Wednesday, October 21, 2009

WeBenchmark.com launched to cater the growing demand for comparable survey insight on website effectiveness

FeedbackMetrics today launched WeBenchmark.com, a new on-demand survey and benchmark service committed to businesses' website effectiveness.

The new and unparalleled survey and benchmark service enables any business, regardless of size and budget, to measure, benchmark and act on its website effectiveness.

"Today many companies run a website effectiveness survey program as it enables them to improve their websites by listening to visitors. What WeBenchmark.com offers is a survey and benchmark service enabling companies not only to analyze their recent results and trend data, but also compare their websites to the results of their industry week by week," says Kjell Oksendal, CEO of FeedbackMetrics.



More info:

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Funds for a new website? Isn't the one we have working fine?

Too many marketers and website owners have experienced it: The uphill struggle to convince management to approve budget for a new website or a major revamp of the existing one. 

The challenge is often that when measuring the success of a website, management focus on transactional metrics, such as:

  • Unique visitors
  • Repeat visitors
  • Demand generation
  • Sales 

Why invest in a new website when all these metrics are showing growth?

Two reasons:

  • Transactional metrics always show something about the past, not the the future; Past performance is no guarantee for future performance.
  • The competition might have a greater success with their websites.

The solution is to implement a website effectiveness survey that not only measures visitors' success and loyalty, but also benchmarks your data with the industry average. Such an on-going research program gives you great insight into:

  • What you can expect in the future (visitor loyalty)
  • How your website is performing compared to your industry, today and over time
  • How your website can be further improved

Provided with insight also to attitudinal metrics, management are in a much better position to invest intelligently and timely in your website.

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Measuring the success of your new website

Many companies (make that "most") are constantly trying to improve their websites either by doing (major) revamps of the current ones or building brand new. What are the goals of these constant activities? What will make the new(er) websites successful?
  • Increased traffic?
  • Increased engagement?
  • Increased leads?
  • Increased loyalty?
  • Increased revenue?

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

The challenge is that some objectives are easier to measure than others. And some are easier to measure short-term than long-term. Measuring traffic and leads are fairly straightforward short-term, while engagement, loyalty and revenue (depending on your business) take longer time.

One of the best ways to measure success and give you immediate results is a website effectiveness survey.

A typical website effectiveness program consists of a success metric (e.g. "To what extent have you successfully completed your visit") and a loyalty metric (e.g. "To what extent is it likely that you will revisit the website" and "To what extent is it likely that you will recommend the website to a friend / colleague"). These metrics combined tell you how effective your website is. From, importantly, visitors' perspectives.

Implemented on both your existing and future websites, a website effectiveness survey is a great tool to measure the success of your new website. And benchmarked with industry data, you can also tell how your website is performing compared to your industry.

Thursday, May 28, 2009

How to measure the effectiveness of your website?

Website Effectiveness If you are responsible for managing your business' website, chances are high that you use visitor behavioral data (e.g. collected by Google Analytics) to measure your website performance, and ultimately, the return of your website.

Visitor behavioral data is great when reporting on unique visitors, page hits, traffic sources, navigation, exit pages, etc., and very useful when wanting to improve visitors' experience in terms of e.g. number of clicks needed to complete an operation.

But reliance on visitors behavioural data fails when trying to measure (and improve) the effectiveness of a website. The effectiveness of a website is based on visitors' success when trying to fulfill the objective(s) at mind when visiting the website. And while visitors' success might be revealed using behavioral data (e.g. did the visitor go through with the purchase), this can at best only be speculative as behavioural data cannot provide you with visitors' various objectives in the first place.

True measurement of website effectiveness should be based on visitor attitudinal data obtained via a web survey when visitors are on your website. In general businesses choose one of the following strategies when implementing a website effectiveness program:

  1. Ad hoc survey (one-off survey measuring the effectiveness within one time period)
    Pros: Easy to implement
    Cons: No comparative data

  2. Trend survey (continuous survey measuring the effectiveness)
    Pros: Monitor the website effectiveness over time
    Cons: No industry comparative data

  3. Trend and benchmark survey (continuous and standardized survey measuring the effectiveness of your website and others within your industry)
    Pros: Monitor the website effectiveness, both over time and compared to benchmark for your industry
    Cons: None

We recommend strategy 3 as comparative data - both trend and industry benchmark - are crucial when determining how effective your website is.

Sunday, May 3, 2009

Now Recruiting vendors from the Software Industry for the WebSite Effectiveness Benchmark program



You don’t truly know how effective your website is before it’s part of an industry benchmark!

As a member of the WebSite Effectiveness Benchmark program you will have 24-7 access to your personal live online portal with the latest results along with historical benchmarks and trends. You will have benchmark results for the general software industry as well as from within your software sub-industry (see list below).

Too many companies rely solely on their own collected data, comparing themselves to themselves all the time. But it’s only when you compare your data with that of your competitors that you’ll be in a position to really act intelligently. Benchmark now!

We are now pre-qualifying companies from any of the following Software Industries:
  • Business Intelligence (BI)
  • Conferencing Software
  • Content Management System (CMS)
  • Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
  • Customer Service Software
  • Document Management System (DMS)
  • eCommerce Software
  • Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
  • Human Resource (HR)
  • Knowledge Management
  • Logistics Software
  • Marketing Automation Software
  • Multimedia, Graphics and Publishing
  • Procurement Software
  • Project Management Software
  • Security Software
  • Supply Chain Management (SCM)
  • Talent Management Software
  • Training Software

How effective is your website compared to other vendors within your own software industry?

Note that all surveys and reports are anonymous. Your company name is never displayed in any benchmark report or visible outside of your portal.

Visit Software Industry WebSite Effectiveness Benchmark to read about the program and to register for participation!

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Why Benchmark Customer Feedback?

As reported by Gartner*, "Feedback management technologies will be the top investment made in 2009 to improve customer experience.”

Businesses invest in Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) to manage customer experience on two levels:

  • Act on individual customer experience, e.g. reach out to customers that have indicated a high level of dissatisfaction.
  • Act on aggregated customer experience, e.g. improve various customer programs and functions.

In both instances, the potential return on a business' EFM initiatives is linked to feedback trends: Are our customers more satisfied now than previously?

Typically, businesses measure and act on customer feedback, and use trend data to validate customer experience improvements.

But as businesses rely only on their own in-house trend data, have they really unleashed the true potential of their efforts to improve? How can they know that their own isolated performance is a good one?

In our view, it is essential that companies not only rely on trend data to gauge improvements, but also compare their own data with industry feedback benchmark data. Analyzing its own isolated trend data, a company may improve its customer experience, but still be way behind its competitors.

* Gartner, Inc. "Predicts 2009: CRM Customer Service and Support" by Jim Davies, November 10, 2008.

Monday, March 23, 2009

Measure. Benchmark. Act.

This is what it is all about. This is what we are all about.

We founded FeedbackMetrics on the vision that feedback measured needs to be benchmarked with industry data to enable businesses to act more successfully.

Welcome to our first blog post :-)

It all started in 2008. With more than 20 years of experience from the survey software and market research industries, we were surprised with the lack of affordable survey metrics and industry benchmark within the field of Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM).

Businesses investing in EFM seem to typically follow one of two strategies:

  • Strategy 1: Do it yourself
    The company licenses a survey software technology, and develops/implements its own customized survey methodologies (e.g. a website effectiveness survey) and/or licenses a third party methodology with benchmark (e.g. ACSI).
  • Strategy 2: Let a consultancy do it
    The company outsources its EFM initiatives to a CRM/Customer Experience, HR, or Web Usability consultancy. The consultancy uses its own methodology and technology.

Both of these strategies come with pros and cons. And some companies combine strategy 1 and 2 to outweigh the cons.

In our view, a third-party survey methodology with benchmark (regardless of strategy 1 or 2) has traditionally been very expensive.

FeedbackMetrics will in 2009 introduce several new affordable survey metrics and industry benchmark products (hosted on-demand / Software as a Service (SaaS)) in the areas of website, customer, and employee feedback.

Stay tuned :-)