thinks

Heard any great customer service stories lately? I did. Yesterday at SES, Jennifer Laycock, editor-in-chief of the terrific Search Engine Guide (The small business guide to search marketing), told an amazing story called “I Heart Zappos”. Must’ve gotten something in my eye at the exact moment she was telling the story. No. Really.

What’s the best customer service story you know? Tell us about it in the comments.

I spent part of my day yesterday speaking with web analytics rock star Avinash Kaushik and watching him present at Search Engine Strategies in New York. And during his speech, Avinash made a great point, stating, “You don’t have a home page. Each of your customers has a different home page on your site.”

Now, what did Avinash mean by that? Simply, that customers frequently enter your site through pages that aren’t the home page. Many visitors may never even see the site’s home page.

For example, here is the top landing page traffic for this site:

Notice that the almost 2300 visits we’ve received here came in through 225 different landing pages. The top page was not the home page (it was the very popular “Comparing hosted services for small business websites”). But it only received 11% of visits. The timpeter.com “home page” got only 8.5%, behind this blog (10.8% of entries) and not one, but two different blog posts.

Customers enter your site looking for what matters to them.

• Do you have a clear, keyword-rich title for every page on your site, describing what it is about?
• Do you repeat that title, or something similar, in an H1 tag to show what the page is about?
• Do you have content - copy, images or video - that illustrates the purpose of the page and answers your customers’ questions?
• Do you have navigation or breadcrumbs giving appropriate context to the page, so you customer knows where they are and what else is available to them?
• Do you have a clear call to action, telling customers what to do next?

In other words, do you make each page on your site a welcoming home page?

For more information about how to build effective landing pages, buy Tim Ash’s great book “Landing Page Optimzation.”. You can also read my review of Tim’s book here and read my interview with Avinash Kaushik here.

Linda Bustos had an excellent piece last week showing how to conduct checkout process split testing. A comment in that post led John Quarto von Tivadar (such a cool name!) at GrokDotCom to demonstrate the value of split testing. Genius. Both.

John gets it exactly right when he says, “Customers don’t care if what we have behind-the-scenes is simple or complex. All the customer cares about is how simple and enjoyable — or not — the experience is for them.”

Every site - every business - has differences. In fact, you must differentiate yourself from your competition to succeed. Your product might be different, your service might be different, your message might be different. But your customers’ goals are the same: to accomplish what they want to do. So if you’re different because you’re differentiating yourself, that’s one thing. But if you believe you’re so different that you can’t learn from what works, you’re not just different. You’re foolish.

So, it’s slowly becoming official: we’re approaching/in a recession/death spiral. Bummer. Ah, well. It could be worse. You could be Client 9.

We at thinks tend to take the long view on these things. And the long view is good for ecommerce. Without further ado, here is this week’s list of ecommerce links to brighten your spirits in these dark days. They might just help you compete more effectively, too.

• I’ve talked a lot in the past about why small businesses need a website and tools small businesses can use to create a website quickly and easily. Search Engine Land gives a great example of one small business using these techniques to great success. Key quote: “[our website has] been crucial to helping build the business and driving customer growth. The majority of our customers originate through the web.”
• How much should you budget for acquiring those customers, through the web or otherwise? Mike Moran (author of the outstanding “Do It Wrong Quickly”) links to great information about how to effectively budget for customer acquisition.
• Conventional wisdom says capturing new customers requires plenty of work as well as money. Even more so if you’ve gotten a bad reputation somewhere along the way. But maybe conventional wisdom is wrong. Conversation Agent looks at how much 14-year olds love Microsoft and what you can learn from that. Huh. Maybe there’s hope for Eliot Spitzer yet.

That’s it for the week, folks. See you on the other side.

Each month, thinks posts the top content from the month before. For February, this was the stuff you found most useful:

• People still dig (not Digg) my reviews of Weebly, Sitekreator and Synthasite, along with my follow-up review of Jimdo
• A quick discussion of why splash screens suck jumped up near the top of February’s list.
• The 12 most important business books of the last 10 years continues getting the love.
• And my weekly ecommerce link digests have become quite popular.
• And, finally, for some reason, people seem to keep asking “who is this Tim Peter of which I speak?” OK, not technically a recent post, but I thought you might like to meet your host.

Avinash Kaushik on 4Q and Measuring Customer Satisfaction

During my discussion of web analytics and business metrics yesterday, I left out one critical metric: customer satisfaction. Until now, few tools existed that made it easy for small business owners and marketing managers to hear what their customers had to say online. That changed last week when Avinash Kaushik and iPerceptions announced the launch of 4Q, a qualitative analysis tool designed to measure customer satisfaction.

I sat down with Avinash (well, emailed, but you get the point) to talk about qualtitative analysis and how site owners can make the most of 4Q. We also talked a bit about the future of the tool and how it came to be.

Tim: First, Avinash, congratulations on the launch of 4Q and thanks for taking the time to do this interview. I’m very impressed by 4Q and happy with the results it’s providing for my site so far.

Avinash: Thanks so much Tim, I am absolutely thrilled that you are finding it to be of value. I personally never get tired of analyzing VOC (voice of the customer), every site is so unique.

Tim: Additionally, I love that 4Q asks your three greatest survey questions ever. Can you talk a bit about what led you to develop 4Q and what your goals are for the project?

Avinash: Several reasons. As you know I inhibit the world of quantitative web analytics and there is a tendency to actually believe in the power of all the numbers. Make no mistake they can be powerful, but for a complex interaction medium like the web, people and habits are evolving too fast to actually get lots of insights into customer intent and preferences. So one thing was the limitations when it comes to the power of pure quant stuff to spit out actionable insights.

A secondary reason was that it is quite atrocious how little most website owner’s and decision makers know about their actual customers. I know that sounds hard to believe, but it is true.

4Q is our humble attempt at helping decision makers have key customer data (in their own voices) as they consider what to do with their sites. It is also to help facilitate the evolution from simply using the “What” type data to “What + Why” type data.

Oh and it is kind of cool and “web 2.0″ to put out something free and of value!

Tim: What benefits should site owners expect from 4Q?

Avinash: Simple:

• Tap into insights directly from their customers.
• Eliminate the need to interpret or throw in your own opinions or overlay “here is what I think works”.

If you know why people come to your site, you’ll design it better. If you know what people find tough about your site, you’ll improve it. If you know they love it, you can go ask your boss for a raise!

Tim: On your blog and in your book, Web Analytics: An Hour a Day, you’ve talked about 6 recommendations for conducting surveys. 4Q does a great job on most of those. One thing I’m missing is how to tie this data to your regular clickstream or behavioral data. How can site owners integrate 4Q most effectively with their behavioral analysis to create a complete picture of their customers’ experience?

Avinash: Connecting the two sets of data would be important, especially as you squeeze all the initial set of juice out in the first say six months or a year.

For GA (Google Analytics), specifically, the best option is to pass a common parameter between both. So, for example, you can pass the anonymous cookie id to the survey and to GA and then use that to tie [them together]. Another alternative is if your survey has a unique value that identifies it, then pass it as a “user defined value” into GA, which also allows you to tie the data and slice and dice.

Tim: And for others?

Avinash: There are some where there is an option to pass a unique identifier (like the user defined value) and there are others where you can import the survey data into the web analytics [tool] after it has been processed. Some of the paid solutions have this option. Please check with your vendor and I am sure they have it.

Tim: 4Q shows its data in real time, without indicating when it’s reached a statistically valid sample. Any concerns about site owners reacting to data that may lead them down the wrong path? How can site owners react most appropriately, particularly if their site receives limited traffic (i.e., a statistically invalid sample)?

Avinash: Can I cheat? Here is a comment I wrote on my blog that addresses this specifically (and there is even a pretty table to go with it!)

The short answer is that for a given time period if you get approximately 300 responses (that’s it) then the data is statistically significant. But I caution and point out that one of the key outputs of 4Q is open text VOC and there, even with small numbers, you are kosher because customers are helping identify issues with your website.

Tim: 4Q is free for its users. Can you talk about the business model? Do you plan to charge users for 4Q at some point in the future?

Avinash: 4Q is and will remain free. That is our plan for now. No plans for a paid version. There are very good complex paid surveys in the marketplace that solve different problems. 4Q is in a different space.

Tim: Are there future development plans for 4Q that you can talk about? I know it just came out last week but, c’mon, we’re impatient folk here on the Interwebs.

Avinash: I think you are going to see some improvements soon, it has been only a few days but we already have so much great feedback.

Don’t hold me to dates yet (!!) but expect to see improvement on the survey invite. I would love for us to add a response rate report, ease of use of adding more sites under one account, and maybe easier to export data out.

So more fun stuff to come. I want 4Q to be truly a customer driven innovation. I plan to stay involved in the evolutionary process of 4Q for the near future, or until they no longer let me (I am sure they are going to get tired of me bugging them!).

Tim: Thanks again for taking the time to talk with us about 4Q. Is there anything you’d like to add?

Avinash: Its my pleasure, thanks for the opportunity.

Tim: Anytime.

How are you measuring customer satisfaction with your website? Tell us about it in the comments. And as a reminder, you can subscribe to 4Q here

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