Makeshift Online CSAT Metrics

Recently we have had several articles on how to study customer satisfaction with your online business. The key is to research customer satisfaction the same way you would research satisfaction with a storefront or product line, but adjust the questions based on your business interface, products, and service offerings. It’s clear that learning to study online businesses – and the effects of your website on your business – is going to be an important part of the future of satisfaction. But before you even perform your first study, there are often clear indicators from within your own analytics that something is amiss in the customer experience.

Repeat Customers For most companies, your repeat customer rate is going to be your most telling indicator. If you have the type of business that should have customers coming back for more, and it appears that most customers are not coming back for future purposes, chances are you can improve the customer experience and help get more repeat business. Bounce Rate It’s important to remember that something as small as bounce rate when a customer comes to your website via search engines may be indicative of a much larger problem.

If customers are consistently leaving right away before making a purchase, there may be something wrong with your products, content, user interface and so on. However, it’s important to also take into account the keywords they use to find your page. It’s possible that you are ranking for a keyword that isn’t targeted to generate business, and the bounce rate is less meaningful.

Conversion Rate When customers do find your website, you will also need to figure out if your company has a good conversion rate. Conversation rate is the rate that your visitors turn into sales. Often this involves a great user interface, text/web copy that keeps the user interested, and the ability to offer the products and services people are looking for.

Time on Page Finally, another crude method of discovering if customers are finding your site valuable is how much time they spend on each page. Customers that only spend about 30 seconds or so on your website before leaving it and not making a purchase may not be finding what they want, or may not be finding it fast enough.

If you are underperforming in any of the above areas, your customers may not be having the experience they want from a website. That is when you should start researching satisfaction and find a way to attract new customers and improve your business.