Types of customer feedback that matter

So, what type of customer information should you collect, and how do you get it? When it comes to data, there are two types that consistently matter: structured data and unstructured data. For this purpose, the first type of data, structured, is just as it sounds: It’s a more formal and organized approach to getting information. You have more control over how, when, and where you collect the information. The other data type, unstructured, comes from sources in an unorganized manner and you don’t have control or influence on how the information is provided. Following are the types (or sources) of customer data:

• Structured
• Surveys
• Interviews (phone or in-person)
• Call center (customer service) recordings
• Web logs
• Polls
• Unstructured
• Social media
• Forums
• Online reviews

Tools for collecting and analyzing VOC data

Given that there are so many different ways to gather customer feedback, it can be overwhelming to develop a formal VOC strategy, especially if you have limited resources. Fortunately, as VOC and customer experience have evolved in the digital world, there are also tools available to help collect and analyze customer feedback. Most of these tools also enable you to collect the data in real-time, as customers are interacting with your site, which boosts the usefulness of the feedback. Here are some of the top VOC tools:

• Feedbackify (www.feedbackify.com): A simple solution that allows you to receive real-time feedback from your website visitors. Users simply click on a widget on a website page and can provide feedback in the forms of ratings and comments on a form (which you customize for your site). In addition to being easy to deploy and use, it’s also inexpensive at $19 per month for all features.
• UserVoice (www.uservoice.com): Designed for use with product development, this VOC tool is particularly useful for online businesses that want serious feedback on features, functionality, or new products. UserVoice operates as a forum and allows customers to vote on and discuss suggestions and send feedback in “tickets.” It’s easy for users to access and doesn’t require registration. This more robust solution is a bit more expensive at $199 per month for its starter bundle.
• Poll Everywhere (www.polleverywhere.com): This tool extends beyond your website, to anywhere you are interacting with customers. It allows you to easily create polls (several format options are available) and then lets customers respond or vote from their smartphones, social media, or web browsers. If you’re working with focus groups or sending polls through e-mail, this is an ideal and affordable solution at $19 per month.
• UsabilityTools (www.usabilitytools.com): A full suite of performance and tracking tools for your website, this solution includes a Voice of Customer function within its vast toolkit. Add widgets to your site with simple code to enable the VOC feature as well as a host of other features, including A/B testing, conversion rate optimization, and in-page analytics, to name a few. This tool is priced based on user sessions and starts at $19 per month.
• UserZoom (www.userzoom.com): If you have a large, complex online business there are solutions, such as UserZoom, that tackles all areas of usability, user experience (UX) design, and customer research. Because it’s built for really large organizations, this is a robust but pricey option that starts at $12,000 per year.

A/B testing is a method for comparing which one of two website elements performs best. In digital marketing, A/B testing is frequently used to determine what CTA (call to action) on a website gets more clicks. For example, if everything is the same (the images, the offer, and so on) except for the text on the CTA button, you would show some of your website visitors an offer with a CTA button that has the text “Buy Now” and show other website visitors the same offer but with a CTA button text “Add to Cart.” You could then determine which button text prompted more visitors to place products into shopping carts. Once you had a winner, that option would be the text to use permanently (or until you tested another batch of text).

Deciding what to update

When you’re ready to update the design of your website, here are some general guidelines you should follow:

• Watch the competition. Spend some time examining sites that handle graphical design well, to see how the sites are built. If the sites are using new techniques, take notes and find out whether the new design is showing up in more than one place. Check out your competitors’ sites to see which designs they’re using. Compare those designs to your site design, to see whether other designs look more appealing.

  Your competitors can evaluate your site just as easily as you can evaluate theirs. Spend some time evaluating them routinely, to see how quickly they respond to a new situation. Your goal is to have other sites respond to your changes rather than play catch-up with their redesigns.

• Check for consistency. Go to your business home page and make sure that all your category and subcategory pages have the same design and graphics. As websites change, not every page is updated. You might have added to your website some new sections that don’t incorporate the latest site design. If you don’t check for consistency, you might have four or five versions of your design coexisting on your site and confusing your customers, which reflects poorly on your company image.
• Test for compatibility. If possible, test your current site on different devices and with different Internet browsers. Microsoft Internet Explorer is still used, but other dominant web browsers continue growing in popularity, including the Mozilla Firefox web browser (www.firefox.com), Google Chrome browser (www.google.com/chrome), and Apple Safari browser (www.apple.com/safari). If you see errors while using an alternative browser, find out the cause and update your site accordingly. Similarly, you must test how your site appears on different screen sizes of desktop computers as well as on devices such as smartphones and tablets.
• Familiarize yourself with new technologies. Many times, the limitations your site faces are due to the technology available to you. As the web becomes more sophisticated and Internet browsers can handle new tools and devices, your options for implementing advanced design techniques on your site begin to expand. One example is the need for responsive web design, which allows your site to automatically change to fit the device being used to view it (such as a smartphone or a tablet). Talk to your website designer or do some research on the Internet to see which new technologies are reaching the mainstream. (The sites http://webdesign.about.com and www.webdesignledger.com have helpful articles.)

The point is to identify what’s working, what isn’t working, and what’s possible to implement in your site design. After you have an idea of what you want to do, you have to create some different scenarios for your redesign. They can range from simple page updates to a slightly redefined user interface to a complete tear-it-all-down-and-start-over total site makeover. Weigh these scenarios against your current available budget and your overall plans for the site. After all, if you’re going to completely change your business model, for example, you might want to delay any site design changes until then.

If your resources are limited, focus immediately on any errors that are occurring and all wildly inconsistent web pages. When you have more time and resources, you can work on updating your web page styles.

Giving your site a fresh design

It’s true that design trends change, but some trends clearly take hold and determine what makes a website modern and fresh. When looking for trends to apply to your own website, pay attention to elements that not only make a big splash but also relate to other widespread functionality changes (such as mobility and video). Here are a few examples of design trends that are defining a new generation of websites:

• Hero image: A large hero image on a home page is replacing the once popular sliding banner ad and carousel image. The hero image takes up a large portion of your page’s real estate but also includes some text and important calls to action.
• Creative typography: Typography is a fancy word for fonts, and the type or style of fonts you use is getting a lot of attention. Instead of using a plain style of text or using only one type of font throughout your website, online businesses are encouraged to get creative with font styles that have personality. Even if you have a B2B website with a more conservative tone or message, you can still use a variety of font styles or a more creative font style in some portion of your site to capture the attention of your customers. The trick with using interesting styles of typography is to make sure they don’t interfere with the user experience and make it difficult for customers to read the information on your site.
• Videos instead of text: We mention throughout this book that video is becoming an important part of website design — and marketing strategy. In many cases, video takes the place of lengthy text-based content.

Some design trends have more staying power than others. Don’t think that you have to immediately implement every trend that makes the rounds. Choose the ones that seem to have the greatest effect and endurance — and that work best for your website and your customers.

Adding content

People nowadays want to read good content wherever they go on the Internet. Quality content is also an important part of optimization to help your site rank well in search engines. E-commerce businesses that focus solely on selling products are finding that they have to add more information to entice people to check them out. But all online businesses must be mindful of the content they place on their sites — and today content includes not only words but also photos, graphics, and videos.

The key to satisfying both visitors and search engines is to provide meaningful and useful content. When placing words on the page, use clear, well-written, up-to-date, and accurate information that offers some value to the reader. Similarly, use good quality videos and photos that are helpful or interesting. Whatever type of content you use, it should contribute to (rather than take away from) the design and functionality of your website.

Look at the content on your site. Does it need to be updated? Could it be better written? Check out the information that people are reading on your site, and review the questions you receive from your browsers and customers. If you’re not particularly skilled in editing, have some friends, employees, or colleagues look over your site and make suggestions. Does your site have dated or low-quality images? Does your site lack videos? Look for places on your site where videos and photos could add interest.

You should also look at potential ways you can add to your content, such as these examples:

• Add a section featuring reviews and recommendations for your products. When customers have to decide what they want to buy, they like reading about other people’s impressions, experiences, and opinions. When you provide reviews, you give customers a reason to come to your website and one less reason to look elsewhere when it’s time to buy.
• Relate customer success stories and experiences. When you highlight customers who have used your business, you provide a sense of validation to new customers by showing them that other buyers are happy with you. Videos are terrific vehicles for delivering customer testimonials or case studies because they can be quick, easy, and inexpensive to produce. However you feature these success stories, they also provide customers the opportunity to learn from each other, by sharing information on how they use your products. Sharing these customer experiences gives your business more value and helps you build repeat business.

• Provide articles you wrote for other sites. One way you can market your business online is to write articles that have the effect of referring people to your business. Why shouldn’t those articles appear on your own site first? See Book 6, Chapter 3 to find out how to write well-written articles.

  If you don’t have time to write articles, tap into free and low-cost article databases and freelance-writing services, such as Scripted (www.scripted.com), Elance (www.elance.com), and ODesk (www.odesk.com), to name a few.

• Tell the personal story of your business. Customers are always interested in knowing more about the people who work behind the scenes in a business. You create a sense of trust and purpose when you add some personal information, because then you’re putting a “face” to your clean, well-laid-out online business. Adding short biographies of you and key employees is an effective way to build credibility, especially for B2B websites. Adding to the biographies the ability to connect, follow, and engage with you on social media, such as Twitter or LinkedIn, is another way to help build trust with new buyers. If people get involved after learning more about the people behind the business or after hearing your story and the reason your business was created, their purchase becomes a form of support because they’re buying from a real person who has goals, desires, friends, and a family.
• Add a blog. If you have an e-commerce site or a service-based company, you might not think that a blog has a place on your website, but it’s a natural fit for most sites. Blogs are a good way to keep a variety of content types (such as articles, videos, infographics, and photos) flowing on your website.

Creating a user community

You might have had the experience of turning to someone at a big department store and asking a question, only to find out that you’re talking with a fellow shopper. Or maybe you overheard a conversation and you pointed another shopper to the correct aisle to find the item he was looking for that day. User interaction is a common aspect in the retail industry. Customers have a similar interest, which is why they’re in the same store together. They can talk about their interests and how the products affect them, and even share advice about good and bad purchases.

In the online world, more businesses are adding virtual community meeting places to their websites or in social media sites. Mostly, these places take the form of forums, discussion boards, support boards, or full communities, where people can gather and discuss issues. Businesses provide a place for active discussions also by using social media, such as a Facebook page, a LinkedIn group, or even a Twitter chat group. For details on using social media to promote your website, see Book 6.

You, as a business owner, can enjoy several benefits by connecting your customers:

• Customers might be quicker to respond to a new customer’s question or concern and can give detailed answers.
• Customers have one more reason to spend time — and their hard-earned dollars — at your site rather than at someone else’s.
• As browsers and customers hear about potential uses of your products from other customers, they might be more inclined to purchase those products themselves. Because they’re already on your site reading about a product, your site is their first choice for making a purchase.
• By keeping an archive of customer communications, you’re building a knowledge database of questions, answers, and experiences that can help solve future customers’ problems. It’s another way to get ongoing feedback and can easily become a formal part of your VOC program.

You can find several free forum and community software tools. Look on the major search engines for a tool that works on the operating system for your web server (search for online community software). Talk to your web designer or IT staff to see whether they have access to any ready-made discussion board or online community software.

One way to encourage people to become active right away is to create certain events that revolve around a specific day or time. You can unveil your new chat room software by hosting a “town hall” or open meeting with your CEO or a visible board member, where customers and general browsers can ask questions and receive immediate responses. You or an employee can host a workshop where you explain a new feature or product that’s being rolled out on your website.

Running a poll

You can also offer polls or surveys so that customers can vote on questions of the week (or month) that you devise. Make polls fun by asking about customers’ favorite stories in the news, or have the polls tie in slightly to your business by asking people about their favorite products.

Again, use your polls and surveys as valuable customer research and part of an ongoing VOC program. Present a few new product lines and ask customers to vote on their favorites, where the winner of the poll results in your new product line. You add excitement and involvement for your users, and they feel like they have some ownership in your business.

If you don’t have a software tool available for offering polls, check out one of the free or low-cost options, such as Poll Maker (www.poll-maker.com) or Poll Everywhere (www.polleverywhere.com).

Update your poll regularly, to avoid making your site look stale and outdated. A 4-month-old poll turns off customers and makes your entire site look old and unprofessional.

You can add polls, community forums, social media platforms, and other customer-engagement tools in several ways. For example, if your website is built on WordPress, you can use free WordPress plug-ins to easily add these types of tools to your site. If your site uses an e-commerce solution (or shopping cart), it may provide free access to similar tools, or APIs (application programming interfaces), as part of its standard marketing and promotional features.

Updating your website in a timely manner

As their websites become more and more complex, many businesses find that they rely on a single person or company to make all their site updates. This situation not only is a bad strategic decision (because it locks you into this entity if you want to keep using your own site) but can also seriously jeopardize your chances of keeping your customers.

Customers are looking for sites that are continually updated with fresh, important, current content. Businesses that want to succeed have to be able to respond to changes in the market quickly, go after new business opportunities, and satisfy a curious, fickle audience with varying demands. All these tasks require the ability to quickly update your site and its content, and relying on one person or business slows down the process. What if your web designer gets sick or is away on vacation? What if you have to post a critical announcement over the weekend and the web design company that handles your updates is closed? What if your designer is so busy changing someone else’s site that your site isn’t updated for weeks?

Your company should always be able to make some changes, especially content changes, to your own site. Why pay a web programmer lots of money to change some text? Instead, pay that person to develop a function where you and your employees can send changes to the site that are updated automatically. Or use a web-based site-building service or e-commerce platform that makes it easy for you to control most of your site’s changes. Today’s website solutions make it easy for someone with little or no knowledge of web programming and design to take a do-it-yourself approach with a professional result.

If you allow your employees to update your company site, be sure to install some sort of screening process, where a serious change has to be approved by either yourself or a manager. You don’t want an angry employee’s changes plastered all over your site.

Building smart navigation tools

We talk repeatedly in this book about the importance of a good navigation system on your website. Maybe you have a vertical row of links or buttons along the left side of your page or a series of tabs along the top. Take it one step further: Determine how sophisticated your navigation bar is and whether it helps customers move around the site. One trend in web design is to eliminate sidebar navigation. Before jumping on this trend, we suggest that you carefully consider the effect of removing navigation or links in your sidebar. Does it help or hinder your customers’ experience when using your site? You may find that the sidebar is a distraction to your customers and decide to do away with it.

No matter where your main navigation is, it’s important to focus on using it to help customers move to and from pages in your site in a way that helps the buying process. When customers use the navigation bar to go to a particular section, for example, does the navigation bar tell them where they are on your site? Your navigation system should make it easy for a customer to move anywhere on your site from any page on your site.

One way that websites show a shopper’s progression is to display the current web page’s context within the entire site structure, called a bread-crumb trail. A user can return to a page by clicking the specific “crumb.” Displaying a trail of crumbs shows customers how you group information on your site and how you establish a hierarchy, or order, of web pages. In addition, your customers can move up and down the hierarchy much more easily.

Your site navigation system should remain intuitive while being able to directly open the pages that customers need. They shouldn’t need lots of explanation or training to navigate your site. A customer should be able to open your home page and instinctively know what to click or how to proceed.

As the owner or operator of your web business, you probably know your site by heart and can easily move around in it. What about new visitors, though? Gain a fresh perspective by having a stranger (or a friend who has never used your site) test your site. Or hire a company to handle this usability study for you. The point of a usability review is to gather a new visitor’s impressions about what makes sense and what doesn’t so that you can update your site and navigation system accordingly.

Usability, in the area of computer applications, refers to the effectiveness and ease of use that people find when they interact with the computer. If an element has high usability, people can easily learn about it and remember how it works, and they find it visually satisfying, efficient to operate, and helpful to use when things go wrong. Usability is a big part of customer experience!

Building your customer history

One reason that people still go to local shops and pay higher prices for products is the familiarity they feel when they’re shopping in a store. The owners or employees know their shoppers’ faces and call them by their names, so they can recommend new products because they know the shoppers’ purchase histories and likes and dislikes, and can recommend products accordingly.

This high-service model works for many small businesses, and you can convert this familiarity to your site with some added functionality. Basically, you want to make customers’ previous purchases (perhaps within a time limit, such as one or two years) available to them after they log in to your site. If the purchases are available to shoppers, they’re available to you, the store owner, and you can provide analysis. From analysis come recommendations and suggestions, perhaps tied into an automatic marketing offer based on the customer’s purchase pattern.

For example, if you know what your customer’s previous orders are and you see that he’s ordering something you predicted, you can offer similar goods at a package discount to encourage sales. When your customers can go back to your site and view their past purchases, they can answer questions on their own without involving you as much. They can also look up their order histories, and your shipping department can record the tracking numbers in your software or website tools. If your customers can answer their own questions or find answers without hearing back from you, you can focus on other customer service issues more quickly and efficiently.

Implementing this function means that your website software has to have both a way for customers to create their own accounts and a database to store customer information and order information so that it’s ready to be displayed on your own website. The customer account should have some form of password protection and should potentially store customer address and payment information. You can integrate this software by looking for customer relationship management (CRM) software that works with your e-commerce software, such as Salesforce or SugarCRM. Or the e-commerce platform you use may already have this capability (as either an included feature or an API that you can add to the site), making it easy to suggest other products based on previous or current buying preferences.

Knowing these common website improvements and being able to balance potential updates with the feedback you receive from customers will make for a winning customer experience strategy.