Undertsanding Online Customer Experience

Qualitative/customer experience goes beyond trends and aggregrate reporting to really interpret and understanding what is going on in the head of your site visitors and customers.

Emerging online businesses can gain a great deal of insight from inexpensive [and free] polls, survey, usability testing.

For large companies with large budgets, being to replay exactly what your consumers actually did and saw can be extremely helpful. It will reveal more layers of data, such as, the reason a visitor didn't see the form field is because it hadn’t loaded properly.

Understanding customer experience is not just about marketing, it is useful in managing fraud and also assisting customer services.

Why Understand Customer Experience

Why do we need to understand our customer’s experience and how can tools help us?

1. The unique session replay functionality would allow the company to hone in on live technical and customer orientated issues to achieve a fix with a quick turnaround on their website.
2. Help customer services teams work with customers where they were having a problem on the website doing what they wanted to do - so the customer services team can replay the customer’s session and tell them where they missed a step or alternatively where the website didn’t deliver.
3. Identify poor customer experience in our customer journey on the website e.g look up sessions where a page or image had a problem loading, 404 errors etc, couldn’t find address, couldn’t find product etc.
4. Identify fraud or unexpected activity on financial services websites and look at the fraudster’s activity.
5. Weekly meetings to go through problem sessions, come up with ideas and identify solutions.
6. Compare click activity on a page to mouse movements on a page to eg identify elements on a page that are encouraging a high number of mouse movements but that are non-clickable (and hence should be clickable).
7. Real time data.
8. With a snippet of javascript, the ability to see which fields in a form were filled out even though the form was never sent.

Customer Experience Measurement Tools

The constraints associated with these tools for small businesses:

1. Cost - they are extremely expensive
2. Implementation - set up and configuration of the product across all hosting sites and servers, tealeaf uses http requests for example.
3. Adoption - getting people internally within the company to use them, for example creating a culture where tech support and or customer services actively use these tools in their daily role.
4. Learning Curve - require a lot of training and learning and time on how to use the product and to configure the events required from scratch.
5. Cultural / Change Management - getting to grips with the “customer experience method of thinking” in terms of the perceived traditional web analytics definitions of items such as visits and page impressions versus “sessions”.

On Page Analysis Tools

Tools are available that allow you to replay exactly what your customers did on your site, a bit like a video player of exactly what they did on your website.

• Tealeaf
• Speedtrap

The sad thing is that such tools are priced for large enterprises, and not the innovative fledgling businesses who need them.

Ironically, getting sign off for such tools in large enterprises is often trapped by political tape such that few get to use them anyway.

Using Tealeaf Example

As an example on how to use on page analysis tools:

1. Review site statistics to identify a particular type of good conversion or bad problem (image not loaded, product not found, 404 etc) at an aggregrage level
2. Search for all sessions where the event is found - this gives- to see eg the scale of the problem, e.g 567 visits where product was not found
3. Drill down by replaying individual sessions
4. A product not found could be occurring on lots of different pages on your site
5. Set up an event occurrence tealeaf - that occurred within a session on the site. The program will tell you how many instances when this particular type of problem occured.
   

Survey Tools

Survey tools [many of them are for free] are a great way to obtain customer experience feed-back, and are often more easily analysed and transformed into useful insights.

NEXT: Internet Trends 2008

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