Learn, Discover, Act

Square Pegs and Round Holes

Recently, there has been talk that the best days of the random sample are behind us, with passive feedback taking its place in the sun. Much like with politicians, you are only being told part of the truth. It would be the most basic of blunders to make business decisions without considering all the available information before moving forward.

When my siblings and I were young, there was this toy we all enjoyed playing with. In fact, this toy is so basic, I can say with a reasonable level of confidence that you most likely played with a similar toy when you were young. This toy was a simple wooden cube, hollow, with holes cut out on all 6 sides. This toy also came with about 12 blocks in various shapes (circle, square, rectangle, star, crescent moon, etc.), and each block corresponded to a shape in one side of the wooden cube. The principle was simple; place all the blocks inside the cube by putting a shape through its corresponding hole.

This simple toy helped teach me, and millions of others, the basics of spatial orientation. But more important; it helped us all grasp the concept of “the correct fit”. No matter how hard anyone tried, you were never able to force the rectangle shape through the crescent-moon hole. The concept of “the correct fit” should be considered when choosing a data collection methodology for obtaining customer feedback.

Random Sampling (via an active solicitation or invitation) remains strong in all the traditional areas. It allows you to collect a statistically significant sample that is representative of your user base. It generally has a higher completion rate than feedback buttons, and when done properly (as an “intercept”, not an “interrupt”), collects both positive and negative feedback without allowing the collection method to influence the data. There are some weakness though; data tends to be more strategic and less tactical, and there are some media where an intercept survey simply doesn’t work.

Conduct Active Research on Blogger with iPerceptions

Do you have a Blogger account and want to understand your readers’ experience on your blog? By using iPerceptions Active Research you can!

At iPerceptions we conduct Active Research by following, a 3 step approach.

1. Engage with your customers in the Moment of Truth with our intercept technology that invites visitors on arrival to complete an exit survey.
2. Capture visitor feedback using proven frameworks such as the 4Q Framework, developed in conjunction with Avinash Kaushik.
3. Act on your readers’ feedback by easily understanding their experience by using our advanced reporting tools or by injecting iPerceptions survey data into Google Analytics.

If you haven’t already setup an iPerceptions account and joined the Active Research Network – join now!

Once you have created an iPerceptions account and have accessed the JavaScript for your survey follow these simple steps to tap into the voice of your reader.

Building Better Data

When I started at iPerceptions five years ago (an eternity in “internet time”), many of the conversations with both prospects and clients revolved around education. Few people knew what Voice of Customer (VoC) was, and fewer still were using it. Clients were ecstatic to review the data that we presented, as it gave them a novel and deeper understanding of their online traffic. Change is the only constant when dealing with the internet, and the VoC space is no exception.

After a few short years, the questions our clients were asking us had changed. “Tell me about my customers” evolved into the much more interesting, yet more complicated to answer: “Nice charts; so what?”

This sent us looking for other sources of data, more than what was available from VoC alone. We started leveraging our clients’ pre-existing relationships with various clickstream analytics vendors (i.e. Google Analytics), injecting our data into GA whilst incorporating GA variables into our own reporting. The results were intriguing and our clients again thrilled with the insight.

Though some would be content to stop here and digest what is already a massive data set, iPerceptions strives to take the “Big Data” philosophy to the next level. Rather than creating some proprietary data format, or restricting the flow of information, we’ve embraced the open source ideals of sharing and collaboration.

Easily conduct VoC research on your WordPress site with iPerceptions plugin

Are you currently using WordPress and want an easy way to conduct Voice of Customer research on your site? We have just released an update of the iPerceptions WordPress plugin making it dead simple to integrate iPerceptions surveys!

The IPerceptions’ WordPress plug-in allows you to easily determine whether to invite your visitors when they reach any page within your website, or only on certain pages. 

Download iPerceptions WordPress plugin

Follow these steps to install iPerceptions’ WordPress plugin

1. Navigate to your WordPress admin login page located at [your WordPress site]/wp-admin

2. Log in to your administrator account

3. From the administration menu, choose “Plugins-->Add New”

4. In the search field type iPerceptions

5. Click “Install Now” on the iPerceptions Survey plugin

6. Once the installation is completed, click “Activate Plugin”

7. Once the plugin is installed, obtain your iPerceptions Survey script by logging into your iPerceptions account. Select your survey and click on "Collect --> Invitation Code"

On the Move Surveying your Mobile User

Increasingly, people are using mobile platforms for online activities – like shopping, reading, playing games and communicating on social networks. But when people use mobile devices, they exhibit characteristics and behaviors that differ from their desktop counterparts.

As mobile usage continues to grow, it’s becoming critical to understand the mobile customers’ experiences, intentions and desires. Here are 3 tips for creating an effective mobile survey that will give your mobile customers a voice.

 

1 - Realize time is precious
While the tasks that a mobile user does online may be as diverse as those done on the desktop, one ubiquitous characteristic of mobile is ‘time’. Mobile sessions are considerably shorter and mobile users are far more task oriented.

With time at a premium, respondent fatigue occurs faster and survey abandonment times are significantly shorter on the mobile platform than on the traditional ones. Keep surveys short and to the point, placing the most critical questions right up front. Don’t ask your user for more than one open-ended response, either: Typing long or detailed answers on a mobile keypad will cause exponential drop-off, and those that do complete may provide lower-quality answers later in the survey.

2 - Optimize for the mobile form factor
Mobile users with larger screens generally prefer to use the ‘full’ version of the site as opposed to the mobile version. Phone-sized screens should be the researcher’s primary focus (not tablets), optimizing both the invitation and the survey itself for these smaller resolutions.

Survey invitations should only occupy a portion of the screen to avoid being regarded as advertisements, and the invitation text should be reduced to a single sentence. If you use a second stage to your invitation, make sure that the trigger (icon, overlay, etc) doesn’t obstruct the website.

Panel research is not the Voice of the Customer

I’ve run into a number of satisfaction studies lately that claim to speak for real customers. A little digging showed that these claims are based on studies that use panels of people similar to your actual customers. The Internet has allowed us to speak directly to customers in the context of real experiences. There is an emerging new breed of market research analytics that is democratizing the voice of the customer. Panels are no longer needed to speak for people, people can speak for themselves.

Our research shows that the way panels rate satisfaction is not the same as the way actual customers in real situations rate it. What is important to them and how satisfied they are is very different. The difference is easy to understand; For example, when I’m in my underwear at 1 AM in the morning, on my laptop, trying to get something done, I’m not experiencing things in the same way as when I am tasked to do something and then evaluate it. I’m not creating fictitious situations and then evaluating them. I can provide real and immediate feedback on my actual experience based by my actual needs.

Panel and focus groups have their place. My point is that the voice of the customer is different; it is about actual customer satisfaction. I’m not saying it’s better than panels, I’m saying it’s different. It’s a new type of information that is more closely aligned with what customers actually experience and how well their expectations are satisfied.

With a panel, people are tasked to behave in a certain way and then asked to rate their ability to act in that way. They have been qualified using demographics or psychographics, whether they are in market to purchase, or whether they make a certain income or not. They are often rewarded for participating. Voice of the customer respondents are qualified by their own unsolicited choice to visit the site for their own purpose and they are not directly rewarded for participating.

A good analogy for the difference between the information that comes from a panel study and the voice of your customer is the difference between a date and a blind date.

4 Factors that Affect the Quality of VoC Intelligence Entry

The saying: “garbage in = garbage out” is very relevant, especially when it comes to the noisy online research medium. Results are limited in confidence by solicitation and collection interface methodology, as well as design and type of questions posed. Capturing the experience of visitors in the context of self-initiated situations is the key to defining VoC business intelligence. The main factor effecting the quality and reliability of VoC intelligence can be broken into 4 main areas.

 

1. Solicitation on arrival – response rate
Passive, exit, and conditional solicitation bias results as the experience itself affects the choice to participate. A balanced view of the total visitor experience can only be accessed when opt-in occurs before the experience occurs, ideally on arrival.

iPerceptions gets a positive response to participate in feedback of between 2-5% of visitors who are solicited on arrival to the site, who complete their feedback immediately after their visit.

2 - Collection interface – completion rate and respondent fatigue
Completion rate is the number of respondents who complete a fixed number of required responses to the survey compared to the number who start answering the survey. A low completion rate suggests that your survey is too long or badly designed.

Our research suggests that survey fatigue, dropping out of the survey before completing the required number of questions, is driven more by the number of screen interactions required by the collection interface used to answer the questions, than simply the number of questions itself.

A screen interaction is any mouse click or scroll required by the respondent while completing the study.

Average completion rate for first 25 screen interactions is ~90%. Exponential drop out starts at about 35 screen interactions. Ideally design a survey so that any respondent, regardless of skip logic (question flow), can complete the survey in no more than 40 screen interactions.