Guest Post: Ariel Finkelstein , Co-Founder and CEO of Kampyle


You know by now the importance of collecting user feedback to improve your site. You may have shopped around, or even implemented a feedback tool. If you have, you know there are many options that all accomplish different goals. You must first start with your own goals for acquiring and acting on customer feedback. What feedback will you receive? What will you do with the feedback? Once you establish your feedback goals, you can determine how to integrate customer feedback into Web analytics.

Using surveys and polls to listen to your customers provides a high-level understanding of what is happening on your Web site, but they are usually based on pre-set questions with a statistical review of answers. The fact that the data is ultimately reviewed from a statistical analysis view also might cause the solution to be relevant mainly to large Web sites with a lot of traffic. This means that not all lines of businesses can benefit equally from these tools. You can use surveys and polls to ask ‘site-level’ questions such as: “Where did you hear about our site,” “What are you looking for,” “How old are you,” etc. The answers to these questions can help you to know your users better, but they will not necessarily help you find problems on your Web site.

Surveys provide detailed information about users, Web analytics provide the who, what, when and where, but what provides the why? Answering the critical question of ”why?” can help Web site owners and companies improve revenue, conversions, site usage and user experience. Online feedback forms that are integrated with Web analytics provide a way to gain instant feedback to the site that is measurable based on your own business metrics. Integrating customer data into your Web analytics, which traditional surveys are unable to do, is the best way to bring the customer’s voice into your analytics process.

There are feedback forms available that can be integrated into any page or process of your site and integrated into Web analytics, CRM platforms and other business applications to provide a more complete view of user behavior. When users come across an issue, they simply click on the feedback icon. Customers then rate their overall impression of your site from a selection of emoticons, select their issue category from a graphical menu and provide a brief synopsis, giving you insight into their behavior in that instance.

Providing a process-level feedback form that is customized and tailored to your brand further encourages users to engage with you at the feedback level. Process-level feedback allows you to piece processes on your site together to give the widest possible picture, i.e. a holistic view of your entire website. This increases the likelihood of users opting in and they can submit only the input relative to their specific Web site experience within seconds. It also removes your onerous to prepare all encompassing questions.

In seeking feedback, it’s not only important for you to get a picture of how your site is performing (through Web analytics), but why customers behave in a given way (through surveys and feedback analytics). If you have the what, you are still missing half of the picture.

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