If you are a Web site manager who uses Customer Carewords™ you will gain valuable insights and know-how to put the views of your customers front and center.
That makes you more effective on the job and prepares you and your organization to change the way you do business through your Web site.
The entire Customer Carewords™ process — preparation, survey, and analysis — will take 8 to 12 weeks. The information you need to address what your visitors care most about when they visit your Web site will finally be in hand. With these immediate results, you are ready to define your top tasks, write killer Web content, and manage your Web site with facts, not opinions.
Are you in search of more effective user survey metrics to help you maintain and operate your site and prioritize your existing work program? Consider using a stand-alone offering: the Customer Centric Index.
It is a different kind of user survey that taps into gut instinct responses and only asks customers to vote for what they really care about. Your customers rate your site against 13 critical customer-centric factors, grouped into three major categories. Your take-away: a crystal clear improvement roadmap for your team from a customer point of view.
On This Page
Key Benefits
A Three-Step Process
The Customer-Centric Index
Focus on the killer content, not the filler content. When you identify words your audience hates, it lets you say "no" to bad ideas, remove unwanted content and move away from being organization-centric.
Provide Executives with an action plan. Prove the value of your priorities to senior management with a prioritized and defensible list of your visitors' top tasks as voted for by people who use your Web site.
Improve resource allocation. Identify what's most important to your visitors so that you don't waste time on less valuable improvements; Avoid expensive redesigns in favor of a program to engage your audience with customer-centric Web content.
Move to an Audience-centric navigation. If you do plan a redesign of your Web site, make it count with the insight a Customer Carewords™ program offers: help in setting your priorities and selecting the right labels in the right places.
Enhance Search-engine visibility. Go beyond keywords for search engine optimization. Keywords will bring customers to your Web site. But Customer Carewords™ helps you bring them through your site after they arrive because they enjoy higher task completion rates. Customer Carewords™ helps you select the right page titles and headings to improve search AND satisfaction.
A Three-Step Process
Step 1: Prepare a list of potential Customer Carewords™
We have a systematic approach for helping you assemble a comprehensive list of about 100 potential Customer Carewords™ to test with an audience.
We work together to identify these potential Customer Carewords™ with a high-impact review process.
We:
• Analyze the goals and objectives of your organization, business or university - What words stand out?
• Ask the customer: Brainstorm with customers and staff
• Analyze the search behavior of your customers
• Examine other similar sector Web sites, especially any competitors, for important words
• Leverage our master list of Customer Carewords™ from previous projects and Web reviews
Step 2: People choose their favorite Customer Carewords™
We've helped you get your list of potential Customer Carewords™. Now it's time to get people to choose their favorites in an online survey. We aim to get a minimum of 100 people to choose. Increasing responses to over 400 yields even more valuable information.
You need to carefully target your audience and we help you do that. When asking someone to choose from the list, we make sure the following conditions are met:
• People select only the top five Customer Carewords™ of their choice
• They do it on their own
• They do it quickly; less than five minutes should be enough. What we want is their gut instinct choices
• Included in the poll is our unique Customer Centric Index – which gets your customers to rate your site against 13 critical customer-centric factors
Step 3: Analyze the results
We have developed special techniques that will allow us to properly analyze the results, so as to quickly identify the most important Customer Carewords™ and Careword groupings.
We have built up a database of previous results that allow us to advise you on how your results compare with key trends. We also provide a number of options to our customers for presentation of the results to team members and management teams.
LEARN MORE
Download Info Sheet on Customer Carewords (PDF 566K)
The Customer Centric Index
What do Your Customers Really Care About?
We've got the missing piece to your Web metrics program: the Customer Centric Index (CCI). Through 12 years of research and work on the best Web sites and Intranets we have identified the qualities that make a site work for customers.
The CCI gets your customers to rate your site against 13 critical customer-centric factors, grouped into three major categories.
:: Content Factors
:: Social Factors, and
:: Visual/Architecture Factors
The factors for each category are listed below. Full descriptions of these factors are available by downloading the information sheet found at the bottom of the CCI service description.
| Content Factors: | Social Factors: | Visual/Architecture: |
| Accurate | Contact | Search |
| Up-to-date | Participation | Navigation |
| Complete | Open | Layout |
| Language | Recommendations | Visual appeal |
| Speed |
How Does it Work?
Your customers aren’t Web insiders – they don’t use language like “site architecture” or terms like “navigation”. Getting them to rate your site against these critical factors means using language they understand.
In the Customer Centric Index (CCI) online poll, customers are presented with a list of 26 commonly understood phrases like “plain language”. For each positive phrase there is also a negative phase.
Customers are asked the question: “Please look at the following list and choose the top THREE factors that best describe your experience on this Web site. Give a score of 3 to the most important to you, 2 to the next most important, and then 1.”
This unique scoring technique has been developed over many years of intensive research involving 50,000 participants in 15 countries. It is a very different approach to the way traditional survey questions are organized.
The reason is that traditional surveying fails again and again to identify the true intentions of customers when they are on a Web site. Our approach taps into gut instinct responses, and only asks customers to vote for what they really care about. The Customer Centric Index gives you a much more honest picture of what your customers really think of your Web site.
Actionable Results
Once you get several hundred people voting, the results give you ratings for each of the 13 factors and an overall CCI rating. The factors that really matter to customers will get the highest votes. We then apply a series of formulae, such as negative vote weighting and negative-positive vote spread.
These formulae allow you to precisely plan exactly what you need to do to improve your Web site—and indicate where the proportions of effort should be directed —in order to make it even more customer-centric.
Because of our unique scoring technique (and because certain factors will, in fact, have a positive vote), not all factors will require action from you. Some will be highlighted as requiring a lot of action while others will require no immediate action.
When you to understand what your customers truly care about when they come to your Web site, you can focus your scarce resources on areas where you can expect maximum improvement and impact.
LEARN MORE
Download Info Sheet on Customer Centric Index (PDF 436K)
