iPerceptions - Customer Satisfaction Measurement

Originally published on November 4, 2008 at http://www.1to1media.com/View.aspx?DocId=31206

You’ve heard the saying: You cannot manage what you don’t measure.

Such was the case at Intuit Global, the makers of Quicken and Quickbooks, which until a year ago was unable to understand why the company was experiencing high website abandonment rates.

Its basic system of surveying customers didn’t provide a look into why visitors were leaving the site before completing their tasks. "If they were coming to our site and then abandoning, we wanted to know why," says. Lance Jones, manager of the user experience team at Intuit.

So about a year ago the company deployed iPerceptions’ webValidator suite to harvest behavioral insights from surveys, analyze the feedback, and profile site visitors. More than just learning why visitors were abandoning their sessions, Intuit wanted to understand who visits its site, why they are there, what they want to do, and if they are successful at those tasks.

The new solution asks every fourth visitor to the site if they’d like to participate in a survey after their shopping experience. If they agree, the system asks 15 questions, including "What was your goal on the Intuit site?" "Were you successful at accomplishing your goal?" and "Why or why not?" "These questions drive satisfaction," Jones says. "They tell us whether we’re building the right website or not. We need to know what people are coming to the site to do in order to deliver on customers’ expectations."

Asking visitors to participate in the survey as soon as they enter the site has additional benefits. "It’s good to set expectations up front so they know if they’re interested, they won’t have to do anything until they’ve finished with the site," Jones says.

Through the previous way of surveying Jones knew that the site abandonment issue was related to password retrieval. When users went through the process of retrieving their passwords or user names, they landed on a page that didn’t allow them an easy way back to the site. "We were creating a dead end for them," Jones says.

But the former Web analytics system didn’t reveal the behavioral data that could determine why the problem was happening. "What you can’t tell with Web analytics is why people are doing things on your site," Jones says. "With Web analytics you don’t get the answers to real questions where you need to know the ‘why.’"

The new solution differs in that it measures the actual attitudes of Intuit’s online visitors’ online experience in the context of their actual visit. "If you don’t understand what people are coming to the site to do, you’re missing the boat," adds Jonathan Levitt, vice president of iPerceptions.

Since deploying the solution, Intuit has seen a steady improvement in conversion—it’s up 15 percent on average. In addition, customer satisfaction rates have increased an average of 10 to15 percent. Much of the success in using qualitative data also comes from sharing the information. Jones’ team sends the user feedback from the surveys to the product managers and customer service to enhance offerings.

Additionally, monthly alerts about trends culled from the surveys update Intuit about the impact of site changes and marketing campaigns. For example, in reference to the site abandonment issue, Intuit discovered that people weren’t noticing the tabs on the password page to take them back to the site so they weren’t clicking on them. Jones says he simply talked to the website designers and asked to make the tabs more visible. "We saw an improvement in the tabs they were clicking going up 30 percent," he says.

Future plans include giving visitors the opportunity to provide suggestions on the product page in real time. "It would be great to prompt them when they’re on those [product] pages," Jones says.

- Mila D’Antonio