“Over the past decade, the power of A/B testing has become an open secret of high-stakes web development. It’s now the standard (but seldom advertised) means through whichSilicon Valleyimproves its online products. Using A/B, new ideas can be essentially focus-group tested in real time: Without being told, a fraction of users are diverted to a … Read more
When measuring your customer experience, there are three questions that you may ask your customer that will give you insight into their satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy. The standard “How satisfied are you with…” is always good way to measure basic satisfaction. When compared to “How much do you value…” – you gain tremendous insight. If … Read more
Jeofrey Bean of Del Mar Research and I are putting the final edits on our new book, The Customer Experience Revolution. It will be available January 2012. Jeof and I have interviewed folks who have shared their talents with Xerox PARC, Apple, Google, Netflix, Yahoo!, Amazon.com, JD Powers and more to gain insights into how great companies … Read more
Vovici, provider of enterprise feedback management solutions, has an exclusive whitepaper, Getting Behind the Customer Experience Wheel, where they describe how to create a Customer Journey Map and a “Customer Experience Wheel” as part of creating a Voice of the Customer program. The whitepaper states, “Research reveals that having a centralized customer experience team and … Read more
Businesses frequently want an evaluation of their websites—mostly to know how they compare to the competition. Based on our experience, most businesses are disappointed with their website’s ability to convert visitors to loyal customers. In fact, many people say they aren’t really sure what their website does for them. To assess and enhance website effectiveness, … Read more
You need to decide how much user research, design, and usability testing you can afford. This depends on your competitive market, business objectives, and release cycles. During the early phases of a product development lifecycle, activities include conducting market, customer, and competitive user research. User research may include surveys, focus groups, interviews, and contextual inquiries. … Read more
Developing prototypes and reviewing them with target customers and users is key to designing easy-to-use solutions. You must spend some time validating workflow, navigation, information grouping, information hierarchy, terminology, labels, and interactions to ensure they meet the needs of the market and your users. Your understanding of various customers’ needs, users’ workflows, and content overlaps … Read more
The first step in developing solutions that are easy to use is understanding customer and user needs within the context of the market and existing competition. It takes market and user research to: define the problem your product must solve and design an optimal solution understand the strengths and weaknesses of competitors’ solutions in comparison … Read more
Product Design conducts an analysis of the market, technology, and competition, in terms of the user experience and interface design, early in the product lifecycle to determine the user interface (UI) design direction. Partnering with Product Management, the Product Design group conducts surveys, focus groups, reviews, and other activities to better understand the market, customer, … Read more
Product Management writes requirements that identify the problems in the marketplace and quantifies opportunities for their solutions. Product Design assists Product Management in validating the solutions. Information Architects or Usability Specialists develop, conduct, and analyze surveys, interviews, and/or observations. The data from these studies helps identify problems and opportunities that are realized in the requirements. … Read more
A customer community is where customers gather to share ideas, advice, experiences and feelings. Customer communities allow the organization that host the community to “listen” to the groups talk about their industry, brand, products, and competitors. Customer-focused organizations create these communities to gain deep insight into their customers’ interests, decisions, and needs. Customer-focused companies listen … Read more
Customer Experience Management (CEM) is a strategy that focuses organizations around the needs of their customers. Moving customers from satisfied to loyal to advocate. As brands become increasingly commoditized, companies look to CEM to maintain their competitive advantage. CEM solutions integrate external and internal customer interactions to create a unified, consistent, end-to-end customer experiences. By … Read more