By Bob Dever, Sr. Director, Corporate Marketing —
Despite the tremendous volume of data you likely gather on your online channels, you might be viewing site optimization with blinders on. And that's probably okay if yours is the only company in your market. But most companies have competitors, and so it's generally a good idea to consider what those competitors are measuring on their sites. How well do they understand their online business and their customers? Are they making incremental improvements that might set give them a leg up? What do you need in order to keep pace or, better yet, get ahead of the pack?
Let's start with the topic of measuring business processes, where it can be especially challenging to detect the many issues that can hinder your success. Here's an example to get things started—are you detecting spikes in failed requests and submissions on your website? Are you able to track them back to why they occurred? Despite the clear sign that something's amiss, not all e-businesses have implemented the capabilities to fully understand why these failures occur. Often the cause is an issue that isn’t readily apparent to those who haven't made customer experience a priority.
Invalid codes can be equally hard to detect. In the retail industry this might be a bad coupon code (or one that wasn't properly entered into the back-end system). For online travel agencies and other industries this might be a promotional code. These types of errors aren't system- or performance-related and are almost impossible to gauge without the proper solutions.
Other examples include Out of Inventory, Invalid Shipping Address, Invalid Shipping Method... the list goes on. In fact, there's almost no end to the number of things that can go astray and only a fraction of them are the types of errors that reveal themselves in web analytics.
If you're not detecting these issues, quantifying their impact and remedying them quickly and efficiently, there's a good chance you're losing ground (and customers) to your competitors. It's the companies that adopt a customer-centric view to their business—and apply that view to improving their e-business processes—that will win online.
So, what are you measuring on your website? What tools are you using? Does it help you to understand how well your critical business processes are working?
Next time as part of our three-part series on measuring up to the competition, we'll look at usability issues.
Despite the tremendous volume of data you likely gather on your online channels, you might be viewing site optimization with blinders on. And that's probably okay if yours is the only company in your market. But most companies have competitors, and so it's generally a good idea to consider what those competitors are measuring on their sites. How well do they understand their online business and their customers? Are they making incremental improvements that might set give them a leg up? What do you need in order to keep pace or, better yet, get ahead of the pack?
Let's start with the topic of measuring business processes, where it can be especially challenging to detect the many issues that can hinder your success. Here's an example to get things started—are you detecting spikes in failed requests and submissions on your website? Are you able to track them back to why they occurred? Despite the clear sign that something's amiss, not all e-businesses have implemented the capabilities to fully understand why these failures occur. Often the cause is an issue that isn’t readily apparent to those who haven't made customer experience a priority.
Invalid codes can be equally hard to detect. In the retail industry this might be a bad coupon code (or one that wasn't properly entered into the back-end system). For online travel agencies and other industries this might be a promotional code. These types of errors aren't system- or performance-related and are almost impossible to gauge without the proper solutions.
Other examples include Out of Inventory, Invalid Shipping Address, Invalid Shipping Method... the list goes on. In fact, there's almost no end to the number of things that can go astray and only a fraction of them are the types of errors that reveal themselves in web analytics.
If you're not detecting these issues, quantifying their impact and remedying them quickly and efficiently, there's a good chance you're losing ground (and customers) to your competitors. It's the companies that adopt a customer-centric view to their business—and apply that view to improving their e-business processes—that will win online.
So, what are you measuring on your website? What tools are you using? Does it help you to understand how well your critical business processes are working?
Next time as part of our three-part series on measuring up to the competition, we'll look at usability issues.
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