Good Behaviour

In The Sunday Times (a leading Sunday newspaper in the UK) on 11^th Nov. 2007, there was a supplement devoted to the Customer Experience Awards 2007. On page 4 of the supplement there was an article written by Andrew Stone and based on work by David Jackson, the MD of Clicktools, a firm specialising in customer feedback. In it the article outlines the top 10 most important lessons for creating a positive customer experience. Whilst it doesn’t directly reference online it seems to me there are clear correlations to be drawn between the two.

With permission from The Sunday Times I am referencing David Jackson’s 10 lessons to draw these comparisons.

1. David Jackson: Three questions form the foundation of customer intelligence: Who are our chosen customers? What are their needs and expectations? How are we meeting their needs?

Online translation: Knowing your target audience is the central tenet of communication on or offline. Knowing what the needs and expectations of your audience is especially important online since the web is both a research medium and a sales and distribution medium. Therefore potential customers find it much easier to shop around if they don’t find exactly what they are looking for initially. Knowing if you are meeting those needs and expectations is first expressed in the Bounce Rate metric which is why it has become one of the flagship metrics in click-stream web analytics.

2. DJ: Understand how customers think.

Online translation: One of the advantages of doing business online is the relative ease with which customer insight can be gathered. There are many techniques for gathering insight online some of which have already been written about on this blog. Web analytics clickstream data, usability studies, online exit surveys, competitor data are just a few areas in which data can be gathered using existing technologies and, in most cases, without having to purloin unsuspecting members of the public who fall in to the relevant target segment.

3. DJ: Trust in your people.

Online translation:In web analysis, and especially click-stream analytics, it is important to give people their lead. It’s very hard to identify what visitors are thinking when they arrive on a site and while there are some fundamental performance indicators that should always be considered when looking at click-stream data, the analyst should always be allowed to disappear down rabbit holes to see what can be flushed out. You may be surprised by what you find out from your web insight team but you should always take it seriously until it can be reasonably refuted.

4. DJ: Work with people who believe in service excellence.

Online translation: Passion for a product or service and the way it’s delivered translates well and can help enormously in putting across a message online. This is all the more valuable on the web where the visitor / potential customer is in control. But, online where service excellence is translated through the web page, it’s important to remember that you design your site for your customers and not for yourself - an easy trap to fall into. So while it helps to have a passionate team it is important to make sure that belief and passion is channeled in the right direction.

5. DJ: Master the art of organisation

Online translation: It is critical to make sure there are strong lines of communication between the web insight team and all the key stakeholders. The first task is always to establish the objectives of the site in the eyes of the stakeholders, in doing so it will provide a clear goal to aim for. This will remove ambiguity and should result in better output internally and so a better experience for the customer. Additionally, mastering the art of organisation within the web insight team can be applied to the disparate techniques for gathering insight which need to be combined to provide a coherent impression of customer need - this as oppose to conducting research using techniques (mentioned in point 2) in isolation. Finally it is important that the insight can be translated into a clear set of actions that everybody involved can identify with.

6. DJ: Make the link to the bottom line

Online translation: This applies in the exactly the same way online as it does offline. In most cases it is standard theory online, in practice many are doing it but because the pace of change is so rapid it’s important to be able to identify as cleanly as possible the level of contribution an individual element will have. When reporting back on performance, filtering out noise from other concurrent efforts can often make proof harder to demonstrate.

7. DJ: Make everything a little better every day

Online translation: Never stop looking at how you can improve the customer experience online. Analysing your performance online isn’t a one-off exercise to be carried out every quarter, it should be an ongoing and iterative process. Some organisations may feel there is neither the time nor the budget to operate in this way so scaling the approach to fit the primary objective is important. Using dashboards which can be easily updated every week or two with the 5 most important performance indicators is the starting point for this. Making sure this is always tied to action that will improve the customer experience is the goal.

8. DJ: Understand that the future will be different

Online translation: I don’t think anybody in the online world has a problem with this, except that sometimes change and new technologies can be bought into with alarming ease and little thought as to how they will really help the customer. The current debate regarding web 2.0 technologies and content is a point in case.

9. DJ: Learn from your mistakes

Online translation: Make changes to the customer experience online but if they go wrong don’t go around wringing your hands and covering your back, learn from them and turn them to your advantage by making sure customers benefit from your learning.

10. DJ: Make things easier for customers

Online translation: This might almost come before #9 in that making life easier for customers online is all about ease of navigation and presentation of important information. This is where changes need to be made either to supporting technologies or to site design. Craig Menzies of Forrester research said during a recent speech in Barcelona that while so many tools and research technologies are available to online marketers, unless used to drive design changes that generate demonstrable improvements the insight they provide is really not much more than a form of customer voyeurism. In the pursuit of insight it’s important that we don’t loose sight of the actual goal.