Limitations of Traditional Online Surveys

I could probably write a book with this title (hey...there's an idea!), but the reason I'm thinking of it now is that I was just popped a survey on a magazine website.

It asked all the basic demographic information that might be useful for research. But so much more was left on the table.  It is great to gather information, but if you are going to put your site visitors through a survey, make sure you are making the most of the opportunity. 

Some quick thoughts (or you could call them "must haves"):

• Make sure you are getting a representative audience to complete the survey.  Without it you have individuals opinions (there is some value there) but with a representative audience you have taken the first step towards having a useful metric.
• Demographics can be important,  but lets also understand what is driving their satisfaction and what is likely to result from the online experience (loyalty, retention, purchase online, purchase offline, etc.).
• Understand the relationship between those drivers of satisfaction, overall satisfaction, future behaviors and financial success. It is great to know where we are today, but the holy grail is to know what we need to do to improve -- and what impact it will have on our success.  This is not an easy task, but it is the key to turning voice of customer into actionable information.
• Rely on a proven methodology.

I like to think of it as "applying science to voice of customer."

Our London Office

I'm thrilled to formally announce the opening of our office in London along with the names of a bunch of clients we'll be working with in the UK, including 3M, Ask.co.uk, eBuyer, eHarmony, Harper Collins, Kellogg, McAfee, and Shopping.co.uk. You can read more in the press release on our website.

Neil Davis is our business development manager in the UK, and you can reach him at neil.davis@foreseeresults.com or 011-44-1403-25-8522.

We're already working with private companies and governments around the world, including in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Norway, Russia, all over the UK, and of course here in the United States.

We're also working with US-based companies in many other countries. A lot of companies want to compare satisfaction between all their English-language sites around the world or even among all their sites in all languages.

This office makes a great addition to the ForeSee team and continues the exciting growth we're experiencing!

Shameless Self-Promotion

Thanks to Shane Atchison over at Zaaz for interviewing me for his ClickZ column this week on a very important topic: the ROI of Customer Satisfaction. It is a topic very close to my heart!

Customer 3.0 and Accelerated Darwinism

Harvard is doing a conference on Customer 3.0, which they describe like this:

"With a seemingly infinite array of options, customers now know that demand (theirs!) is in short supply. They dictate how they will consume—where, when, and how much – using a variety of community-based online tools. They are creating social networks, composed of the people they trust, that are rapidly becoming the significant channels of media distribution and capable of distributing marketing messages that surpass Madison Avenue in reach and impact."

This Marketwatch article describes Customers 1.0. 2.0, and 3.0. The way that they define Customer 3.0 actually sounds a heckuva lot like the way I defined Customer 2.0 in a white paper last year....we even did a Customer 2.0 private sector conference in September 2007 and a Customer 2.0 Public Sector conference in May of 2007.

But whatever you call it and wherever it came from, the concept is important: customers have a lot of power now, online more than anywhere. This has spurred what I have long called the Accelerated Darwinism effect: survival of the fittest and failure by the less than fit, faster than we've ever seen before. Since academic research has proven that customer satisfaction (when measured with a precise, accurate, actionable methodology) is a driver of future financial performance and stock prices at the company level, the conclusion is clear: only companies that truly satisfy their customers will survive. That's just regular business Darwinism. But it becomes Accelerated Darwinism online, where the competition is only a click away, barriers to switching are lower than ever, and companies are made and broken in a few months time.

In order to not only survive but to thrive in the age of online Accelerated Darwinism, e-businesses must harness the power of the customer to meet or exceed consumers' ever-changing expectations while also growing and sustaining a profitable business. The companies that can best enable the customer to flex his or her own increasing power are the ones that will prosper. Companies that fail to do so (as determined by their own customers, not by internal opinions and board meetings and self-proclaimed experts) cannot succeed.

Comcast Cares About You and Your Twitter

Another interesting anecdote from the cutting edge of Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 . . .

I've been reading a lot about Comcast's use of Web 2.0 to respond to the now infamous customer complaints. There was another article yesterday in the Boston Globe about how companies are responding to complaints voiced on blogs, message boards, and even Twitter. Comcast now has an employee monitoring Twiiter full-time just to look for and respond to complaints (twitter.com/comcastcares).

Considering Comcast's well-documented customer service problems (including an all-time low score in the annual American Customer Satisfaction Index ratings), this seems like a step in the right direction. They are at least listening, and they're using a pretty innovative online application to track and respond to complaints.

The question is, will this catch on? Will other companies start tracking--and addressing--complaints on Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, etc? And if it does become widespread, will the effect be to either a) overwhelm the companies doing the tracking or b) overwhelm the users who are always getting pinged by Dell and Comcast and Snickers and Toyota when they say something bad about a product?

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.