Watching Websites » Building a new site

Guest Post: How much is enough when it comes to Voice of Customer?

Jonathan Levitt — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 02:18:19 +0000

Jonathan Levitt has spent the last 5 years as a pioneer in the voice of customer analytics space. Through his speaking, writing, and evangelism, he was instrumental in legitimizing voice of customer analytics at a time when traditional web analytics still dominated the online business intelligence conversation. Jonathan has worked with world leading brands like Bank of America, Verizon, Dell, Procter & Gamble, Ford, and Reebok and has been featured in several industry publications including 1to1 Magazine, ClickZ, DM News, and MediaPost.

One of the best sources of business intelligence for companies of any size is raw Voice of Customer data.

This is particularly true for start-ups, where early, frequent, and consistent interaction with customers is critical to getting off the ground. The more customer-centric your decision making processes are from day one, the more likely you will get to the next stage in the development and maturation of your business plan.

This explains the recent growth in the selection of free and low cost Voice of Customer collection tools. User Voice, Kampyle, Survey.io, 4Q Survey (disclaimer: I helped conceive and build 4Q) — all of these are examples of popular Voice of Customer collection tools that can provide site owners with a pipeline of cheap and actionable visitor-sourced insights.

Once you put on the VoC practitioner’s hat, however, questions about respondent count size inevitably come up. Simply put, you need a way of knowing how much data is enough.

At what point can you act on the findings coming through your shiny new tools, with full confidence that you have collected a representative sample of your audience? If you’ve been running a User Voice customer feedback tool for 3 weeks and you’ve only collected 20 respondents, is that enough to act on? These are certainly agonizing questions for a data-centric marketer.

Now’s the time to start glancing over enviously at the big sites, because they don’t have this problem. The laws of probability are such that feedback from 500 respondents is usually enough to deliver reliable data at even the strictest confidence intervals. A big site like Dell.com can pull in 500 respondents within a day or two; at that clip, statistical significance comes through in a heartbeat.

But since your traffic generation muscle isn’t likely to match Dell.com’s anytime soon, I’ll let you in on a little secret: for small, startup websites that want immediate answers to their questions, the size of your sample almost doesn’t matter.

Here’s why. Representative feedback sampling requires a known population that is relatively stable and doesn’t fluctuate all that much–basically, a predictable population that will yield reproducible results. But the visitor bases of small, startup websites are anything but stable, especially if the websites are in a voracious traffic acquisition mode. The reality is that the composition of their online audiences is constantly shifting, which seriously undermines any effort at scientific VoC measurability.

This is one case where directional data can be just as powerful as representative data. I’m not saying you should blow up your website and start from scratch because of 1 piece of negative feedback, but you don’t need more than 20-25 pieces of feedback to really get started. So, forget about the science and the stats, and focus instead on segments of visitor discontent.

Look for repetitions and common patterns in your feedback; group similar items together and focus on sectional site optimization . If you notice two or three pieces of feedback that are eerily similar, then chances are your respondents are surfacing a real issue that’s resonating far deeper in your growing visitor base.

Voice of customer research can be a wonderfully responsive early warning system for a small website owner. Don’t get caught up in obsessing over respondent counts. If you’ve got 25 or so pieces of real visitor feedback at hand, you can go a long way in constructing a visitor-centric website experience that will help your website to grow and flourish.

Jonathan Levitt

Blunt – The Conversation Agency

brilliant example of surveying users about a feature before it is built

Sean Power — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 04:12:04 +0000

There’s been alot of talk lately on the idea of prototyping and demonstrating a product to solicit feedback. The catch? The product isn’t actually built. This goes hand in hand with the MVP concept practiced by lean startups.

I was on BackType today, and I just witnessed an awesome example of this concept in action.

BackType is a search engine that indexes millions of comments across social media platforms and lets you query for particular topics that interest you. Cool, right? I performed a search query for “analytics”, and the resulting page had a small tab called “Trends”.

Curious, I clicked on it and was brought to this page:

Drat, it’s not released yet!

Brilliant! BackType has given me an excuse to come back and check to see if the tab is active. Even better – they were able to collect my expectations before the feature has even been released (or built!).

This is product management crowdsourcing at its finest.

Well done, team BackType.

new website upgrade – goals? what goals? – part 2

Sean Power — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 23:54:15 +0000

Since we’ve got a site, there must be a reason for its existence . . right? We bothered to put something up – there must be a point. But often many sites don’t consciously know why they created their sites in the first place, and this may be a result of not taking the time to articulate the goals of the site – its raison d’être.

By mapping out your goals, you’ll find it much easier to translate them into things to look at to make sure that you’re achieving your goals. These “things to look at” are also called metrics. AKA KPIs. AKA all those other silly names that denote some sort of accountability. At any rate, it turns out that wachingwebsites.com’s goals are pretty simple. In no particular order:

Create a cool site that supports the book well. This includes information about the book, its chapters, changes, updates and so on.
Inform people about our services. Tell them about the company “Watching Websites”, and let them know what we do.
Blog about things related to our areas of expertise. Anything goes: industry trends, anecdotes, lessons learned; as long as we provide content that our readers think is valuable, we’ll have a great start.
Encourage visitors to stick around by providing free resources (including presentations, whitepapers, notable conference lists, etc)
Be full of win.

Your goals are undoubtedly different. Example might be “increase retention by 10%”, “party like its 1980″, “increase conversions next quarter by 1%”, “increase blog readership by 2%”, “wear cool shirts”, “increase bottom line by 25% over 2 quarters”, etc.

We’ll come back to these goals, over and over and over again during the course of this series of blog posts. Knowing what your goals are can help you save you alot of time, by painting a clear vision of where you’ll likely want to end up. Now that i’ve got these four things to work with, off I go to create sketches of what I envision! baseline the site to figure out how it’s doing first! (woops, jumped the gun!).

This is an article in a series of blog posts that will look at the process of building the new Watching Websites website, focusing on metrics & analytics. The posts include:

Part 1: things as is aren’t looking so good

Part 2: goals? what goals?

Part 3: baselining the existing site

Part 4: mocking up the new site

Part 5: marketing requirements documents (MRD) made easy

Part 6: requirements definitions documents (RDD) made easy

Part 7: analytics requirements documents (ARD) made easy

Part 8: choosing the right platform

Part 9: watching websites – the back end

Part 10: watching websites – the front end

Part 11: watching websites – going live!

Part 12: post-upgrade analytics in practice

Part 13: optimizing the site

Part 14: lessons learned & conclusions

new website upgrade – things as is aren't looking so good – part 1

Sean Power — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 00:28:20 +0000

Welcome to our site. Like it? Didn’t think so. You probably came here expecting to find book content, information about us, information about our company “Watching Websites”, stuff about analytics in general or simply find cool anecdotes.

We put this site up as we were writing the book. We found hosting (thanks Ian and Dan!), installed wordpress, installed the Atatahualpa theme and off we went. We didn’t really have time to tend to the site too much for reasons that included hectic schedules, keeping up with the book deadlines and so on.

But now, the book Complete Web Monitoring is out! Woot!

So, it’s time to give www.watchingwebsites.com some much needed love. Over the upcoming weeks, we’ll be blogging about the process behind upgrading www.watchingwebsites.com, focusing on how we’re using analytics to figure out if things went well or not. As always, we won’t be teasing you with how things could happen – instead, we chose to be transparent, name sources, show off tools, give out documents and generally try and give as much pertinent information as possible.

So, the following hyperlinks will get activated as soon as the articles go up (expect some of the titles to change!). In the meantime, follow Alistair and I on Twitter for updates, or simply add us to your RSS reader (RSS feeds are mysteriously broken. Still trying to figure out why!)