Six Ways to Understand Customer’s “Why” and Achieve ROI – Part Two

In Part 1 we looked at straightforward ways to more easily maintain engagement with customers. Now let’s find out why they’re doing what they’re doing and how to use that insight to your organization’s, and their own, benefit.

4. Ask for Feedback and Listen

Feedback is the insight an organization needs to determine if they have the right product for the problem. All too often an organization spends time and money on a digital product without enabling customers or even their stakeholders to provide feedback. The organization misses a tremendous opportunity to understand why customers do what they do, in turn barring them from a better return on investment (ROI).

Nevertheless, customers will find ways to give their feedback – just take a look at all of the online complaint boards dedicated to aggregating feedback about organizations and their products. Dedicated feedback channels are vital for your organization to take advantage of this valuable insight.

Customers will take the path of least resistance when driven to give feedback, so make it easy for them to send you the type you need:

1. Motivate customers to provide feedback
2. Give them a simple and direct means for doing so
3. Proactively ask users where the product is difficult and uncover why they’re having trouble
4. Let them know their feedback is valued
5. Demonstrate that their feedback has a positive influence on the product’s evolution

Customers who have an outlet for their frustrations are more likely to trust and even evangelize a product if they feel the organization is listening. Nothing promotes loyalty like empathy, and valuing and responding positively to customers demonstrates that emotion, and more.

Because it is so important for customers to see tangible outcomes from their feedback (#5), I give further detail below.

5. Assess the Customers’ Behaviors

Customers often say one thing, and then do another. As your website or mobile app matures, hopefully customers start exhibiting the behavior that your organization desires. For example, customers should be:

• Getting the information they need more quickly and easily
• Completing the tasks they came to do
• Entering information more accurately
• Coming back!

But as your organization assesses customers’ behaviors, triangulate with their feedback. Do customers say they’re happy with the app but struggle to complete transactions? Do they say it’s difficult to find what they’re looking for, yet metrics show that they get through the site quickly? What’s the real story, then?

If your organization can drill deeply into why customers say one thing but behave differently you will have better insight into how to improve the app.

6. Adapt to the Feedback

Understand why your customers come to your site. It has to be more than just the functions for which the site was built; otherwise, you would already be seeing a greater ROI. Welcome your customers. Engage with them and facilitate what they came to do. Elicit their feedback. Assess their behavior. Act. Improve the site based on everything you’ve learned and you will start to see a real ROI.

The ROI can take many forms but is definitely measurable through the following:

• Higher acquisition and retention rates
• Sustained improvements in customer satisfaction, conversion, and loyalty
• Boosts in user comprehension
• Increased compliance
• Lower customer support cost

By understanding your customers’ “why”, you will understand where they have trouble with the site and how to fix those issues, so you can get that return on investment your organization deserves.