Companies have traditionally relied on behavioral metrics as the leading performance metrics for a website: how many unique visitors come to the website each month, how many visitors "convert" to a sale or a lead, how many pages they visit, where they leave the site, the path they take to navigate throughout the site, etc. Increasingly, managers of web operations are finding that this type of data falls short of providing compelling metrics that gauge the website's contribution to the company's bottom line.

There are several commonly used approaches to measuring the website experience from a voice of customer perspective:

Customer Surveys
Thanks to inexpensive technology, customer surveys are extremely easy to implement on the web, but the challenge lies in wielding them to gather accurate, consistent, precise and reliable information. Too often, survey questions are written by various stakeholders within the company, sometimes with particular outcomes in mind, which undermines the reliability of the measure, not to mention it can significantly skew results to achieve a foregone conclusion.

For customer surveys to be truly valuable and actionable, they must control for sample bias, survey bias and engineer in enough consistency over time and across industries to provide valid benchmarking measurement. Another danger of customer surveys is overreacting to anecdotal feedback, which is skewed to the most critical and most laudatory comments and does not link to future behavior (e.g. a vociferous complainer may be a loyal customer who still plans to give the company his business whether or not his input is heeded).

Another pitfall is focusing on page-level surveys that give feedback on a specific web page. Since the website experience is cumulative and is highly influenced by site visitor intent and perceptions in addition to the visitor's self-directed path through the site, the feedback received is potentially misleading and highly subjective.

Focus Groups and Usability Studies
These research forums engage a small number of representative customers and ask them to conduct a series of specific activities on the website. While this may yield interesting qualitative observations, they are not true performance metrics since the experience of a handful of guided site users is not a realistic proxy for the real-time website experience of a self-directed site visitor. In addition, these studies are not predictive of future behavior nor can they be accurately projected to a mass audience.

Panels
Proxy panels that collect site visitor data are used for benchmarking purposes in some industries. This approach can yield misleading results if the panel isn't truly representative of the company's site visitors. Also, the benchmarking that is commonly done with panel-based industry norms focuses on the competitor's site visitors, not the company's own site visitors. By chasing the competition, which may have a significantly different site visitor audience due to differences in marketing, products, site design and other factors, a company can stray from a customer-centric approach that will ultimately yield greater loyalty and retention to drive financial performance.

Companies that truly embrace a customer-centric philosophy should consider using customer surveys that apply the ACSI methodology to website measurement. The scientific methodology of the ACSI has been shown to provide an accurate, precise and reliable read on the satisfaction of site visitors - for both the overall site visitor base and for distinct audience segments, e.g., members vs. non-members, first-time visitors vs. repeat visitors, and other groups of interest.

What the ACSI methodology does that other customer measurements can't accomplish is to isolate the specific drivers of satisfaction with the web experience, quantify their relationship to overall satisfaction and project the influence on desired site visitor behavior. Seasoned research analysts who work with this system have the tools to identify and prioritize where making improvements will cause the greatest impact on behavior and on the ROI of the improvements. ForeSee Results, the leader in online customer satisfaction measurement with over 15 million completed surveys over 22 industries and a partner of CFI Group, applies the ACSI methodology to website experience measurement. To get a more complete view of the customer experience, ForeSee Results can integrate customer satisfaction data with behavioral data collected through clickstream tools or can integrate with CRM data in the company's database. This combination affords a 360 degree view of how well the website is performing from the site visitors' perspective.