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Customer Centric Index
The Customer Centric index is a two-minute survey revealing what's really annoying your customers about your website. It produces a clear roadmap for improvement that is based on fact, not opinion, and allows you to focus your resources for maximum impact.
What is different about this survey?
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 two minutes 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.
It is not a satisfaction rating, but instead is pointing at specific strengths and weaknesses. It is focused on what the customer wants to say rather than what the company wants to ask. Customers taking the survey only address issues they care about.
Learn about how the one-minute survey applied to Amazon.com revealed more than we had expected.
How does it work?
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 | without the right information, customers will be unable to complete tasks correctly |
| Up to date | Content that is out of date will drive customers away |
| Complete | If critical information is missing, or the call to action is too hard to find, customers will abandon their tasks |
| Language | Jargon alienates readers. Unless you write in the language of customers, they will go elsewhere |
| Social factors | |
|---|---|
| Contact | Is it easy for your customers to get in touch? Whether it's to get help or to complete a transaction, if they can't get engage they'll get frustrated |
| Participation | The Web is nowadays all about joining in. Customers don't want to simply be talked at, they want to be involved |
| Transparency | Clear, honest and simple information is what customers want |
| Ratings | People love to compare, rate and review. The objective opinions of others are an important factor in making decisions online |
| Visual / architectural factors | |
|---|---|
| Search | Search is often the first place people go to find content. People look for relevant results in the first few places, and will get frustrated if they don't find them |
| Navigation | The clarity and placement of links have a huge impact on how well customers complete tasks |
| Layout | Clutter can hinder navigation. Customers will get annoyed if the layout does not support their tasks efficiently |
| Visual appeal | Do your customers find your website appealing, or off-putting? Visual appeal is important to make customers feel at ease |
| Speed | Speed is of the essence on the Web. Customers have little patience with websites that slow them down when trying to complete tasks |
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: 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.
Once you get several hundred people voting, the results give you ratings for each of 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.
Pricing
The prices of a Customer Centric Index survey ranges from $5,000 to $10,000. This pricing makes it possible to repeat the survey over time to gauge the effect of website changes against a fixed benchmark.
The survey can also be followed up by an expert heuristic site evaluation that adds further value to the results.
Next steps
View a video on how the Customer Centric Index works [.wmv, 23 mins]