Very nice insights you sharing.For myself,I’m working on the support section for my company,and I’m thinking about the possiblities of doing a segmentation testing through creation of 3 buttons namely for the first time user, repeat user and the non-IT savy users, in-comparison with the existing call to action buttons and search found the support section, in determining whether the customers are getting their questions solved.

What’s your view or take on the test ?

cheers,
deric Loh

In regard to measuring visitors, you may want to measure the ratio of support site to support calls — hopefully your site is handling the bulk of the work, even if your latest release was “buggy.” This is especially helpful if you are trying to move customers online — you can measure adoption.

I like the measuring problem resolution ideas — if a customer wont recommend your site, they will probably not buy from you next time. Another factor of timeliness is the amount of solutions viewed. In an ideal support situation, the first solution solves your problem. i.e. Enter site, search, pick one result, the result solution fixes your problem, and you are done.

Which leads me to another approach to consider… I beleive the last page viewed is very indicative to how your customer did on your support site. If the last page viewed was a search result page, they likely failed. Likewise, if the last page they viewed was a solution, it is likely they solved their problem. If you compare this to your survey data, you will likely find that your most successful and satisfied customers viewed a solution just before leaving your site.

Of course this will break down for those users who looked at many solutions. (Again, compare to your survey data before drawing your own conclusion.) Those who last viewed a solution and reported success on your site likely did not look at more than 2 or 3 solutions. For viewers who viewed 4 or more, they likely just gave up, just like the person on the search result page.

So your successful visitors looked at no more than 3 solutions and the last page viewed was a solution page.

The only point I’d make is that moments of truth can happen anywhere in a person’s web experience and at any time throughout the cycle we use to think about how the customer progresses through the product lifecycle (Research, Shop, Buy, Use). I definitely agree that the majority of the moments of truth are related to that “use” piece of the equation — I lost my credit card, I tried to pay for something and my credit card was declined — and those are probably the ones that often make the deepest impression on us, but they’re not the only ones.

I just want to make sure that the whole concept of “moments of truth” isn’t equated solely with support.

IBM has a support site (eSupport) and the way your approaching metrics could be helpful (it’s not a project I’m working on today, however).

If you think about it - how many have the opportunity to really work on a support site like the type mentioned?

Keep up the good work!

Have a nice evening,

Aurélie

Two examples of how this is one on our sites. This is on a ecommerce site and I searched for totally random something and it tells me “Customers who searched for xxx yyy found results at:” so it tries to guess what I am looking:

And this from a support site where I entered something completely wrong error code 123 (which does not exist) and the search tries to guess and help:

Couple of small examples of what you are saying. The best thing for support sites is to simply watch customers and ask and get out of the “engineering mindset” in creating them.

Your second suggestion is also on the money. I am not a fan of “page level surveys” in most cases (they do a terrible job of representing site experience). But for a support site I think it is a great way to learn (and I am very happy if only stressed people reply becuase our job is to solve problems of our stressed customers in their “moment of truth”).

Here are two small examples of that:

Thanks for your comments, it is always nice to hear from my friends in Europe.

Great post, very complete, I really enjoyed reading that!
I would however just want to add 2 things and would appreciate your opinion.

The first is some kind of lexicon or translation table for the searches entered on the website. This is from my own experience as a non-technical woman: I tend to call things differently and often get lost in support sites because I can’t remember to call what I’m looking for by their right names.

So, Chief Web Analytics Officers (just read this funny post on Eric P.’s blog) should encourage their analysts not only to look at the search words entered but also make up some kind of “matching list”. And when someone types in one of these words, that is not an official word but a matched word, it should show up in the results as “the information is not found but our experience shows us that you might be looking for so and so”.

And this brings me to my next suggestion: add a “has this solved your problem” box. We all know that it will only be used when people are, as you say, stressed but it could turn out to be usefull. Add this to your top 10 problems: the top 10 non solvers and dig further into that.

Anyhow, let me know what you think, I always greatly appreciate your insight.

Kind regards,
Aurélie

a) that was easy for the customer to go through,
b )satisfying at all (you can accomplish any process while hoping you could grab a company representative by the throat), and
c) make it a retention element of your relationship with the customers.

As you said, visitors who have to use support are in a critical state of mind, and we need to understand how that state of mind was and how it evolved through the support process/experience. You definitely need attitudinal analysis here.

Thanks for this great post, you provide specific tips on how to measure a support site and each recommendation is awesome.