Site design changes can come directly from the customers, too

There continues to be a role for interviewing customers in determining what makes a good web site, Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results Inc., maintains. Web analytics systems provide good insight into how visitors are using a site. But the information can be coupled with research to provide insight into exactly what customers did and what that means to the likelihood of repeat visits, Freed says. “Clickstream analysis is important but it doesn’t tell me if my customers accomplished what they set out to accomplish; whether my site met their needs and exceeded their expectations,” says Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results Inc., a company that uses the American Customer Satisfaction Index to quantify customers’ satisfaction with web sites and correlate it to their likelihood to buy from the site again. “One person may click on four pages and another on 27 pages, but that doesn’t tell me which is the better customer. The person who clicked on only four pages may have found what he wanted right away, then gone offline to buy it.”

The American Customer Satisfaction Index maintains that a direct correlation exists between customer satisfaction and success of a company. ForeSee Results interviews a fraction of customers at a site, then applies formulas to measure satisfaction and future likelihood to buy. Often, the interviews uncover information that web site operators would not know otherwise. For instance, when ForeSee interviewed customers of a government site, it learned that repeat users gave the site an acceptable score, yet first-time users gave it extremely low ratings. Further probing revealed that first-time users had a difficult time knowing how to find information on the site. “The site was organized the way governments are organized, which was understandable, given the operators’ orientation,” Freed says. “It wasn’t organized by the user’s orientation.”

The operators changed the home page to ask users to identify which group they belonged to--individual citizen, business or government employee--then presented information organized by the user. Satisfaction scores from first-time users doubled, Freed says. “They were organizing by functionality and not by user,” he says. “Many retailers do the same thing.”