Web Analytics Special Report: Understanding the ‘Why’ of Customer Behavior

hough blogs can reveal what customers do, it’s difficult to understand why they behave the way they do. Customer experience management is a complementary approach to Web analytics that reveals the “why” behind the “what,” delivering insights into why customers behave as they do.
Reliable customer insights let an online business shape the Internet experience to maximize brand affinity, conversion and loyalty. Customer experience consists of a complex interaction between the Web site and the thoughts, feelings, behaviors, habits, expectations and social references that the customer brings to the situation. It is not the objective reality of the site that needs to be analyzed, but the subjective reality of the customer — the customer’s perception and interpretation of the site.

To add to this complexity, each site visitor has his personal history, creating many subjective realities for the Web marketer or researcher to understand.

Analyzing non-obtrusive observational data such as sales figures and server logs does not uncover such information. Two common examples come to mind:

· With server log data, it’s tough to determine whether a customer is lingering on a site because of interest or confusion.

· It’s difficult to determine whether a customer abandoned a shopping cart because of registration or the shipping fees.

Without knowing a user’s goals, it’s impossible to interpret whether she achieved them. The most reliable method to capture the customer experience is to have many customers surf the Web pursuing goals, while simultaneously gathering behavioral and subjective data from each individual. For a full picture of the user experience, it is important to examine all the critical aspects, including behavior (e.g., where do users abandon registration?), thoughts (e.g., do users realize they have completed a purchase?) and attitudes (e.g., do users feel the site is trustworthy?).

By combining qualitative data — why did you give up? — with quantitative data — number of page views, navigation path — marketers can gain powerful insight into what changes would improve the experience. Furthermore, iterative testing establishes benchmarks to measure the effect of changes on customer satisfaction.

Thus, customer experience evaluation can reveal:

· Users’ prior expectations (Do customers expect to find a product demo?).

• Users’ behaviors in the context of their intentions (Where do customers who are price-sensitive click first? How do customers use online help and support to resolve questions?).

· Which features will affect your bottom line (Which should be developed first: a more accurate search engine or a faster checkout process?).

· Which features likely will be deal breakers (Will asking for a home phone number prompt registration abandonment?).

· What your competitors offer (What’s working and what isn’t on their site(s)? Should you match a competitor in offering links to an independent research site, or does this distract users?).

· How your site compares with industry benchmarks (How does your site’s search function stack up against other search engines?).

· Whether your site is building and extending your offline brand or detracting from it (e.g., does your online experience increase or decrease brand affinity from before to after the experience?).

· How well your site and your online presence affect conversion and retention (Can people find you on the Web? Do your advertising, partners and your online properties increase their likelihood to buy from you?).

These insights help online businesses decide strategic issues: what to fix, how to fix it, what to fix first and how much to spend.




Bonny Brown is director of research at Keynote Systems, San Mateo, CA, an online business performance management service provider. Her e-mail address is bbrown@keynote.com.

Mobile User Experience

http://www.mobileuserexperience.com/

Great article with some good stats.

Ray talked about the role of trust when selling mobile content. Trust is important because it allows more to be sold. It involves the following…

Access to the service
This includes SMS short codes, camera based codes, mobile searches, web/WAP sites.

Brands are currently wary of implementing ‘Off the page’ services as there is currently consumer mis-trust of ’subscription’ based SMS services (due to past scams).

A high trust solution consists of an initial (normal rate) SMS message to download catalogue of content suitable for the particular phone. i.e. Not all services run on all phones.

Mobile search engines are becoming very popular. Many people are buying this way (they trust the links).

There are big commercial gains for early content providers.

Viral ‘pass on to a friend’ systems are very successful as trust is implicit.

Pre-buy experience
Vendors that give useful information, free previews and the exact price (in correct currency) are the most trusted.

Trust during purchase
Services such as Bango offer a "Best Biller" service where the system automatically finds the best way for the customer to pay based on the network operator/country.

Operator billing has the highest conversion rate. Vodafone UK provides the most successful payment system (for Bango) due to the ease of paying.

5% of people are willing to enter a credit card into the phone. It’s 9% in the States as there is more consumer protection (refund) if things go wrong. This rises to 14% if it’s for a trusted brand.

There’s a huge variation on conversion rate (browsing to buying) across all Bango’s merchants.

Return for more
The browse and buy model is more successful than SMS (46% vs 18%).

Fear of what to do

Find Out What Employees Are Afraid Of
Fear keeps many workers from reaching their full level of commitment and productivity.

by Lior Arussy

Thursday, September 01, 2005
You've tried the motivational speakers who came to deliver another touching story--it had the lasting impact equivalent to the patience of a kindergartner. You've exhausted the skills trainers and delivered a plethora of tools to enhance employee productivity. Still, you sense there is more to the problem than meets the eye. You don't get the sense that your salespeople are selling at their maximum potential. You're not convinced that your service people are truly trying to meet--let alone exceed--customer expectations. A hunch tells you that your employees could do more, if only they had the desire. Although you have provided them with great incentive programs, you're convinced deep down that they are not fully committed.
You're probably right. Your employees are not giving you 110 percent of their efforts. They somehow fall short of your expectations. You are not alone: This is a problem shared by almost any company or employer. The bad news is that it takes more than a motivational speech or the promise of a trip to the Bahamas to get them committed.



Most companies established their relationship with employees on the premise that they will do what they are told in exchange for a salary. This premise captures only a small part of the employees' true capabilities. Under this premise employees will never be fully committed. They will do the bare minimum to get their paycheck. Bottom line, there is no way to pay employees to smile sincerely. They need to want to do it, to actually deliver an authentic experience to customers.

During our research we discovered that many employees do not reach their full level of commitment and productivity because of fear. Employees developed different types of fear during the course of their contact with customers. It is these fears that make them perform in a reluctant fashion, which does not maximize the full potential of their relationship with customers. The fears can be related to price or product, competition, or the nature of the relationship with customers. Employees may act on a fear that the competition is better, or that the price the company charges for the services employees represent is excessive and unjustified. Employees' fears may stem from doubting the value of the product or its ability to perform as promised. When shadowed by fear, employee performance will be minimized and reserved, and will cost the company in unnecessary discounts, lost sales, and diminished loyalty. Often, employees feel that by interacting with customers they lend some of their personal credibility to the interaction. If they lack conviction in the products they represent, they will be reluctant to go all the way to deliver excellence. Employees' fears, doubts, and lack of conviction stand between companies and excellent performance.

Acting on the premise that employees will do what they are being paid to do has brought companies to failure. They took employee conviction for granted, failed to sell their own value proposition to their employees, and then they expected them to believe in the products without any evidence.

To elevate employee performance to the excellence level you seek, you need to redesign your relationship with them to include understanding, and to address their fears. This is at the core of the employee experience, and it has a direct impact on the customer experience. If you do not know what employees are afraid of, if you do not have convincing evidence to ease their fears, no motivational speech or other superficial fix will be successful. After all, if you fail to sell to those on your payroll, how do you expect customers to buy from you?

Lior Arussy is the president of Strativity Group and the author of several books, including his latest, Passionate & Profitable: Why Customer Strategies Fail and 10 Steps to Do Them Right! (John Wiley & Sons, 2005).