We work a lot with tourism and travel providers operating customer satisfaction feedback systems to help improve their services and offerings.   But I’ve met a few people recently who have expressed scepticism about customer rating systems generally and it strikes me that this scepticism could be the result of not looking at the data in a more rounded context.  Or due to receiving data derived from flawed methodologies.

The scepticism was expressed along the lines that these kind of things always show that 90% of customers are satisfied. The implication of this is that rating systems aren’t really telling you the full story. So, while we’ve previously written here and here about using comment cards, these recent comments show that there is still a little more ground to cover in this area.

I can understand the view that customer rating systems are inadequate – but this typically occurs only if you are looking at the data derived from the customer in isolation.  As we wrote in one of the previous posts, “comment cards are just one of a suite of businesses information sources”. In other words, you shouldn’t rely on comment cards alone for customer feedback in its broadest sense. (And with such rich data all around you, why would you want to ignore the other sources?). But let’s start by looking at this “90% satisfaction guaranteed” issue a little closer as I feel that a rating like this is not as pointless as critics suggest.

To my mind it’s all about context. A 90% satisfaction rating expressed as a snapshot of customer sentiment can be fairly meaningless. However, a 90% satisfaction rating for an activity compared to (for example) the rating for a different activity, a different period or even a different location does start to have some meaning.

It’s about trends, not absolute scores. It’s about comparisons, not absolute ratings. It’s about context.

But let’s have a look at this using some real data.

Context One – data over time

The following charts are drawn from ‘real life’ but have been anonymised.

Starting with the one on the left (click on it to open a larger version in a new window), the orange line represents a lower control limit (one standard deviation from the average downwards meaning that 68% of all monthly results ever fall within this range – and if you are interested in why I’ve used only one standard deviation, see the  second comment at the end of this post). The average is the grey line in the middle. The blue straight line represents an upper control limit (again one standard deviation but upwards). I’ll explain the purposes of the control limits in a moment. There is also a dark grey line which is the trend of the scores. 

In this first graph we see a green line charting the percentage of people who completed a comment card for a particular aspect of their experience and who said that they were satisfied. Looking at this line, we can see that indeed it hovers around the 90% mark but that there is some variation. So what can start to take from this information?

Firstly, you will expect some degree of variation when analysing data one month to the next – it’s just natural. But there are times when a change is ‘unnatural’ and this is when control limits come into play as they alert you to when something has fallen outside of the normal corridor of performance. And these control limits can only be derived from looking at this data in a historical context as this gives you the most realistic guide to what is normal and what isn’t.

Secondly, looking at the trend line you will notice that, if anything, it has dipped a little. It’s probably nothing to be worried about.  But if, for example, the line represented a customer service rating and, despite months of internal training, around one in ten of your customers were still leaving feeling that they had got substandard service.  Wouldn’t that be a concern to you?

Context Two – data compared

In our second example on the right (click to enlarge), there is now a second line of data about a different service.  This was rated at the same time as the first service and by the same respondents.

Firstly, it should be noted that these lines are not moving in lockstep (they actually have a correlation coefficient of around 0.25 indicating a practically non-existent relationship).  The trend lines further indicate that the levels of satisfaction are moving in opposite directions and so we have a clear indication that, despite the high ratings for both lines, the responses are nevertheless suggesting that there are differing levels of satisfaction with them.

Now we’re starting to get towards something useful.  We can start to ask what is going on to make people less satisfied with service A than service B over time.  It is even possible to start to test operational changes to look for a positive uplift.

You MUST be happy!

The context in which the customer feedback was taken can also affect satisfaction levels (although the data I’ve worked with suggests that aggregated satisfaction levels tend to be quite similar).  For example, I analysed the results of feedback from one destination where the respondents were required to hand the completed score cards  straight to the accommodation provider collecting the forms. Unsurprisingly, 85% of people claimed to be elated by their recent accommodation and 5% dared to only be satisfied.  In a context where the data was collected more anonymously, this split would probably be something more like 55% and 35%.  In both cases, we could argue that 90% were satisfied although the second example is probably closer into the truth.

In a situation where you do have frequency data for all the scores (ie counts of how many excellents compared to how many satisfieds), it is worth looking at it in some more detail to get sense of how sentiment is shifting.

For example, are there more ‘good’ than ‘excellent’ scores?  for most items but for a few that situation is reversed?  This might indicate that while 90% are satisfied (’satisfied’ being, as noted earlier, the ‘goods’ and ‘excellents’ summed) the balance of satisfaction lies at the lower end than the upper for most items. And that those that buck this trend are worthy of note.

But what is satisfaction anyway?

But there are still important questions floating around in the background here and they probably all flow out of the main one of, “what does ’satisfaction’ mean?”

What I mean by this is satisfaction indicate something good, all right or possibly inadequate.  For example, the data behind the charts above is coded in such a way that the rating delivered by a respondent is give a numeric value (eg bad = 1, adequate = 2 etc).  From this it is possible to calculate that your visitors were 4.2 out of 5  happy this month.   Unfortunately, such an approach can also demonstrate that your visitors were 1.4 out of 3 female, something that is just plain silly.

So, the approach we have taken for the purposes of top line reporting is simply to allocate results to discrete bands – if, for an example, the score is a 1 or 2, then it shows that the customer was dissatisfied, and anything above that suggests satisfaction.  This means that you get an easy overview of the level of satisfaction.

But, you might say, I’m not interested in people being satisfied, I want them to be elated!  A noble goal to be sure but I’m not sure just how elated one can be at the process of buying a coffee or noting that the toilets were clean. There are some things that just don’t excite people that much to cause them to rate them highly in feedback forms!  They’re only notable when they go wrong!

But I guess that this is all really confirming something we’re said in the past – if you are measurng customer satisfaction but only skimming the data then you are potentially wasting your time.  Only through a more indepth and intelligent use of it can start to yield up the nuggets useful for your business.

Filed by Stephen (07/04/09)

What business are you in?

Knowing what business you are in gives you clarity of purpose.  This, in turn, gives you focus and an enhanced ability to understand and meet customer expectations.  But surely we all know what business we’re in, right?

Well, think about Domino’s Pizza for a moment.  Domino’s are not in the catering business, they’re in delivery.  Fast, fresh, reliable delivery.  Customer’s don’t call them for a slice of authentic Italy – they want big, hot pizza and they want it now.

Likewise, people don’t buy a drill because they want a drill – they want a hole.  More important still, they want a hole to make a shelf to put their son’s first football trophy on.

In the same way, people don’t visit a destination because they want a tourism experience – they want any number of things, from privacy, to exhilaration, to a convenient place to break a journey – to complete brain-switch off in the sunshine.

No, what business are you REALLY in?

A simple answer to that might be “the one you’re customers think you’re in.” What is the fix you deliver to their problem?

That might initially sound a little too simple and prescriptive – after all, it seems to suggest that you can only ever be defined by what your customers think you do now and that any strategies or messaging to alter this are doomed to failure.

So it’s probably more constructive to start to answer that question by thinking in terms of: “It’s not about me, it’s about you.”

Those of you that have an awareness of strategic marketing might recognise this in terms of ‘features and benefits’.

In other words, it’s not about whether you have, for example, 30 museums and 100 five star hotels, rather, in this example, it’s about cultural enrichment and pampering. It’s not about a list of products and services, it’s about what these mean to your visitor.

Let me explain what prompted these musings….

The first recent occasion was at a conference in Glasgow launching the Scottish customer feedback initiative.  As well as discussing feedback, there were also destination presentation highlighting approaches that could be take in marketing an area .  I was comparing my notes taken during presentations by  Santiago de Compostela and Prince Edward Island and realised that very different approaches were being taken in how they were portrayed.

Santiago de Compostela seemed to concentrate on its features to define itself of the destination whereas PEI explained how they had done research among their visitors and had then defined itself based on the benefits it had found within this research.

Undoubtedly both approaches work – visitor numbers had risen in both location.  But I had a niggling sense that Santiago de Compostela could have gone a step further as they seemed to lack a distinctive narrative or personality (although Santiago de Compostela  would undoubtedly argue that it does indeed have a personality –  that it’s a culturally vibrant place to visit).  However, While they could come across as being a place with ‘lots of things to do’, they could be just be one culturally rich European location among many.

On the other hand, PEI’s research suggested that it’s visitors thought of it as ‘a gentle island’ and to me this seems a more meaningful and human differentiator.

Or, to put it another way, one was about the products and the other was about the customer.

But in this example, I’m still not sure whether one was was superior to another. From a personal perspective Santiago de Compostela sounds more interesting (I prefer cultural tourism to relaxation) but I’m not sure that I would choose it above many other culturally rich places.

Destinations everywhere – but how many really stand out?

While there is ambiguity in the examples above there was less experienced walking round the exhibition halls at  ITB in Berlin.  The choice of destinations  could be not so much mind-blowing as mind-numbing.

The trouble was that I often struggled to think of a reason why Destination X was better than Destination Y. Golden Beaches? Check. Local Cuisine? Check. Authentic experiences? Check. Compelling reason to visit above competitor destination? Not sure…

“We are in the happiness business”

So, to return to the conference in Glasgow where the last session was delivered by Gregg Patterson who runs the The Beach Club in Santa Monica.

For me, the key sentence Gregg used in his session was “we are in the happiness business.” Others might have said, “we operate a high-value members-only hospitality facility” or “The X Group run mid-market hotels aimed at the leisure market.” And they would be right – while also missing the point of why they exist, as they would be defining themselves from a product, not a customer perspective.

They would be emphasising their features, not their benefits.

Yet it is  this recognition of the benefits from a customer perspective that allows a “different” approach  taken.  One that more intelligently communicates with customers, connects with them emotionally and identifies how best to deliver to them at a product level.

It enables you to develop strategically and tactically. In the case of PEI, the local DMO has been liaising with the local authorities to develop facilities that help deliver on the promise of being ‘a gentle island.’

At a tactical level, it has shown The Beach Club how important the ‘dignity’ of customers is. This might sound like a rather odd or old fashioned term but it means recognising the visitor as a person, not as another number.

So how do you start to understand what business you are in?

For me, the starting point would be some form of qualitative research to determine what the area/attraction actually means to your customers. What is their emotional connection? What is the narrative behind their visit?

And there are many ways to pick up this information.  For example, there is user generated content online.  What are people saying about you and how are they saying it?  What images are they posting, how are they branding you?

Also, what terms are people using to find you online? What kind of sites things are they looking at as well as your own?

And there is always the more traditional research method of  destination audits, street research and focus groups which can also really help to drill down and identify what it is that really makes your destination memorable (or infamous!).

Ultimately, whichever research methods you choose – the challenge is to see yourself as others do.  And to react to those perceptions, even if they differ from your own.

Posted by Stephen (26/03/09)

Google’s business model is simple. It wants you to spend your money wisely on Google business products and, to help you achieve those ends, there are tools to make your spending decisions more informed.

Looked at from another angle, they offer a bunch of tools that you and I can use free of charge.

This post forms part of a series over the next few weeks that will show you how to make the most of tools like this – as well asking some more probing questions about how far they can really help you.

This post originated in a question I asked myself recently, “what exactly does the tool data in Google Trends and Google Insight show and what has this got to do with travel and tourism?”

At a top level, the answer is quite simple. Google Trends shows data relating to traffic to websites while Google Insight shows data related to search terms. However, what they have the potential to give you is considerable and so for this post, I’ll talk just about Google Trends, followed in the future by Google Insights and then finally a post dealing with some more ‘philosophical’ questions these tools have thrown up.

What is Google Trends showing and why is it useful?

OK, let’s start with Google Trends. If you click here, you’ll open up a new window with Google Trend data for visitscotland.com. At this point, you’ll see a graph showing daily unique visitors to the visitscotland.com site over a period of about 2 years. You’ll also see a bunch of data below it. Let’s look at those two elements in turn.

Before I get going though, I would like to stress that I’m using visitscotland.com here as an example only. The point of this is to look at data for your own site (assuming you have sufficient traffic) and to use the techniques contained in this post.

The graph shows a representation of the number of times visitscotland.com has been called up via Google. Note that this is not searches for visitscotland.com in a search box but rather the number of times someone has visited the site and Google has been in a position to capture that data (with some caveats).

Now, this graph can show a lot more but I want to mention the lower half of the screen before getting into that as it is where the data starts to get really interesting.

On the left, you get an indication of where the visitors to visitscotland.com and coming from. In other words, you can see by geography where the warmest prospects are.

In the middle, you can see which other sites were also visited alongside visitscotland.com. In our example, you can see sites ranked that you might expect to see – and depending on your perspective, this might be comforting or unsettling. For example, if you saw visitireland.com as the most visited other site, you would know that there was a real fight at this level to attract visitors who were torn between destinations.

And on the right hand side, you see the search terms that are most often associated with that site. Again, this might be revealing or comforting. For example, if you run a website for a DMO in a whisky distillery town and people find you only by the brandname of your whisky and not under something more generic like ‘whisky tourism scotland’, then this would be a sign that your site isn’t attracting as many visitors as it could.

But the fun really starts because you can start to compare sites.

Let’s demonstrate this by taking our example above and adding a few more sites – visitbritain.com and visitsweden.com. It should now look like this.

Let’s start with the graph. It shows that visitscotland.com attracts more visitors than visitbritain.com or visitsweden.com. It also shows that visitscotland has different peaks and troughs to the other sites at a global level (predominantly the effect of Hogmanay I would guess).

In the bottom half of the screen, you’ll see that you can segment this data by region and by website. You’ll notice that under the ‘ranked by’ tab, you’ll see how each geographic area performs for each of these sites. You’ll notice in our example how Scotland and Sweden are broadly similar in terms of interest in Germany. If, in the upper right of the screen, you use the drop-down box to change ‘all regions’ to ‘Germany’, you should see something like this.

So what’s this saying? It’s saying that, in this instance, people in Germany have show a greater propensity to visit the visitscotland.com site at a different time to the visitsweden site. That might be on account of a campaign by visitscotland in Germany…or it might just show a different ‘natural’ search pattern (and I’ll show you in a coming post how you can go about finding that out). If we assume on this occasion that German’s simply are more interested in visitscotland.com at the periods suggested, wouldn’t it make sense to have the website ready to react to this niche interest at the time? The data suggests that it might be wrong to assume that people think of destinations in a uniform way and that you need to be ready to respond to the customer when they actually come calling, not when you think they ought to be calling.

Conversely, if the spike was the result of an advertising campaign, this gives an indication of how long its effect lasted and how big it was in comparison to the spike caused by possible competitor marketing.

(I’ll hasten to add, I’m not passing judgment on visitscotland.com but just using them as an example – for all I know they might well be doing all this already!)

What I’ve described rather quickly in this post is one, powerful view that the travel and tourism industry can use to get a deeper understanding of how it sits in the online world. But, as is often the case, you need to look at other areas in order to build upper a more mature understanding and so this represents just one part of the picture. In the coming weeks, we’ll develop this theme further with more tips on these free tools.

See post 2 in this series – Warning bells you can’t afford to ignore: courtesy of Google Insights

Further reading:

Competitive Intelligence Analysis: Google Trends for Websites

“No one visits my site on their mobile phone…do they?”

As a researcher I shouldn’t deal in anecdote but, ignoring that cardinal rule, recent conversations suggest to me that tourism organizations and business are becoming more aware of the potential of people to access their internet sites by phone. However, while they know that this is a forthcoming issue, they remain unconvinced that this is something that they need to worry about just yet.

So, the purpose of this post is to give a primer into how you can tell if people are already accessing your site by mobile devises as well as some of the important issues about how this could develop and what the development of this method of customer’s accessing your site.

Before, I do so, I would like to thank the good folks at the Web Analytics Association for their recent seminar, “Measuring Web 2.0 Technologies Part 2” on which this post is largely based. That seminar is only available for WAA members to access but, if you are not yet a member and you have a serious interest in web analytics, do check the site out anyway.

Anyhow, I thought I would initially structure this post as a question and answer session before moving on to the issue more generally. I suspect that there are a lot of people that need to cover the basics before we look at some of the wider issues.

• Are people already visiting my site by mobile device?

The answer to that is, probably, yes.

• How can I tell?

The way to tell is the way that tell whether anyone has accessed your site: go and look at your web stats.

Specifically, you need to look through your web stats data to see if specific operating systems have been used to access your site.

Now, I am making the assumption here that you have something like Google Analytics or equivalent on your site (if you are the kind of business looking at raw log file data, then this article is probably too advanced or too basic for your needs!). If you are using Google Analytics, choose ‘Visitors/Operating Systems’ and you will get data on how people are accessing your site. The first three entries will probably be Windows, Mac and then Linux but if you go through the whole list, you might find some odd entries and some these will be people accessing your site on mobile devices.

I’ve ringed the entries on the image on the right (click on the image to enlarge) that are evidence (in this single example) of mobile device being used to access a single site.

• Wait a minute, why do you say ‘mobile device’ and not just ‘mobile phone’?

Well, look at the last entry on that list – it’s for a Playstation portable so it’s not just phones we are talking about here.

• How reliable is this information for showing my all the people who came to the site via mobile device?

At present, products like Google Analytics will not pick up visits from most common types of phones. It only really picks up people using ’smartphones.’

• What’s the difference between a smart phone and a normal mobile phone and why does this matter?

A smart phone is the kind of mobile with more advanced capabilities, like Blackberries or iPhones (see here for more details). I don’t have figures but they’re probably the minority of phones used just now but represent what we’ll all be using (in some modified form) soon enough. The reason it matters is that the evidence for website usage you will see will probably be for these sorts of phones.

For the moderately techie among you, this can be explained by the fact that smartphones are often javascript enabled whereas other phones are not and web analytics products like Google Analytics need javascript to be working on your system for their page tags to work.

• Can I track the same customer as they visit my site by phone and web?

Not really. Most solutions will see these as two separate visits and not realize that those two visits are made by the same person. You could get round this by getting people to log on each time they visited but, unless you have a compelling reason to do this, I think it might just be elevating the collection of stats over the user experience.

• OK, so I might have visitors coming to my site by mobile phone – so what?

Put simply, people will use your site differently through a mobile device than through a desk computer. This means that, in order to deliver what they want when they come to your site, you need to be aware of how they are acting in this different environment. For example, page can take longer to download, screens are smaller and some of the programs you take for granted on you computer might not be available on your phone.

So, if you want a site optimised for mobiles the first recommendations would be to look through your stats to see how mobile users are using your site. From this, most other decisions will flow in terms of content. The advice from industry leaders in the WAA seminar was simple enough: Once you see evidence of web usage by mobiles on your site, dig deeper and see what they are doing.

Are mobile users looking for specific content? Certain information may be particularly associated with phone usage – maps, directions, booking references for example – but look at your own web analytics data back up those assumptions. People may be using your site differently by phone. You can also factor in how long are they on the site (bearing in mind a long time does not always indicate a successful experience, but often a frustrating visit).

Some other suggestions I would have include:

• ditch any large graphic files;
• ditch the background music on the entry page (actually, just do this anyway);
• make it easy for the customer to get to where they want to go to – on a mobile, time is money and I don’t want to waste either;
• the mobile experience is more often about ‘just in time’ information rather than gathering a body of research – deliver accordingly;
• is what you are delivering commensurate with the mobile devices capabilities? For example, if you were delivering music samples via your site, you would need to know how big these could be.
• And developing that example: many mobiles do have MP3 players built in as well as cameras – can you take advantage of this somehow?

To round up, I can almost guarantee that the visitors to your website are using a broader range of devices than simply PCs and laptops. They may currently only be a small group – but they may represent a very valuable one. Its worth starting to look for them in your data so you can plan accordingly.

Further reading:Sunday Night Thinking on Mobile Analytics…

Great examples of the tourism industry successfully combining research and technology (and what the rest of us could learn from this)

My post last week was a bit of a moan – probably something to do with winter returning to Scotland and the general state of the world.  So, I thought I would balance out some of the negativity with some posts on people that are really getting things right.

Firstly, I would like to point you to William Bakker, director of eBusiness at Tourism British Columbia. As an area marketing agency, I think Tourism BC has one of the most sophisticated and advanced operations I have seen and the following paragraphs encapsulate one of the reasons why:

“We have conducted focus groups, phone interviews, card sorts and/usability tests to find the best way to organize the content on each website. We start with research about how our target audience in a particular market approach their trip planning; their mental model. We adjust our taxonomy where needed. For example, in North America a farm accommodation is called a ‘guest ranch‘. In the UK it’s called a ‘cowboy ranch‘ and in Australia a farmstay.”

What can I say apart from, ‘Wow!’  Although this approach might seem sophisticated to some, I recognise it as actually very simple at heart.  It’s the approach that says you should remember that your customers are human and need to be researched as such to get the full picture.

I particularly liked William’s comment about language.  This is something I think might be overlooked by a number of businesses and organisations but is vital if you want people to recognise what it is you are offering.  In some instances, you might get a clue to this if you are able to analyse searches made from within a site that have ‘odd’ terms but I think that the larger issue of language and its use is probably best started with real live people in focus groups.

Its an approach we always take in our tourism research projects as well – we recognise the immense value of quantitative data (whether that’s web analytics or traditional surveys) but feel that the best value is derived when you go that one stage further to probe the human element and combine it with the quant. I think this usually leads to a far more sustainable outcome.

You can read more at William’s blog here.

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Another post that caught my eye was from the Karin Schmollgruber’s interview with Angela Zechmann(Director of E-Marketing and Internet for Salzburg Area Tourism) at the blog Fastenyourseatbelts.com. The interview is about about the Salzburg Area Tourism’s efforts to attract a younger audience to the area the site www.onebigpark.at and, in some ways, continues the theme from British Columbia that you need to understand that different audiences need information in a language specific to them.

But the other thing that made me sit up was that I was reminded of a conversation related to me a while ago about Austrian tourism to the effect that their ongoing research revealed that the country was having difficulty attracting young people.  I am not privy to the data for Salzburg so will assume that their research also suggests that, for mainland Europeans, Salzburg means Mozart and pretty mountains and, for people from the UK and the US, the Sound of Music – none of which suggests to me a largely younger profile of visitor (Angela, Karin – let me know if I am way off the mark here!).

And it’s not only a case of identifying an issue but doing something tactical about it with a considered Web 2.0 to help fulfil a strategy to encourage younger people back.  In other words, it’s a piece of joined up thinking and a good example of the intelligent application of 2.0.

The original is in German here and one of those rather odd internet translations for you non-German speakers can be found here.

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My eye was also caught by this post at Phil Caine’s Tourism Tide on the potential conflict between Yield Management and Price Transparency.

To some of you, this might sound at best an arcane venture into a world far beyond your business.  I would disagree as it concerns something fundamental to all business – trust and transparency.  So, for example, reviews on tripadvisor at the moment just have people discussing the condition of an establishment.  What if those reviewers ever started comparing prices with one another?

Well, there are already moves that way in the accommodation sector with the likes of Farecast. This added-value price comparison site is essentially doing for the accommodation sector what price comparison sites have been doing for the transportation sector for a while.

For many establishments thismight not seem an  issue but, from experience, I know that accommodation prices can fluctuate at certain parts of the market and for much the same reasons as at the top end of the industry – such as sellers want to make a buck without having to pay an intermediary.

To that end of the tourism sector that thinks this is some far-off fad, let me say that this will happen whether you like it or not.  It doesn’t matter that you think of intercontinental air jouney is a big ticket item and your accommodation offering as small ticket item – customers will apply the same standards of transparency of value to both. Looking beyond the lowest common denominator horizon will help you prepare for changes like this.

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Finally, I think the Canada-e-Connect Tourism Strategy Conference 2009 might just be the place if you are looking for intelligent debate and insight into how best to harness the new opportunities.  I don’t think the program is finalised yet but, judging on the people behind it, it won’t be looking at ‘lowest common denominator’ stuff but instead offering something for those with more vision.

For some of you, this might be an old story but bear with me…

Imagine a man with one foot in a bucket of freezing water and one foot in a bucket of boiling water. Taking the average of the water temperatures, the man would have to say that he felt comfortable.

Which is nonsense of course.

If I told you the average of the two buckets was 50 degrees, I’ve told you nothing about the spread of temperatures that give you a fuller picture of the real situation. And if you have commissioned me to do some research into the respective water temperature in buckets and I omit to tell you this vital piece of information, you are not getting your money’s worth.

So what’s this got to do with anything? Well, Vicky’s recent post on recession busting research tips started me thinking along similar lines and how managing your researcher harder with a little knowledge of their black arts can be a viable way of getting more band for your buck.

In the example above, having an understanding of the concept of the standard deviation is would have led a manager to ask a question that that would have identified the spread of results. Better still, the research company should have identified it themselves and explained its significance in this case.

And this isn’t the only area where a little knowledge can be a good thing. While many research companies will offer data such as the standard deviation as a matter of course, I suspect that it is rare that someone commissioning research at a less experienced level will know about some basic concepts and make their researcher work harder.

So, the following is for people commissioning research but unsure of what questions to ask once they receive it. I’m not going to go into mathematical depth with any of these (that’s what you pay me for when you commission the work) but instead you should consider them as more tools for your toolbox with which to prod your research company and your data. The following concepts are, of course, the tip of the iceberg and are chosen here because they are probably the most fundamental but common concepts that we come across which remain something of a mystery to many people.

The purpose of this post is not to befuddle or bore but rather to empower. As a researcher, we know we are going to be asked about sample sizes. We know that many of you remain to be convinced that focus groups are a good thing. But show us you mean business by understanding some of the following and you’ll surely get more bang for your buck.

Mean, Median and Mode

Remember that an average is more that the total score divided by the number of incidences (the mean). The median will tell you the middle point in that data and the mode will tell you the value that occurred the most. Each of these are telling you something different and noteworthy about your data.

Standard Deviation

The standard deviation is a measure of how close most of the results are to the mean. It shows you how far the results are from the mean – which then tells you how representative that mean figure is.  68% of results will be within one standard deviation and 95% (the more usual measure) will be in two.

Using the standard deviation would have told you that, in the example at the beginning of the post, 50 degrees lacked any insight as a figure. It would have revealed that the spread of results was so wide as to be practically meaningless.

Correlation vs Causation

There is a difference, between correlation and causation. The first suggests that there is a link between two events whereas the second suggests that one event caused another. For example, there is probably an historical correlation between the number of pirates on the high seas and the emergence of Europe from a mini-ice age. But one event did not cause the other. However, an upsurge in visitor numbers might cause service ratings to fall. The good news is that it is possible to prove whether a link does exist (whatever caused it) or whether you are just imagingin it. And you can even understand in some circumstances the exact scale of the impact of one event on another.

Statistical Significance

Statistical significance does not mean that something is interesting or noteworthy. Rather boringly, it simply means that something is likely to be true. For example if it were calculated that the statement that 70% of Scottish customers and 60% of English customers preferred continental breakfasts were statistically significant, it would mean that there really was a difference English and Scottish customers – not that the insight was a more exiting one than another insight.

In conclusion: this post isn’t suggesting that you should become experts in statistics. But having a little knowledge might allow you to start asking probing questions of the experts and working their findings harder.

Learn to love qualitative research and discover the three greatest open questions you could be asking

Businesses and organisations like surveys. Surveys are easy enough to produce (but not so easy to produce well). They give you answers to things that interest you and they give you measures that are useful when ticking your own boxes.

Ordinary people, on the other hand, seem at best to tolerate surveys and show a remarkable resilience when faced with daft questions. You know the ones – they’re a bit like, “On a scale of 1-5 tell me how satisfied you are with the Sleepytown’s CrimeSukz food crime prevention initiative and its effect on you.”

Don’t get me wrong, quantitative surveys have their place and I’ll discuss where this is in a minute. But they are rarely a conversation and in my experience, if you want to rich data from a customer’s perspective, you need to get your hands dirty and get into qualitative research.

Qualitative and Quantitative Research – a quick reminder.

For those of you a little rusty on this, the next few paragraphs are a quick primer for you. Quantitative research is about numbers. ‘9 out of 10 cats prefer a warm fire to the snow’ is an example of quantitative research. Qualitative research is about attitudes, beliefs, views and motivations – the kind of things that are more difficult to reduce to numbers. ‘I’ll vote for Mayor Sandburg but I think he comes across as shifty’ is an example of qualitative insight.

Obviously both types of research compliment each other but it seems to me that people are generally more distrusting of qual than quant.

Qual tells you what you weren’t looking for. Personally, I think this is a good thing.

If I use a quantitative survey structure that asks “What was the biggest problem – the sidewalks, the shops or the train station” I will get an answer where the respondent has weighed up the relative standing of only these three options and given me an answer accordingly. However, if I ask an open question and get answers that say, “I couldn’t see anything”, “The view was terrible” and “My child missed everything because of tall people in front of her” – then I am a) revealing a previously unknown issue and b) getting an idea of its importance because it is the thing that occurs spontaneously in the conversation. In this example, we have moved from the producer’s perspective through to the customer’s perspective.

So what’s the problem with qual?

• It’s difficult to understand

There’s no way round it – understanding qual data can be difficult. For example, you have lots of people saying lots of things in lots of different ways at the same time and simultaneously often meaning something other than what they’re uttering (see my previous post for details!) My view is that putting in some effort is worth while as the outcomes are invaluable and I speak of some solution later in this post about presentation and analysis.

• What about sample sizes?

The issue of sample sizes is a vexing one. In some forms of research it is vital. If you are bringing a medicine to market, for example, a sample size that enables you to know that it will make 0.05% of its users violently unwell is a justified investment. If you are a political party, knowing that you are 3 points ahead in election week is also important. But a) large samples cost large money and b) you don’t need them all the time anyway.

Two focus groups of 8 people each will generally give me a deeper insight into people’s motivations about something than a survey of 500 people (the survey of 500 on the other hand will help me to identify demographic differences as well as enabling me to determine, for example, clusters, correlations and other exotic items).

Solutions and Presentation

• Don’t be afraid of open ended questions

If you are doing a quantitative survey, there’s nothing to stop you including open questions and coding the responses. It’s not going to be as quick as totting up a ‘which do you prefer?’ kind of survey but, if you sift through the open responses, you will generally find that you can reduce them down into a manageable number of categories. The example above with people saying things like “I couldn’t see anything” and “The view was terrible” could be coded in this fashion as ‘viewing’ or possibly ‘crowding’ issues (depending on a probably known context).

This can then be condensed and treated as quantitative data but with the advantage that you have not decided the paramenters before starting. The following (fictitious) table of customer complaints gives an example of this and used the same data as the later example further down this post. The message in this instance from open field data is that a) there are three distinct areas of improvement needed and b) an indication of the priority they assume for the customer.

Area of complaint	% of complaints
Staff	46%
Toilets	22%
Viewing facilities	32%

• Good presentation is important too

The kind of table above is good for management and bean-counters – but what about for people who either don’t have the time to read that stuff of are sceptical of the interpretation you are putting on it?

Using the same data used for the table above, I’ve transferred the customer comments (with light editing for sense) into a visual word cloud. This allows the same information to be gathered at a glance.

What should you be asking?

So, I’m a fan of asking open ended questions and then playing with the results for deeper insight. But what are good questions to ask? Well, obviously, the more open ended the better. But I’m on the hunt now to work out what the standard ‘killer’ questions could be for the tourism and travel industry.

This is ground that we’ve covered in this blog before for the online world and the issue has also been covered in depth by Jim Sterne of the WAA as well as Avinash Kaushik (see Avinash’s The Three Greatest Survey Questions Ever. In terms of the online experience the questions are as follows:

• What is the purpose of your visit to our website today?
• Were you able to complete your task today?
• If you were not able to complete your task today, why not?

There are two things to note here. Firstly, it is a mixture of open and closed questions. Secondly, they are questions that are, to my mind, explicitly transactional. In other words, one visits a website usually for a clear purpose and you know whether you mnaged to do that or not. The purpose of a tourism experience could also be reduced to an almost transactional simplicity but I am not sure that people really think like that in this context so, if we are to use this kind of structure in offline travel and tourism, then we need to adapt it a little.

Before I dive into what I think might be workable alternatives for the tourism and travel industry, I’ll explain why I like this ‘back to basic’s’ approach. It’s because the answers tell you which issues matter. It gives you an insight into your customer’s use of language. It’s specific without being proscriptive. It can be used for marketing as well as feedback.

OK, it might not tell you that they were only 3.4% satisfied by the product positioning statement but, frankly, who cares when you can know that they are all badmouthing your business because the aircon kept them awake all night and the sheets smell of smoke?

So, here’s my suggestion for the three greatest tourism survey questions ever.

• Why did you stay/visit here?
• Were you satisfied?
• If not, why not?

Actually, ‘the three greatest tourism survey questions ever‘ sounds definitive when it’s not -this is a blog and so let’s see if we really can refine the greatest three travel and tourism survey questions ever together.

When no one has a crystal ball it’s time to use internal data to get tactical

Like the housing market before it, the travel & tourism sector faces uncertainty. It knows it is facing upheaval – it just doesn’t know exactly how painful it will be.

Not surprisingly, people are suddenly at lot more interested in market information. And indeed a daily flood of headlines, predictions, scaremongering and irrational optimism pour forth – many of them completely contradictory.

Mixed messages both reflect and fuel the uncertainty. It is not that the data is necessarily wrong, its just small pieces of a very big and complicated picture and a snapshot cannot convey the full story.

So, do you ignore the information altogether? Pick and choose what you want to hear? Do nothing while waiting to see who turns out to be right?

My view is while this big picture data matters (especially at the government and national marketing level) at the individual business level there is more to gain by ditching the crystal ball. Instead it is the best possible time to turn tactical by wringing profitable actions from the information you already have.

Control what you can – eg marketing costs and barriers to conversion

It’s a cliche that you should hope for the best and prepare for the worst – personally, I think you should aim to control what you can. That means working with what you have and leveraging data to help your money work harder. And while you cannot control currency rates & oil prices, you can use existing data to improve your conversion rates and tighten your marketing return on investment.

Conversion equates to action. From a business perspective, the conversion rate is typically the proportion of potential customers that convert into actual customers. But its also worth turning it around to the customer perspective – the conversion rate is also about the proportion of your website visitors or enquirers who were able to successfully achieve what they came to do. (That could be buy, call you, find directions, make a booking, check the price etc).

2% conversion from your marketing activity was never ideal, but with fewer tourists to target, you may need to convert at 4% just to stay still. If the overall customer pool is shrinking, it becomes essential to convert more of those that do come your way. But without spending more than those additional customers are worth (which is where ROI comes in).

Yes it takes focus and effort – but improving conversion & more importantly ROI can actually involve spending less rather than more money, as you can cut back on what isn’t working.

For example, by looking at the overall return on investment of specific marketing activities you will identify those black holes that are swallowing spending without delivering a suitable return, whilst spotting well performing campaigns you can expand.

The marketing return on investment is calculated as a percentage and the formula is as follows:

For more on measuring ROI I suggest you login to MarketingProfs to read the article Financial Intelligence for Strategic Planning by Jim Lenskold or check out Jim Novo’s in depth piece on Calculating ROI.

“It is critical to cut the excessive waste of marketing dollars that is abundant in most businesses. Efforts must be concentrated on winning the greatest share—not of customers or revenues—but profits” Jim Lenskold

You take control once you understand both conversion and return on investment, meaning decisions get made on fact not fear. Here is data that I believe is way more valuable in uncertain times than scaremongering headlines.

Conversion rate at the business wide level

Understanding that only 5% of all enquirers to the business actually turn into customers triggers two important questions. “Why?” and “What do we do about it?” Are you making it hard for potential customers to buy from you, to trust you, to understand your value offering? The quest to make it easier for enquirers to achieve their objectives is a potentially very profitable one, because by addressing the conversion process weaknesses you’re increasing your prospect pool regardless of whether there are more overall visitors in the market.

Conversion and ROI at the sales channel level

Web, third party website affiliates, agents, phone and face to face all represent different sales channels and will convert prospects at different rates (and importantly at different value levels & costs, hence the importance of looking at ROI). Are the commissions you are paying justified by the overall ROI? Are your efforts being focussed on the best performing channels? If something has to be cut back, this data will help you ensure it is the right thing.

ROI at the marketing campaign level

The most expensive advert, third party website, brochure insertion etc is not necessarily the best performing one. Likewise, the one that generates the most responses does not always trigger the most conversions or the best return on investment. Online campaigns are extraordinarily measurable without having to ask the visitor. You can also observe online conversions of offline campaigns by measuring search trends. But simply making “how did you here about us?” a routine question during all enquiries and purchases means that offline campaign effectiveness can be tracked too (as long as the answer is stored and can be referenced to the transaction).

Conversion & ROI at the customer segment level

All customers are not created equal. We regularly conduct segmentation exercises on client transactional information and databases and find the most valuable customer segments are often small and not immediately obvious. But, if you are able to distinguish between different groups of customers, it becomes possible to target your acquisition and retention marketing activities on those customers that represent the most profitable prospects. (Of increased importance when you can’t afford to market to everyone).

For example Customer A may make a single high value transaction while on a once in a lifetime holiday, Customer B may make a mid value purchase twice a year, every year for a decade, Customer C may have made a couple of low value purchases over the years and may or may not be back. If I was conducting a direct mail or email marketing campaign to previous customers I would want to differentiate conversion rates from these customer groups, because I know their potential lifetime values to to be very different.

I may be prepared to invest more in marketing to retain Customer B than I would Customer C and it may not be worth my while spending to retain Customer A at all. (Close attention to the data is required here though as its rarely clear cut).

Sometimes the small picture tells more than the big picture

When external, macro data becomes at best confusing and at worst distracting, your internatal data comes into its own – be it revenue, repeat booking rates, satisfaction data, advertising return on investment, website conversion or marketing ROI.

This is because while an individual business can rarely influence the overall volume of tourists in the market, it can influence the proportion of those who respond positively to their business and shift from being potential to actual customers. And given finite or shrinking resources, your internal data can help you spend on the right place and on the right people – and usually more effectively than a crystal ball.

I spoke recently to Ian Yeoman, formerly Scenario Planning for Visit Scotland. As Ian is in the process of taking up a position at Victoria University, New Zealand, and has recently published Tomorrow’s Tourist, it seemed a good time to catch him to get his views on where industry is heading.

Anyone who has seen Ian speak will know that he does not speak from an ivory-tower but rather in a very accessible way on what could be a dense topic. And the book is little different – it’s aimed at business and planners within the travel and tourism sector definitely not a scholarly tome designed to gather dust.

Although Ian mentioned that Scenario Planning was a little like science fiction, I don’t think we should interpret this as meaning that what he does is a flight of fantasy. On the contrary, his work is backed up by a lot of empirical research and this one of the reasons why it is worth paying attention to him.

It’s important to note that at the outset that Ian’s work concentrates on the changing nature of the traveller. While this obviously has implication for how the supply side of the industry meets that demand, his work is not about the development of the supply side per se. Instead he looks the changing picture of demands, desires, constraints and impacts that the traveller and thereby the travel industry may face.

Ian’s work offers predictions through to 2030 but this interview concentrated more on the short term issues that we could be facing. For those of you wanting to find out what happens next, you’ll just have to buy the book.

So what is changing for the traveller and what are the implications?

While it is tricky to condense the whole conversation down into a couple of lines, I’ll start by trying to do just that.

• We are moving from a world of seemingly unlimited opportunity through to a world of constraints. These drivers are largely external leading to constraints that are economic, environmental, political and moral in nature.
• The growth of tourism will not stop – although it might be slower than it has been.
• The traveller will want more in less time or with less effort – this has implications for everything from the format of events through to booking processes and the nature of breaks.

Before this becomes a shopping list of changes, lets take those points and develop them more fully.

We are entering a world of constraints

It will have escape no-one’s notice that the economy is not as robust as it once was. And, although there is still resistance in some quarters about the degree to which climate change is attributable to human activity, governments are acting to lessen its impact whatever the cause. On the home front, we notice that our disposable income doesn’t goes as far as it did, say, 18 months ago. We notice that the cost of travel is rising, both at the immediate level of our cars and at a wider level.

When Ian described this as “leaving a world of low inflation – moving to an era of constraints”, it suggests that this is not just a short term blip on a historically inevitable rate of progress but rather a longer lasting change of pace.

“The consumer is being squeezed by rising prices and falling levels of disposal incomes, as a consequence out of home expenditure will fall. In the short term, rural Scotland will feel the pinch rather than Glasgow/ Edinburgh / Aberdeen. Leisure spending will fall but business tourism in cities will remain robust in the short term. The middle classes are the market that is going to be effected the most.”

We have been in situations like this before though, most notably in the oil shocks of the 1970s. In the case of the 1974 oil shocks, the economy rebounded swiftly but the problems of the79-83 took a lot longer to recover from.

It should be noted that the constraints are not just economic but political as well as governments make move to combat climate changes and other examples of environmental degradation.

On a positive note, Ian noted that we are more fuel efficient today than in the 1970s – our cars do more miles/kilometers to the gallon/litre for example. In the medium term, he sees coal and nuclear as the only realistic players in the energy market but acknowledges that the political and environmental issues surrounding this are immense and are constraints in themselves.

However, although ‘grid’ power could be delivered through coal/nuclear energy generation, the fact still remains that the vast majority of transport in the UK is oil based which will have an impact on people’s willingness to travel longer distances by car in a time of rising prices.

Some other examples of constraining factors include:

• Environmental constraints: Some destinations start to become too hot to visit on account of climate change – the eastern and southern Mediterranean countries particularly will be challenged under this scenario. In other areas, decisions will be made to limit the number of visitors on account of their impact on a sensitive region (I suspect that Antarctica cruises might be see this)
• Moral constraints: Ostentatious luxury will be frowned upon in some travel sectors – Ian noted that there was a trend for businesses to meet in ‘misery locations’ that sent a clear message that money was being spent on doing business, not having fun.
• Cost constraints: Airlines will protect revenue by reduce capacity. Effectively, this would mean that we could go back to 1990s style prices for some of the less profitable routes.

The growth of tourism will not stop – but it might slow down

Ian discussed two scenarios – one in which demand is not constrained and one in which it is. His estimate was that under the scenario where there is no limiting factor on growth, then we could be looking at around a 3.4% rise per year leading to 1.9 international arrivals by 2030. However, in world of constraints, that growth rate would slow to 1.2-1.5% per annum, resulting in 0.8 billion fewer arrivals by the same data.

How the constraining factors affect visitors

But how will the present situation affect the travel industry? Well, I’ll detail a few of Ian’s predictions below but I think they can be summarised as, ”travellers will want more from what they can get.” This shouldn’t be immediately interpreted to mean (for example) that travellers will want 2 meals for the price of 1 as standard but rather they will want to seek travel options that enable them to do more in the time they have available to them and this has implications for the process, products, promotional and logistical aspects of the delivery of travel.

• Proximity of destination to home will rise in importance

In a post on peak oil tourism a while ago, I speculated on whether local destinations would again become popular. Ian answer suggested that local destinations would indeed become more important but probably not in the way that many of us might imagine it. 30 years ago, ‘local’ would have suggested ‘domestic’, it now suggests ‘regional’ and regional should be understood as being within a three hour travel zone. Therefore, from a UK perspective, Paris, Athens, Tunisia etc are local.

The driver behind this shift to local is that the traveller does not want to waste their precious break (or indeed their work time) travelling. If they can only afford to take 5 days break, they do not want to spend the equivalent of 2 days travelling.

This has a number of implications including:

• A rise in city breaks (but only if they offer good transport links)
• A fall in rural breaks in remote areas
• A fall in long-haul customers.

It should be noted that city status does not guarantee that an area remains attractive to potential travellers – the important thing will be its accessibility and it’s role as just one of many competing destinations. From a Scottish perspective, the ‘local’ nature of Edinburgh and Glasgow to London will be no guarantee of their status as major tourism centres when the London customer has a choice of the whole of Europe from their local airports and international rail terminals. It should also be noted that good transport links extends not only to the nearest airport to the destination but also the connection between the terminal and the end destination.

• There will be complex customer strategies of trading up and down

Although there will be a move in time of economic challenges for people to seek cheaper and better value accommodation, the picture isn’t a simple as everyone suddenly deciding that 5 star hotels are beyond their budget. Ian noted the tendency for some people to trade up – but only if they could trade up to their first choice of hotel (for example). And if this first choice were not available, then the visitor would trade down – meaning that the choice would be between Gleneagles or the local Travelodge.

This reminded me of a paragraph from a recent edition of the Wall Street Journal, discussing Walt Disney Co’s recent performance “[Chief Executive] Mr. Iger said one factor helping the company during the downturn – as opposed to previous economic slides like the one in the early 90’s – is that 75% of our hotel product is “moderately priced”or “value priced”. In 1991, over 55% of the rooms were considered “premium priced”. Our portfolio of rooms is more accessible.

The article also notes the impact of the weakness of the dollar leading to a) an influx of visitors from overseas and b) “US residents looking to avoid the high cost of travelling abroad are visiting the domestic parks instead.”

Ian said he thought that families especially were looking to trade down at the moment and that accommodation that was ‘difficult’ to book would suffer and this point is discussed more fully in the context of the next bullet point.

I found this observation about the how people trade down interesting because it obviously applies in some markets but not others. As we discovered recently, in some markets trading up is seen as a necessity as it is a hygiene/standards factor – people simply do not trust a three star in that area to be of comparative quality and so ensure that they are getting decent hotel by booking a five star.

Ian used a couple of examples to illustrate how activities re adapt themselves to a world where people are unwilling or unable to divert as much time to that activity that previously.

You see it in sporting events. In cricket the move toward the 20Twenty format (essentially a cricket match lasting about 3 hours instead of 3-5 days) reflects how people want the experience but want to be able to have it in a condensed form to fit in with their busy lifestyles.

Ian pointed to the importance of quicker booking and check-in processes as being something that issued from the same impulse – cutting down on the ‘hard’ parts of the travelling experience to maximise the pleasurable or profitable parts.

From a Scottish perspective, Ian thought that B&Bs will lose market share to budget accommodation due to their lack of ecommerce. “Only 4% of accommodation providers in Scotland operate a dynamic on line reservation system like Easyjet. Many SME’s still only have website that effectively says, “Please make a reservation and we will contact you the next day.” In today’s society the consumer won’t wait.”

Many SME’s still only have website that effectively says, “Please make a reservation and we will contact you the next day.” In today’s society the consumer won’t wait.

He also cited the City of York’s outside gallery as an example of allowing visitors access to culture ‘on the hoof.’

So who’s getting it right?

There will continue to be destinations that are approaching these challenges in the right way. Ian cited the following as examples of the right approach:

• Scotland: Scotland has invested in research and understanding its customers to an extent unrivalled by most other areas (and my own experience suggests that this is the case also).
• Vienna: Vienna (and Austria as a whole) also collects great visitor data and Vienna has a really strong emphasis on delivering quality to the MICE market.
• Las Vegas: Vegas is a hedonism hotspot and well positioned to exploit gambling opportunities coming from Asia

Additionally, some niche markets will continue to do well but other broader markets will struggle. This shouldn’t be understood as meaning just destinations but also visitor segments – for example, single people travelling in a group.

Ian’s message for operators and providers is simple. “Overall, this means that business needs to know the price elasticity of consumers – using a process of segmentation – some consumers will continue to pay a premium.” In other words, you need to know your customers inside out and really ‘up your game’ when it comes to customer intelligence as there will be people out there who will pay for good value. Obviously a lot of big players do this already but, from a personal perspective, I fear that there is a lot of the market who view the notion of understanding and identifying the tolerances and desires of distinct customer types as something akin to a science beyond their grasp and not worth attempting.

There will also be parts of the world that continue to be profitable. We suggested Canada would be a beneficiary of the fuel rise in a post a while ago and Ian added Aberdeen to this list on account of its status as the home of North Sea Oil.

So, what does this mean?

I think the thing that history tells us is that, although circumstances can look similar and indeed share similar traits, no period will be exactly like a previous period. So we will not be going forward to the past to 1974 or 1979 and here are a number of reason off the top of my head why this will be the case:

• Tourism and Travel have grown since the 1970s and so we live in under a completely different set of circumstances than those experienced at that time. Put simply, we are standing in a different place and that is not one characterized by 1970s travel levels and expectations.
• Technology plays a more integrated and personal role in the process of travel and tourism than it did in the 1970s and we can expect this to remain the case – the internet will not be ‘un-invented’ any more than commercial television was ‘un-invented’ in previous times of economic scarcity.
• The demographics are different – we are about to experience the mass retirement of the baby-boomer generation for example.
• Markets are more free now than in the 1970s

So the constraint of ‘only’ going to Milan for a break instead of a break to Vancouver will be the equivalent of someone in the 1950s only going to Blackpool instead of going to Paris

It is clear that some providers will need to fight harder for their customers. My take on it is that knowing your customer and the whole market in which you operate will be key to navigating these waters. Reading a book like Ian’s or blog like this are part of that process but understanding the customer and their trends needs to be ingrained within the tourism industry even at the smallest level. To navigate these water blind would be to immediately operate at a competitive disadvantage.

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I would just like to finish the post by thanking Ian for his time with this post and to wish him the best in his new position in New Zealand. I suspect, though, that we haven’t heard the last of him!

When in doubt decisions get made based on our own gut instincts.  Or on those instincts of the loudest or most influential people in the room. Somehow, the voice of the customer doesn’t always get the hearing it deserves.

Website interfaces, marketing messages, service propositions – all things that impact the customer absolutely – typically get created from the inside out.  With rumbling guts leading the way.  But you, me, the boss, the consultant – we are not the customer.  The perspective that the customer brings – whether gathered through research in advance, testing during the process or feedback after the event – takes some of the randomness and risk out of second guessing.

How do you ensure the customer doesn’t get left out?

1. Don’t optimize for the hippo

Everyone has a hippo in their life – it may be the HIghest Paid Person’s Opinion, or a Highly Influential Person’s Personal Opinion.  The hippo knows just how a website should look, or just what makes a great advert and they are not about to keep that opinion to themselves.

In lieu of stronger evidence from the customer, the hippo holds great sway!

But, our roaring, mud loving, opinionated hippo friends are not the people the website, marketing campaign, or interior layouts are ultimately designed for – theirs isn’t the only significant opinion.

Which brings me to the second point.

2. If in doubt, ask… (the customer that is!)

Just how many hours of speculation, doubt and opining could be saved by talking to the customer?

User testing, for example, can stop dead a circular debate that has run through a company for months.  In the space of just a few hours the customers themselves reveal what is really in their mind.

Testing different content side by side and tracking the comparative results (right through to overall revenue) is another way of asking the customer “which of these works best for you”.  Tools such as Google’s free weboptimizer allow you to easily test any combination of web content to find out what leads to the most conversions.  The customer speaks with their attention and actions.

And of course, asking the customer can also mean good old research in the form of focus groups, site visits, follow homes, surveys, customer diaries, user testing and formal or informal interviews.

3. But, don’t start research sure of the answer – you’ll only prove your self right

Keep your mind open, listen and learn.  Biased research is no better than gut instinct.  I’ve written before about how easy it is to influence the results of your research.  For example by unwittingly encouraging people to tell you what you want to hear, or by being so sure of “the answer” that you hear it despite what your customers tell you.

Instead, see if you can prove yourself wrong.

4. Test, analyse and make decisions based on evidence

If you have the evidence, act on it – don’t let the customer in, then ignore what they tell you when it comes to decision making.

But sometimes, despite the fact that you’ve talked to the customer and gathered your facts, the hippo can come back for a final roar – still convinced that their personal opinion trumps the evidence.

Keep the hippo at bay with voice of the customer data (the customer in their own words really works here). And remind them of the financial costs of inaction or inappropriate action.  Better still, help the hippo realise it was all their idea in the first place and that they are one smart semi-aquatic mammal!

5. Out of sight, out of mind?

Highly successful businesses typically know that the customer is genuinely at the centre of their universe. And many go to great lengths to keep the customer presence there in the decision making process.  I saw a presentation by eBay recently, where they talked  about how people throughout the organisation participate in follow homes, to observe customers using the site in their own context.

Microsoft have done a lot of persona work and have created life size representations of key customer personas who are taken along to meetings. At the other end of the scale I have seen tourism businesses whose offices are full of cards and notes from previous visitors from all over the world – also a visual representation, if they choose to use it, of the customers’ role in key decisions.

So, you are not the customer and neither is the hippo – make sure you don’t simply second guess what your real highly influential opinion holders think!