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Are visitors completing their tasks on your website?

The 4Q Website Survey is a collaboration between iPerceptions and noted web analytics author and blogger Avinash Kaushik. It is a free website survey solution that allows you to find out why visitors are at your website, and whether or not they are completing their tasks (and if they aren't, what's getting in the way?).

The 4Q website survey provides answers to the following 4 essential questions:

    • What are my visitors at my website to do?
    • Are they completing what they set out to do?
    • If not, why not?
    • How satisfied are my visitors?

Thousands of companies are already gaining tremendous insight into the customer experience on their website. You too can measure purpose of visit and task completion (and of course, satisfaction).

And best of all...the 4Q website survey is completely free!

Nathan Huppatz

Over the past few years I have listened to a few people talk about measuring customer service, and reducing email
volume.

One speech comes to mind whenever I think about making more of an effort to improve customer service and reduce our time spent answering emails (and responding to phone calls.)

The topic of this speech was Amazon.com and the lengths they went to, to not only reduce their customer contact but improve customer support in the process.

It was really amazing to see what they had done. Using some simple measurements and following up some findings with implementation of FAQs and other information on the site they were able to drastically reduce the number of customers they had to communicate with, whether that be via email or phone. Most online businesses get emails, more than they do phone calls (I would guess), so I will talk a little about reducing the amount of emails you have to respond to!

Thats right. You don’t necessarily want to be the biggest Powerseller, or the biggest seller in your category.
Size doesn’t have to be a goal.

Some eBay sellers forget, turnover in itself is not a measure of success.

For a long time I have, in the back of my mind and sometimes the front, wanted to be the biggest seller in my category.

I guess this was for some sort of feeling of importance, a power of position, or something like that. But over the last year or so, things have changed in the Australian eBay landscape and business has to change with it.

Getting customer feedback/testimonials/complaints can really help you identify what parts of your
business are working well and what needs attention.

We recently implemented a free feedback service on some of our websites and the information we have received has been quite valuable.

People have given us testimonials which we can use on the store to boost buyer confidence. We have received constructive criticism, helpful hints and some product range ideas too. And (I must admit a little to my surprise) we haven’t been abused at all!

So, here are 5 good tips of mine to get some really useful customer feedback :

Running an online business more often than not involves trying to automate and save costs. The online world is generally a very competitive one so any edge you can get is a good one. When a business is shipping 10 orders a day, making an extra $1 per order in profit starts to add up!

Usually, your largest cost as a business is staff, or staff time. When calculated per hour of effort, staff are expensive. In Australia and other developed countries, taking on a new staff member is a big decision as the cost is high and that staff member will really have to assist in growing the business or at the very least, perform well enough to save time and effort for you, so you can focus on growing your business.

International labour has been used for many years now for telesales, IT support, and general customer support for many industries. And this is becoming prevalent in online retail businesses worldwide too. Some of Australia's largest and highest profile retailers use some international services and labour.

So, what about your own online business?