Survey: Customer Research and Results

Feb 8, 2006

Last March I wrote about The Best Month for Customer Experience; do you remember which month it was?

Excerpt:

Early and often - that's when you should work on the customer experience. EARLY: The best time to get started is ASAP. Remember that the earlier in the project, the more you're able to think strategically... and make changes to strategy.

Whether in a major site redesign, or a first-time launch from scratch, it's important to include customers in the process - and to involve them as early as possible in the process.

This isn't a new idea, certainly not in the writings here at Good Experience and Creative Good for the past nine years; so the question arose last year - how customer-focused are we in the business world?

To find out, we surveyed over 140 e-commerce executives - site owners, VPs, and directors of major e-commerce sites - about their use of customer input, and customer research, during the development process. Phil Terry, my business partner and CEO of Creative Good, ran the survey and presented the results at last month's Shop.org FirstLook conference.

Of course, we could run this survey for many different types of online businesses (intranets, portals, B2B sites) and offline (banks, schools, hospitals, and airlines come to mind) - but consider these results, which were limited to e-commerce for Shop.org, to be indicative of what *your* industry may look like.

Some of the results may surprise you. I've summarized them below.

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On when they conduct customer research:

• Only 25% of site owners conduct direct customer research at the beginning of the project.

(To be fair, 25% is higher than it was a few years ago, so this represents a big win for the industry and the customers.)

• 45% do customer research at some point later during the project, but not at the beginning.

(This includes customer research that first appears at the *end* of a project - something we see a lot of, unfortunately.)

• 30% of site owners generate all their ideas internally and build without *ever* testing with customers.

(This means planning, developing, and finally launching a site - all done with no customer research at all.)

Again, judging this result depends on one's perspective. It's either a big win (since it's lower than a few years ago), or an astoundingly high number (who still operates without any customer input, ever, as late as 2006?).

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On whether they ask customers a "net promoter" question:

• Only 40% ask the question, "How likely are you to recommend our company to a friend?"

• And of those who do ask, only about half ask the follow up question, "Why?"

More on "net promoter", from last May.

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On what the site owners' most recent redesigns focused on:

• Over half of all recent redesigns focused on improving *basics*: finding (32%) and buying (20%) products.

• Checkout came in third, at 10%.

• All accounting for small percentages were other investments: search engine optimization, e-mail, multi-channel work, "participation economy" features, customer service, loyalty programs, and promotions.

This was striking. Some of these sites are over 10 years old, perhaps having lived through 10 or more redesigns, and they're *still* working on getting the basics right.

And we're happy to hear it. Most customers mostly care about the basics of the experience - not the latest flashy feature - and thus the site owner's investment should be made to match. (We're also happy that this is becoming a more popular idea than it was when we repeated it, again and again, in the dotcom bubble :)

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On measured results:

We asked, "Which statement best explains your experience?"

• About half chose, "When we redesigned, sales immediately improved."

• About a quarter chose, "When we redesigned, sales slipped."

• About a quarter chose, "We've had both results."

This is a great sign that many redesigns - I'd like to think it's mainly those that start with customer research in the beginning - are measurably and immediately improving business metrics.

But it's important to re-state the importance of measuring results. What good is user experience, usability, IA, CX, AI, FUBAR, or any other discipline or acronym if you can't show *some* result after investing time and money in it?

Read more about results and how to get them:
www.goodexperience.com/blog/archives/000283.php

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