Abstract: Businesses must continuously listen to their customers using various tools and technologies, analyze what they are saying and act on feedback quickly. Organizations are setting up dedicated digital monitoring teams with sophisticated tools, with a strong mandate to listen to customer interactions and conversations across various digital channels.
When listening to customers, it good to focus on what they are doing and why they are doing so. Few critical web analytics metrics and approaches that provide insights on customers’ experiences include Exit rate, which provides a view into leakages on your website (users who came to the site, started their session but exited without completing the activity). To understand the why part, it is necessary to check out the pages that are causing these leaks, evaluate if these have been designed well and have the right performance threshold etc. One can look at this metric from a positive perspective to determine how many users were able to exit after completing a transaction successfully.
Having a view of the users’ experience with digital assets and their interactions at a page/module level can be very useful. Tools such as ClickTale provide such features. These tools give you an option to replay the user session; they can be leveraged to give an aggregated view of what users did within each page. This can be extremely valuable to understand why certain segments of customers didn’t convert. Monitoring this data provides a comparison of how users are using the pages versus the targeted/desired usage by the designer. Visitor loyalty (repeat visits, visit frequency and time spent on the page/site) is another important metric which helps to track stickiness of your content and site. Metrics associated with competitive intelligence help in choosing the right keywords tracking and referral sites that are working for you and your competition. Similarly in the mobile world, taking a segmented view on app ranking, user reviews, page usage, app usage trends etc. would be valuable.
There are many more KPIs, however, for a comprehensive view of the user, it’s important to listen to and analyze user feedback available from online surveys, app stores, feedback emails, comments from social media etc.
Ability to act ‘fast’ based on what you are listening is key to improving your digital channel
This will need the ability to make quick changes and deploy at shorter frequencies. Amazon is on record for making production changes every 11.6 seconds. This calls for a lean startup-like mentality. Enterprises are deriving value today by adopting continuous delivery and carrying out frequent controlled experiments to improve customer experience. Listening to customers surely gives a view into what they are experiencing over digital channels, however to put your finger on the type of feature changes required to address the need is the tough part. As per research conducted by Avinash Kaushik, author of ‘An hour a day’, 80% of the time you are wrong about what a customer wants. This will call for frequent controlled experiments (A/B tests), and hence more frequent releases for continuous delivery. This results in several benefits such as fewer failed deployments, reduced mean time to recover, and increase in innovation velocity from the development teams.
