Customer Centric Index: Customer Carewords

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Find out what's really annoying your customers

"The Customer Centric Index was quick and easy, sweet and short, yet encompassing every aspect of the dimensions that impact the user satisfaction online - full of might!"
Jana Milenova, Sr. Product Manager, Bell Aliant

"The information gained from conducting your Customer Centric Index survey was highly pertinent to the website issues which we at East Stroudsburg University feel will immediately help guide us as we continue to improve our site. "
Doug Smith, Director of University Relations, East Stroudsburg University

How Customer Centric Index works (Video: WMV: 19 MB: 23 minutes)

Do you want to know what's really annoying your customers about your public website or intranet?
Do you want a crystal clear improvement roadmap for your website/intranet that is highly defensible because it is based on fact, not opinion?
Do you want to know where you should focus your scarce web resources for maximum improvement and impact?
Do you want to know what your customers are not that concerned about so that you can fend off internal stakeholders who want to make changes for the sake of making changes?
Would you like to know how your website/intranet ranks amongst your peers for customer service?

Through 12 years of research and work on the best websites and intranets we have identified the qualities that make a site work for customers. The Customer Centric Index gets your customers to rate your site against 13 critical customer-centric factors, grouped into three major categories:

	Content factors
Accurate:	Accurate content is the foundation upon which all quality websites must be built. Send customers to the wrong place, give them the wrong information and they won't come back.
Up-to-date:	If your website is not up to date then you will waste your customers' time. Waste their time and they won't come back.
Complete:	Leave your customers hanging at the end of a process, leave out the last vital link, forget to add the full physical address – they'll go somewhere else.
Language:	If you use jargon you alienate your customers. Expect customers to adapt to your language and they will leave. On the web it must be the customers' language.

	Social factors
Contact:	Can you be easily contacted – is it obvious to your customers how they can do this? Difficulty in contacting a person is one of the biggest irritations customers have with websites.
Participation:	Participation is the essence of the Web. Customers don't simply want to be talked to. They also want to talk back, join discussions.
Transparency:	On the Web, customers are saying: ‘Give us the facts, quick.' They don't want spin, and they don't want vital information hidden from them. They expect transparency.
Ratings:	Customers love to compare, rate and review. They like to read about what other customers think. They want objective advice to help them make the right decision.

	Visual / architecture factors
Search:	For many customers, search is the first step in their task. If your search doesn't deliver a quality result in the first three results, then many people will simply hit the Back button.
Navigation:	Links are the building blocks of all websites. The clarity of your menus and links will have a major impact on the ability of your customers to quickly and easily complete tasks.
Layout:	Customers hate cluttered layouts. It makes it harder to read and find things. Do your customers think you have a simple layout?
Visual appeal:	Does your design make your customers feel comfortable and at ease? Do they find your website appealing, or do they find it off-putting and alienating?
Speed:	Can your customers do things quickly on your website? Speed is of the essence on the Web. It's about fast in, fast out. Everyone is in a hurry.

How does it work?

Your customers aren't web insiders - they don't use language like "site architecture" or terms like "navigation". When you ask them to rate your site, you want to provide a rating tool with questions they easily understand. When your customers take the Customer Centric Index online poll, they see a list of 26 commonly understood phrases like "Plain Language." 13 phrases are positive, and 13 are negative. (In this instance, "Full of jargon, corporate speak" is the negative phrase.)

Customers are asked two questions:

Were you able to complete the task you came to this website to complete?
Please look at the following list and choose the top THREE factors that helped or hindered you most in achieving what you came to the website to do. Give a score of 3 to the one which helped or hindered the most, a 2 to the one with the next most impact, and then a 1.

This unique scoring technique has been developed over many years of intensive research involving 50,000 participants in 15 countries. It is a very different approach to the way traditional survey questions are organized. The reason is that traditional surveying fails again and again to identify the true intentions of customers when they are on a website. Our approach taps into gut instinct responses, and only asks customers to vote for what they really care about. The Customer Centric Index gives you a much more honest picture of what your customers really think of your website.

Another major advantage of this approach is that it only takes the customer one minute to complete. And in this day-and-age of the super-impatient customer, that means that an awful lot more people will be completing it.

Once you get several hundred people voting, the results give you ratings for each of the 13 factors and an overall Customer Centric Index rating. (The factors that really matter to customers will get the highest votes.) We then apply a series of formulae (such as Negative Vote Weighting and Negative-Positive Vote Spread). These formulae allow you to precisely plan what you need to do to improve your website - to make it even more customer-centric - by indicating where to apply effort and resources for maximum impact.

Actionable results

You get a crystal clear improvement roadmap that is highly defensible because it is backed up by facts, not opinions. For example, let's look at the Navigation factor:

If you get a lot of people voting for "confusing menus and links", then you know what you need to do: create "clear menus and links."

Let's have a look at the Language factor:

If, for example, you also get a high vote for "full of jargon, corporate speak," then it gives you even more direction in relation to creating clearer menus and links.

As an option, we will also identify for you the specific areas on your website where there are, for example, confusing menus and links. We will give you a clear action plan in relation to how to fix them.

Because of our unique scoring technique (and because certain factors will, in fact, have a positive vote), not all factors will require action from you. Some will be highlighted as requiring a lot of action while others will require no immediate action.

The Customer Centric Index allows you to understand what your customers truly care about when they come to your website. It allows you to focus your scarce resources on the areas where they will achieve maximum improvement and impact.

Continuous improvement

The Customer Centric Index is repeatable and you can compare results to see if and where there have been improvements. As you fix issues with one set of factors, the Index will then isolate for you the factors that now need focusing on in order to bring your website up to the next level of excellence.

How Customer Centric Index works (Video: WMV: 19 MB: 23 minutes)

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The Customer Centric Index allows you to understand what your customers truly care about when they come to your website. It allows you to focus your scarce resources on the areas where they will achieve maximum improvement and impact.

How Customer Centric Index works (Video: WMV: 19 MB; 23 minutes)

Bell Aliant
"The Customer Centric Index was quick and easy, sweet and short, yet encompassing every aspect of the dimensions that impact the user satisfaction online - full of might! Another of its great advantages is the fact that it works well for the whole site, despite the fact that the site has different areas - transactions/commerce, my accounts, help and support.

To summarize: the experience was painless both for me and the users, the results' presentation impressive and clearly conveying as well as reinforcing the findings of the study. As I mentioned to you already, I did not expect all the extra analysis and advice provided - this exceeded our expectations!
Jana Milenova, Sr. Product Manager, Bell Aliant

East Stroudsburg University
"The information gained from conducting your Customer Centric Index survey was highly pertinent to the website issues which we at ESU feel will immediately help guide us as we continue to improve our site. The summary report of the survey results, which you provided in a very timely fashion, is easy to decipher. We now have the data, not merely the impressions, as to how differently each of our surveyed audience contituencies (alumni, prospective students, current students, faculty and staff) perceive the website. I am confident the information will help us improve our website in key areas. There is also added value to having this information, in that these results will help back up our rationale as to which of our audiences should be considered by the university to be our primary audience(s)….in order of priority."
Doug Smith, Director of University Relations, ESU

Identify what your customers like - and don't like!

Find out what really annoys your customers when they visit your website with our webinar and PowerPoint presentations about how the Customer Centric Index will work for your organization.

Webinar presentation (WMV: 19 MB; 23 minutes)
PowerPoint presentation (PPT: 1.4 MB)

(This is a sales presentation.)

Designing navigation using task management

Find out how to design your website navigation using our top task management methodology.

Web navigation webinar presentation (WMV: 40 MB: 38 minutes)
PowerPoint presentation: Web navigation (PPT: 13 MB)

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