I was thinking about customer satisfaction through e-commerce sites lately, and wanted to share you my thoughts around measurement points from web analytics point of view.
One of the ultimate outcomes for a website is customer satisfaction. First site I think of e-commerce site with great customer satisfaction is Zappos.com. It is one of the ultimate models to service and satisfy customers. Zappos definitely made me think about customer satisfaction more than before. Before we think things in complicated manner, I think we need start somewhere and understand the measurement points for web analytics, because web analytics is the bread and butter of this blog.
Check out this diagram I made. Apologies if it is not pretty...
When a business owns an e-commerce site and deals with web analytics, we (web analysts) need be mindful of the key points that support and complete the e-commerce service. Allow me to share you my idea around three web analytics action and measurement points:
Point 1 (Website and Customers)
This point shows the interaction between customers and the website. In other words, it is the "experience" part for the customers going through your store. From web analytics point of view, we would measure and assess:
- Pages that the customers viewed that contributed to completing a key event.
- Entry pages with high bounce rate to understand what to optimize.
- Conversions.
- Visitor types and their behavior differences, and outcome analysis.
- Advanced segmentation analysis on various dimensions of data against outcome.
- And many other fantastic data we get out of web analytics applications.
These are typical metrics and KPIs that are available straight out of the web analytics applications, which requires customized tracking and set up for key events on goals. The business should know what KPIs should be gauged to understand how their site is doing against their goals.
Optimizations and testing will impact this area (point 1), so customers' interactions with the site will give us actionable data that supports decisions to improve customer experience. Measured and assessed data should tie with customer satisfaction because your website has to serve your customer with products/services/content they are looking for, and have your site optimal so that customers can convert with ease.
Point2 (Business and Website)
You are wondering what does business or website owner got to do with the actual site that relates to customer satisfaction. To be honest, after going through many websites, I've seen many situations where I doubt site owner's care and ability to maintain the site to serve its customers. (Maybe I am shooting my own foot here... lol)
Some of the actions taken by business owners could be adding/updating content, executing promotions, supply inventory info in e-commerce database, etc. All these actions could lead to customer satisfaction. Taking the supplying inventories as an example, I've came across sites where when I put an item into cart, it'll show "out of stock". Leaving me with no choices, but to leave the site.
From web analytics stand point, we would love to measure everything that impacts the bottom line, but here are examples of metrics and actions pertaining to customer satisfactions:
Inventory availability vs. demand orders, Promo response and application/redemption, site optimization A/B or multivariate test, fresh content uploads rate vs. avg. visitor frequency, applying SEO best practices, etc.
Point3 (Customers and Business)
I believe this is an important point as well as other common web analytics involvement affiliating with customer satisfaction. After customer purchase items from the website, orders have to be fulfilled, issues have to be solved; direct marketing may take place online or offline, etc. The speed and timing of fulfillments, customer supports, and customer communications are pretty critical to customer satisfaction.
From web analytics stand point there quite a few measurement points. Here are some examples.
- Direct Marketing (online/offline): Delivery, Response Rate, Conversions, etc.
- Fulfillment: Ship to order ratio, average order to delivery time
- Support: Customer response, incident reduction, support forum usage
- Direct testimonials to business, survey request to customer and analysis
Hopefully, this article gave you different take or angle in viewing customer satisfaction relating to e-commerce. Some of this concept may apply to non-commerce site, too. I guess having a creative mindset in web analytics field does not hurt. That's what I believe in.
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