Customer comments serve up gourmet designs at Cooking.com
Hearing the unvarnished truth from shoppers can hurt. But for Cooking.com soliciting and evaluating customer feedback is also an effective way to improve web site design and usability.
For the past four years, Cooking.com, an online retailer of cooking equipment and related merchandise with annual web sales of more than $50 million, has posted customer feedback forms throughout its site, including product pages, most search results pages, and in the shopping cart.
In addition to helping Cooking.com improve customer service and add more merchandise to its online inventory of more than 50,000 SKUs, ongoing customer feedback is also helping Cooking.com implement simple – but effective – design and navigation changes. For instance, suggestions and complaints from shoppers about the difficulty of deciphering shipping rates led Cooking.com to redesign parts of the shopping cart and add an application that automatically calculates estimated shipping costs before the customer clicks on the order button.
“Customer feedback gives us concrete ways to improve our ongoing design and navigation,” says Cooking.com director of customer service Kirk Oshiro. “It takes the guesswork out of design and helps us develop the features and functions our customers really want.”
Cooking.com, No. 178 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, has expanded its shopper feedback program to include customer reviews and a post purchase e-mail survey. But it’s the more than 4,000 comments, complaints and suggestions that customers type into the “how are we doing” boxes each month that help Cooking.com pick and choose its design priorities.
Cooking.com built simple forms that can be easily inserted into design templates and integrated the forms with an SQL database. Customer reps spend between 30 hours and 40 hours each week analyzing the comments and prioritizing the ones that are the most relevant.
“When Cooking.com was launched the site was laid out like a typical department store,” says Oshiro. “The customer feedback has helped to evolve our features and functions.”
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