Conversion Optimization, Best Selling Author http://www.amazon.com/Conversion-Optimization-Converting-Prospects-Customers/dp/1449377564

Jul 12, 2016

Just Listen: Back to elementary school basics

Too often, businesses are often “siloed” away from their customers, making marketing decisions and setting marketing budgets in board rooms without really knowing what customers need or want. In my 11 years as a marketer, I have found that leveraging the voice of the customer is one of the most often overlooked and undervalued data point.

And it’s maybe because hearing from customers in the online space is inconvenient, sometimes unpleasant, and a bit difficult.

As a marketer within the space of conversion optimization, gathering customer and market responses and voice is a necessity in order to get a true picture of what is happening on ones’ website. Parsing through analytics without qualitative data about the market is like reading a book without an introduction or conclusion.

Really, listening to your customers is an important part of the learning process for any entrepreneur.

And of course, always know that what your customers say is incredibly valuable. There’s an art to collecting the data, and art of knowing what they’re saying.

For example, although good reviews boost your business, but where the real learning happens is from the bad reviews. These are the customers that didn’t have a seamless experience and are letting you know what the issues are so you can better optimize your processes.

Although collecting qualitative data may be challenging, you can be proactive and start listening to voice of your customers on a regular basis, especially if you are aiming at achieving higher conversion rates.

What is Voice of the Customer

Voice of the customer, or VOC, is a method that is used to find out needs and want of your customers, organize them into hierarchical structure and prioritize them.

The VOC has four aspects:

Customer needs
Hierarchy
Priority
Segmentation

Customer needs is how customers describe in their own words what kind of benefits they want to see in a product or a service. Your customers might share their assumptions related to your product or service, state their wants or exciting needs (what will delight or surprise them). Knowing customer needs is crucial for marketing, and in case of website, for conversions.

Hierarchical structure comes in place when you gathered initial data on your customer needs and you need to organize it in simpler structure for your own convenience. Usually needs are divided into primary, secondary and tertiary. Primary needs are up to 10 top needs identified by you. They set the strategic direction of your marketing efforts. Each primary need has several secondary needs that specify them. Secondary needs represent tactical level of your marketing efforts. Tertiary needs represent operational level activities; they provide details for development team, web designers or copywriters on what they need to do to create a software, website or copy that satisfy primary and secondary needs.

Prioritization is ordering the customer needs in terms of their priority for the customer. Based on prioritization you make decision on what marketing efforts to pursue. Don’t forget that priority level is applied based on perceived customer needs rather than based on real features of your product or service.

Segmentation of course not all customers have the same needs. This is where segmentation comes into play. Segmentation takes place when you group your customers into priorities clusters. Now if you’ve already created market segments and even personas, you can match priorities to each persona or market segment that you’ve previously created.

Why Voice of the Customer is Relevant for Conversion Optimization

In a nutshell, voice of the customer is qualitative insights into your customers’ minds.

We typically pair quantitative data such as analytics, heatmaps, voice recordings, etc. with qualitative data to get a full view of the customer and their online behaviors.

You gather qualitative data on your customers’ wants, needs, pains, trigger words, fears, uncertainties and doubts so that you can use this information further to increase conversions by improving customer experience.

Then you use qualitative data received through VOC research for persona creation that helps to personalize the user experience online by allowing experts to optimize the page through the lens of the customer.

Basically, VOC is a way to preempt visitor experiences and expectations through cognitive progression.

In any conversion optimization project, modifying a page should be based heavily on VOC and analytics as it makes the process scientific and razor sharp focused.

How to Listen to Voice of Your Customer on Your Website

Qualitative research typically tries to uncover/achieve one of the following 10 goals, which we have divided depending on buying stage:

General

Understanding reasons for visiting the website
Soliciting feedback
Assessing competitive space

Early to mid

Rating website satisfaction
Rating page satisfaction
Uncovering the appeals of your site / product offering

Mid to late

Uncovering missing content
Uncovering Issues with the website/page
Understanding reservations with using or purchasing product

Post action

Scale of satisfaction

Each of the following can be measured using one or more of the following tools:

on-site survey
email survey to gauge customer experience
data-gathering and review of chat and call complaints, questions, and comments from customer service reps
interviews
social media chatter and engagement
usability testing and field studies

On-site survey:

There are a number of onsite survey tools that allow you to present visitors with a pop-up containing a quick response on their overall site experience, as well as gauging what they are doing on your site in the first place.

You can also consider using exit pop-up surveys to figure out why visitors are abandoning your site. Some questions you can ask include:

What is the purpose of your visit today?
Did you find what you were looking for?
If not, why?
What was your overall site experience?

Of course these questions can be adapted to match your site service or products, but overall, they will give you a sense from your visitors of their overall experience, why they came, and what if anything did they accomplish.

Email Survey:

So great, you made a sale and got a customer.

Is that enough? Never.

Although email surveys need not be exclusive to post purchase, that is a good time to take advantage and send it with the order confirmation.

One time purchases are not very beneficial to you in the long run. Now, you have the more difficult than ever task now of engaging that one-time customer to become a customer for a life, or even better, an ambassador for your product or service. That is why a post-purchase survey allows you the opportunity of engaging them, understanding their experience, and giving them an incentive to return. You can learn a lot about the service you provided and how to better improve it by listening to your customer’s experience.

Data gathering:

Many companies have customer representatives standing by to address questions or concerns visitors may have.

But how many companies are analyzing the data?

Customer reps are speaking to all sorts of visitors at the different buying stages with questions and concerns about the site, about the products, etc.

So the question is, how can you gather that information and successfully address it?

Top 15: You obviously can’t address all questions and concerns at once, so start small. Take the top 15 concerns and questions and one by one, work on addressing them on your site. Once you’ve completed them, move on to the next 15.
Have a solid data-gathering method: What’s worse than having the reps and just not using the data, is not gathering the data at all! Leaving the info in the heads of your reps alone will do you no good. You want to make sure your customer reps are noting the questions and concerns, and placing them in an organized file so you can easily be able to extract the information.
Don’t dismiss VOC: Sometimes you really need to read into some of the comments or questions customers have. For example: when they say they can’t find something over and over again, that means there is an issue with your navigation, filtration mechanisms, or search. When they continuously ask about a certain spec of your product or service, although you may have it listed on the page somewhere, clearly, it is not obvious enough to your visitors.

Interviews:

Interviews are a great way to hear the customers voice directly from their lips to your ears.

We actually recommend two-tier interviews:

The customer service reps: What is their experience with the customers, what do they think the top concerns and questions on without reviewing the data (i.e. what sticks in their minds).
The actual customers: What was their experience like? What changes would they recommend on the website? These questions and more can really help you become more in-tuned with your target market.

Listening to the Chatter:

Social media, blogs, and customer reviews all give you a lens into what your target market are buzzing about.

Set-up different alerts for mentions, monitor and interact with your visitors through social media, and consistently look at the good and bad reviews people are making on your site.