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. In the second I outlined a method for using VoC to understand customer journeys. Here’s the third, showing how VoC can be a super-efficient way to test creative strategies before investing in an expensive A/B or MVT test.
One of the really interesting discussions in the VoC Huddle that illustrates how flexible online surveys can be revolved around the use of online intercept surveys to test creative approaches. Here’s an example. We often use self-description questions to help us understand web behaviors and choice. For example, on a consumer electronics site, we might ask a visitor to self-qualify whether they are a value shopper looking for the best price, a feature shopper looking for the right mixture of features and performance for specific needs, or a lifestyle shopper looking for a product that fits a certain style or image. Cross-tabulate this kind of self-description with actual choices, and you get much deeper insight into why people are choosing particular products. Once you’ve got this basic technique, however, you can extend it in really interesting ways. By changing the wording on the self-qualification questions, you will shift the distribution of visitors who describe themselves as belonging to each group. In one rather amusing case of this, we found that young shoppers on a client site were reluctant to describe themselves as image shoppers but when we explored individual factors in purchase decisions they were often focused on things we categorized as essentially image-oriented. By tweaking the wording of the self-selection away from image to softer, less ego-driven words, we were able to shift a significant percentage of young shoppers into the “image” category. This tells us two things. First, you need to be work hard on these questions to satisfy yourself that you’re getting the categories you want. Second, these types of questions create an incredibly easy test-bed for creative approaches.
It takes about 15 minutes to effort to change and re-deploy the wording on a self-qualification question within an online survey. It might take 2-3 hours to analyze the result. How does that compare to the effort to build an alternative creative approach in your CMS or testing tool and test/analyze it against every demographic and visit category?
[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!]
