Want Customer Insight—Just Ask or What eBags Knows That Others Don’t

I am reading a great book I would recommend to merchants—Web Analytics: An Hour a Day by Avinash Kaushik. In terms of web analytics, Avinash is one of the leading figures and his book as well as blog posts are a great source of some very accessible advice on the difficult topic of web analytics.

One piece of advice Avinash stressed in the book and also in a blog post on customer survey questions, is the importance of qualitative data—in other words what customers are saying about your site and how they feel when shopping there. Analytics can tell you what they bought, when they bought, what they searched on to find your site, what pages they viewed, and even some arcane information such as what resolution their screen was at the time. Analytics can’t tell you they almost left your site before buying and would have if you weren’t offering a coupon promotion for free shipping. Because of this, Avinash rightly stresses the importance of collecting this type of attitudinal data from customers.

A Look at the Top 100

With this in mind I went and looked at some of the sites in the top 100 Internet Retailer. To my surprise I did not find many examples. Now it is possible or even highly likely that these mega merchants, many of whom have retail locations (Target, Walmart, Staples, Williams-Sonoma, and other) and undoubtedly massive marketing departments, are collecting this same data in focus groups or usability testing sessions, but it was still surprising to find so few examples. Why not ask your customers what they think right on your web site?

Crate & Barrel has a feedback link that appears in the footer of their pages just below the email sign-up form. This opens a pop-up with a few questions (see below).

Crate & Barrel feedback form

While Crate & Barrel is smart for collecting this information on site when many other top retailers don’t appear to be (at least not with prominent links in global locations of the site), I wonder about the quality of feedback they are getting with such an open-ended form and by asking for multiple pieces of information even if marked optional; they are collecting a quantitative rating as well though which seems smart.

The best example I came across which appears not in a pop-up but right in the footer of the page was eBags.

eBags feedback form

The message appearing with the form makes it very clear what information they hope to collect. They are asking in a customer-focused way for the products customers want to buy and the language they would need to see to aid in making the sale.

If this seems like a good way to collect feedback from your customers, it’s fairly easy to create form and use a cgi script which we provide already to collect this data and send it to an email address you specify. Then you can add the HTML for the form to the final-text field or a custom field if you have custom templates.

In terms of processing the feedback, I would recommend creating an alias such as feedback@yourdomain.com and then forwarding messages to the appropriate people in your organization to act upon. Now all of the feedback you collect may not be something you can act upon, but there will likely be some invaluable nuggets of information you can use to expand product content to address buyer concern, add new related products you don’t carry, or help establish trust with buyers. If you have employees that handle customer calls you may want them to use the same or a custom-built form within their CRM tools to collect this same feedback. Your goal should be to try and learn something new with each customer touchpoint.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

P.S. Avinash is donating all of his proceeds from his book to two charities: The Smile Train and Doctors without Borders so if that plus all the great insight don’t encourage you to buy the book, I’m not sure what will. And yes he is that nice of a guy to do so.