Mr. Tarasofsky

Website / Online Mechandising / SEO

Updating Your Site - A Checklist to Ensure Your Customers Are Onside

By Jerry Tarasofsky, CEO, iPerceptions Inc.

In order to answer that question, you must have previously established clear, quantifiable objectives. You would be surprised to learn that there are still quite a few relatively sophisticated site development teams out there that fail to quantify their objectives into terms that can be measured and benchmarked. And as the saying goes, you can't manage what you can't measure and when it comes to the web, it is imperative that you are able to quantify your site's performance against objectives and benchmarks.

So number one on my list for ensuring your customers are onside with your site is to make sure you are onside with your own objectives. Make sure everyone on you team understands what you want the site to achieve. It really doesn't matter whether your site is to be purely informational or is driving reservations - if everyone on the team, from Marketing and IT to Customer Service is pulling in the same direction, you'll have a pretty good chance of meeting your objectives. If they are off on different tangents, you run the risk of pleasing no one but outside suppliers who will be kept busy constantly making changes to the site - changes that may or may not be what your actual users want.

If your objectives are clear and can be supported with metrics that can act as benchmarks such as conversion rates, look to book ratios, abandonment levels, site satisfaction ratings, user satisfaction ratings, pages viewed and time spent on the site, you at least, have a starting point from which to evaluate what if any changes need to be made to ensure the site is meeting your objectives and the needs and wants of your users and most valuable customers.

Understanding to what degree your site meets those wants and needs of your web site visitors is probably the single most important issue a web site owner faces when they begin to look at site updates and enhancements.

Before you begin tinkering with the content, navigation, interactivity, special tools and other features that you believe need fixing - STOP. Step back, take a deep breath and ask yourself what it is your users are telling you? What are they saying about the site, as it now exists? Are they booking reservations online or abandoning the process just before they are supposed to hit the "confirm your reservation" button? Are they leaving your site satisfied or frustrated? If you can't listen and hear what they are saying, your first challenge is to build the tools or find an organization that will help you collect the necessary business intelligence so you can truly understand what your users are saying.

This business intelligence can come in many forms. Web logs provide such data as number of page views, time spent per page, click through patterns and site exit points for example. All of this data is vital information for determining user activity to some degree, however it does not provide any information about the actual user's online experience and the frame of mind they are in when they visit your site.

The only way to really obtain this information is by providing your actual users with a vehicle or channel for sharing their experiences with you. In other words, give them a way to quickly and easily let you know who they are, why they came to your site, what they value, what they like, what they dislike and finally what they want more of. Let them tell you whether you are delivering on your brand promise or why they've abandoned your site or most importantly, why they continually keep coming back.

Most web site owners today provide their users with some form of feedback mechanism however this is not really what I am referring to. You need a way to take the information and feedback your users are sharing with you and frame it in the context of your site objectives. You need to be able to quantify and distill their thoughts into actionable information so your web team can respond accordingly and in a timely manner. If you cannot respond quickly to the concerns of your users, there is a great likelihood they will end up on a competitor's web site or make a reservation through a third-party distributor.

Collecting this information in a timely manner is no easy task and requires, depending on the complexity of your site, some level of research expertise. But to begin, you might want to think about inviting your users to answer a few simple questions. Be upfront and ask your site users to spend three minutes answering twenty questions - that's a start. What questions you ask is the $64,000 question and why I suggest you might need some research expertise to guide you.

Therefore number two on my checklist of ensuring your customers are onside, is to make sure you have a mechanism in place to obtain reliable feedback from actual users - not people paid to visit your site by outside research firms or "professional" web surfers but actual users and that you respond to that feedback in a timely manner.

Once you have a program in place to harvest this business intelligence, you will be able to respond to your users online experiences and where and when necessary, make changes to your site that should improve their experience.

Since it is a given in the hospitality sector that a positive user experience enhances user loyalty and increases the likelihood that your users will become repeat customers, the third and final point I want to make about getting your users onside is that every site change or update that you undertake must drive a positive user experience. If more tools or features make navigating your site a nightmare, then although you've added something to the site, you've also created something that just might turn users off and force them to get the information they are looking for elsewhere.

In summary, if you cannot ensure that your site updates and changes are improving your user's overall experience, don't make them until you have a means to listen to what your users are saying!!

Jerry Tarasofsky is CEO of iPerceptions Inc. Its webValidator® "captures the voice" of the online customer, helping companies learn more about their customers. Using a comprehensive perceptual framework to evaluate key elements of the visitor experience and, algorithms and modeling to identify attributes that drive satisfaction. The webValidator solution turns data points into easy-to-understand strategic and tactical decision support. iPerceptions’ clients in the hospitality sector include Crowne Plaza, Omni, Savoy, Wellesley, Homestead, Radisson and Holiday Inn. Mr. Tarasofsky can be contacted at jerryt@iperceptions.com Extended Bio...

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