Customer Satisfaction Surveys are Usability Early Warning Radar

Web Site Customer Satisfaction Surveys Can be Usability Early Warning Radar

A brief story about customer satisfaction and usability:

Joe Usability conducts usability testing for BigNameCompany.com. Joe conducts usability tests for new web site applications, as well as on his company’s existing web site. However, often Joe is asked to do usability testing on the web site only after a problem has been found, usually because the problem is causing lost sales. Joe tries to keep ahead, but he always feels like he’s in a reactive mode. His internal customers like usability, but they tell him they feel like usability testing is slow, and not quick enough to discover problems in a proactive manner.

Mary Usability (no relation) conducts usability testing for SmallNameCompany.com. Mary conducts usability testing just like Joe. However, Mary does one extra thing, Mary uses her company’s online web site customer satisfaction surveys to ask a couple of usability related questions. Mary reviews the responses to those questions weekly. She has found through those customer comments several issues that caused her to conduct additional specific usability tests on certain pages. Those tests resulted in finding usability issues that unknown to the business were causing lost sales. Mary’s internal customers like usability, and tell her they feel like usability testing is fast and quick, often identifying and fixing problems in a proactive manner.

Although this story is fictional, it does point out the advantage of using a customer satisfaction survey to gather usability feedback about a web site. If you work for a firm that uses web site customer satisfaction surveys, then you potentially have access to one of the best usability early warning systems available. Think of it as usability early warning radar. The idea is to include a question or two on the customer satisfaction survey that will alert you to possible issues well before they begin showing up on monthly sales or other transaction reports.

Why can usability questions on a web site customer satisfaction survey be helpful? Because if you work for a large corporation, then it’s possible that changes to your company’s web site can happen without usability being addressed. You may not even be aware that web site changes were made. Customers who are interacting with your web site however are fully aware of issues caused by changes, and will tell you about those issues if given a chance. No, they won’t be able to express in detail what the issue is, but by seeing the same type of comments over and over again, you’ll have an idea usually of where to start looking.

When changes happen that cause usability issues, the only way that most people usually become aware that there’s a problem is when they review their weekly or monthly reporting. “Sudden” decreases in numbers of interactions or conversion rates will occur, and warning bells will only then sound throughout the company. Subsequent usability testing may find the issue, but only after the damage has been done. For eCommerce sites, this damage is lost revenue, which is a very bad thing indeed.

Whether you have a large or small web site, it’s always a good idea to include a customer satisfaction survey for your visitors. Besides the obvious questions of overall satisfaction and whether a customer’s visit was productive or not, you can include a few usability questions you can monitor on a daily or weekly basis (assuming you have the ability to access your survey results).

There is always (and rightfully so) a concern from a survey team that too many questions on a survey will reduce response rate, so you may receive push-back if you make a request to add a question or two to an existing customer satisfaction survey. But by working with the survey team to help them understand your objective, and the benefit to the company, you can probably add just one or two questions that will provide you with enough information to alert you to potential usability issues.

Typical usability questions on a survey must by nature be rather broad. You won’t be receiving the same detailed information you normally receive when conducting 1-on-1 performance based testing, for example. In addition, your usability survey questions will vary based on the type of survey, the format of the questions and the scales used.

In general, I like to try to use 2 survey questions, the first being relatively simple, like:

“Did you have any difficulties while navigating or using this web site?”

This question has a Yes or No response.

For all who answer Yes an example of a follow-up question is;

“Please describe the difficulty you experienced.”

This question has a text entry box for the response, so survey respondents can write in more detail about their issues.

If however, you can only have one question on the satisfaction survey, then combine the above two questions into something such as; “Did you have any difficulties while navigating or using this web site? If so, please describe the difficulty,” with a Text Entry box response.

As an aside, some in Marketing or Advertising might wish to include an additional question asking the customer to tell them about positives of the web site, or of the product. These positive responses can be collected and used for testimonials. If this question is present, you can use it as well, for example to measure the ratio of positive to negative comments received after completing a usability improvement.

Assuming these usability questions, or questions like them are on the customer satisfaction survey on your web site, and assuming you have access to the daily or weekly reporting, you can now keep an eye on the usability responses in near real-time.

If you suddenly start seeing a spike in Yes, I had Issues answers, and complaints come in of a difficult to find page or web site function not working, you now have an instant warning of a potential problem which may be usability related. Further usability testing of that issue could be warranted. I would add here that you may often find technical issues being reported by your customers, which might be helpful if forwarded to the technical team.

So there you have it, you can be proactive in sleuthing potential web site usability issues by using a few well written usability questions in a web site customer satisfaction survey, and tracking responses on a frequent basis. The end result will be you using usability testing and improvements to enhance the experience well before other business units come to you with an emergency of conversion or sales on their hands, and isn’t it nice to be ahead of the curve?