No area of analytics is as underserved in the enterprise as Voice of Customer (VoC). Despite plenty of lip-service to caring about what the customer thinks, VoC data tends to under-collected, under-processed, and under-distributed. It’s a shame, because VoC is powerful, easy to deploy, inexpensive and easy to understand. Yes, it’s true that most enterprises these days do collect basic information around satisfaction – especially NPS. But as I’ve written before, NPS is no more than scoreboard. It’s a reasonably interesting metric in terms of brand perception, but its information content is very low and largely non-digital. You can get so much more out of a robust online survey program.
I wanted to highlight four areas of interesting discussion from the Voice of Customer Huddle I attended at X Change that illustrate just a few of the ways you can extend VoC beyond simple metrics like NPS. I’ve written the first here (a short post for me), and I plan to finish the remaining three installments and push them during the week.
Digging Deeper into Task Accomplishment
Most online surveys that are intended to go deeper than NPS or site satisfaction begin with two simple, fundamental questions: task intent and task accomplishment. Task intent explores what the visitor was trying to accomplish. Task accomplishment explores how successful they were in meeting their intent. These two questions are much, much richer in analytic terms than NPS or site satisfaction. They are more specific to the immediate task (NPS, in particular, is largely brand halo driven and is very unresponsive to site and task issues) and they integrate with behavioral data to provide a significantly improved view of the digital experience. These two questions are also hugely valuable to us in creating our 2-Tiered segmentations and building data-driven models of success metrics.
In general, we also try to drill-down on task failure, exploring the reasons why the visitor wasn’t able to do what they wanted. What we haven’t done, however, is drill-down on task success.
Why would you drill down on task success?
Well, one drawback to task accomplishment is that on some sites and for certain tasks, it’s relatively inelastic. A small amount of friction on a travel site may be enough to drive me to an alternative when I’m making a normal purchase. If my travel aggregation site isn’t working well, there are five others I can use to do the same thing. On the other hand, if I’m trying to redeem miles for a trip, I may struggle with an incredibly bad interface but preserve simply because I have no other options and I really want to complete the task. If you think some of the tasks on your Website or Mobile Apps are inelastic in this fashion, you may want to go beyond task completion to explore task effort.
I’m indebted here to Alex Destino who discussed the way his company uses VoC to measure how difficult it was to complete a task. I think this is a terrific extension on our basic task intent/completion questions and an approach that feels analytically rich when paired with actual behavior. By asking customers to rate the difficulty of task completion and matching back to their behavior (path and time), you’ll have far better insight into the actual functioning of your online process and you’ll have removed much of the self-selected bias introduced by degree to which a customer wants/needs to complete a process.
[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!]
