There are four areas from our Voice of Customer (VoC) discussion at X Change that I’m highlighting. In the first post, I wrote about a way to explore task accomplishment in more depth. Here’s the second – outlining a method for using VoC to understand customer journeys.
I really should devote a full post (or even a series) to the techniques we’ve been deploying around VoC to measure a broader spectrum of the customer journey. Here, I’m just going to try and sketch out a capsule summary of the overall approach we discussed at X Change.
When we ask someone their opinion, we get a snapshot in time of what they think. Online surveys (and digital visits) we’re getting a snapshot of what someone thinks or is doing at a specific moment in time. To really understand someone, you need more than a snapshot. You need to be able to understand how their opinions evolve over time and how their behaviors are driven by and, in turn, shape those opinions.
You can create a research program that helps you do that.
By inserting very small (2-3 question) surveys at the beginning of a Web session, you can measure how qualified visitors are when arriving at your site. That’s hugely important. No factor is likely more important to your actual digital success than the pre-qualification rates of your visitors. Of course, most digital teams have absolutely control over this. Yes, digital marketing impacts prequalification. But offline spend, brand awareness and brand marketing are often dominant factors when it comes to pre-qualification. If you need to know whether or not changes in TV are driving online performance, you need to measure prequalification.
Prequalification surveys typically focus on where the customer is in the journey. For a products company, we’d likely want to know if a visitor is actively shopping, if they’ve decided on a brand, if they know a specific model, and when they intend to make a decision. By matching and tuning these questions against actual shopping behaviors, you can build a system that is very sensitive to changes in prequalification; a system that allows you track over time whether prequalification is changing and the impact of that change on overall digital system performance.
Increasingly, we’ve also used re-survey techniques to do permission-based research with Website and Mobile users well after their digital touches. With re-survey, we focus on the outcomes visitors have generated since their digital touch. With careful stratification and when combined with Two-Tiered segmentation, re-survey allows you measure the actual value of different types of Web visitors and visits. It also provides a hard-and-fast, data-driven way to establish which Web metrics are good KPIs. With re-survey, you no longer have to subjectively decide which measures indicate engagement. You have a means of showing a direct link between specific behaviors and downstream success.
By combining pre-survey, survey and re-survey you can create a system that does far more than snapshot visitor sentiment. This combination will allow you to, in effect, create a moving journey that allows you to model the visitor over time and measure the impact of touchpoints along the way. It’s like going from a Kodak to a movie in two simple steps!
[And speaking of Voice of Customer, Phil Kemelor is currently running our “State of the digital analytics enterprise” survey. We’re exploring a host of issues around how analytics is organized and what issues are dominating the digital analytics landscape. Please help us out (and get back some fascinating data) by taking the survey!]
