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

By: Jonathan Levitt - November 2nd, 2009  Filed under: Building a new site, startup, VOC, What are they saying, Who's talking?, Why did they do it 8 Comments

jl1Jonathan 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. [Read More]

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

By: Sean Power - October 28th, 2009  Filed under: Building a new site, lean, startup, VOC, Why did they do it 3 Comments

lightbulb.jpgThere’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:

backtype feature launchDrat, 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.

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An Open Letter To All TechCrunch50 2009 Startups: The TC Bump, What It Really Means and How To Navigate It

By: Sean Power - September 12th, 2009  Filed under: Could they do it, Events, How did they do it, Misc, Social Media, w2e, What did they do, Why did they do it 51 Comments

Disclaimer 1: All site-related data found in this post comes from compete.com.  The company was kind enough to give us a “pro account” to help us research the O’Reilly book that we wrote called Complete Web Monitoring (thanks, you rock!).  However, compete.com did not sponsor this post (nor did any company, for that matter).  And yes, we know – compete.com numbers are simply estimates.

Disclaimer 2: I (Sean) worked for Akoha as Community Gardener while we launched at TechCrunch50 2008; but I’m now doing metrics, web analytics, performance, and social computing consulting.  The views found below are mine, and do not reflect those of Akoha in any way.  For the record, Akoha is awesome!

About us: This post was written by Sean Power with Alistair Croll.

Dear TechCrunch50 Startups,

Congratulations. You made the list. You’re finally launching, and that pent-up frustration of not being able to tell people about it for a month is almost at an end. Now, you have to live with a weekend of cold, hard fear that your demo will explode. You’ve got an interesting week ahead, and I know you’re short on sleep, so let me get to the point quickly.

You’re probably excited about the TC50 bump. I first saw the term used by Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital on the RedEye VC blog. The bump refers to the pounding your website is about to experience from TC50 attendees, readers, bloggers and their friends.  It’s not to be underestimated.  Here’s a glimpse at how the bump looked like for all TC50 startups in 2008.  If you squint a little, you’ll see Akoha somewhere in there!:

TechCrunch50 2008 - Unique Visitors - All Finalists - The TechCrunch Bump

This is an unprecedented influx of attention. It may be the single biggest traffic spike you’ll ever experience. Thousands of visitors will drive by your site, stay for a minute, and leave — never to return. After the bump, you’ll feel a tremendous rush of adrenaline, then deep, soul-sucking disillusionment as your traffic dwindles back to its former levels.

Don’t waste this opportunity. If you take the right steps, you can make the most of your fifteen minutes of fame.

[Read More]

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DemoCamp Guelph

By: Alistair Croll - March 4th, 2009  Filed under: Could they do it, DemoCamp Guelph, Events, How did they do it, Uncategorized, What did they do, Why did they do it, Writing the book Add Comment

We’re doing a presentation that’s excerpted from the book at DemoCamp Guelph tonight. Should be an interesting conversation; we have an “exercise” planned. Sean can’t be here (he was at Podcamp and has to get real work done after a weekend of editing the 400+ figures in the text!) but will be joining on Twitter. If you have photos from the event, or questions for Sean, we’ll be using the #CWM hashtag (for Complete Web Monitoring, the title of the book.)

One of the projects we’ve been working on is trying to create a single, comprehensive overview of the Complete Web Monitoring process. Here’s where we’re at (and an early glimpse at a poster we’re working on.)

First of all, a complete monitoring strategy includes the many questions a web analyst needs to answer:

  • Web analytics (“what did they do?”)
  • Web Interaction Analytics (“how did they do it?”)
  • Voice of the Customer (“why did they do it?”)
  • Both synthetic and real user performance monitoring (“could they do it?”)
  • Community monitoring (“what are they saying?”, “who’s talking?”, and “where are they saying it?”

Any strategy also has to look at several different stages in monitoring:

  • Arrival (“I visited the site”)
  • Usage (“I played with it”)
  • Engagement (“I’m a part of it”)
  • Revenue (“I paid for it”)
  • Referrals (“I spread the word”)

If these look somewhat like Dave McClure’s Pirate Metrics, it’s because he’s awesome and we borrow heavily from his thinking on startup metrics. Anyway, this PDF is a work in progress of trying to align the big questions analysts need to answer with the various stages of visitor engagement. Once we sex it up a bit, we’ll make some posters.

I’ll put the DemoCamp slides up here shortly.

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