'Net Features : ForeSee Results

Top-5 Digital Survey Solutions

Administrator — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 19:53:00 GMT

The best way to understand the emotions and feelings that end-users have about your website and digital applications is to survey them. It's important to ask open-ended questions in order to develop more formal, strategic questions which may also influence success. Discover the top digital survey solutions below.

SurveyPro

SurveyPro enables website owners to survey users online, send surveys and view results of surveys.

Brands like Victoria’s Secret utilize SurveyPro to gauge customer experience through a comprehensive Website Experience Survey. Users are asked basic intent questions and are also guided through 10 usability questions that ask them to rate the importance of certain homepage factors (e.g. overall layout, ease of finding onsite search functionality, etc.).

Survey takers also rate the same factors on a sliding scale of poor to excellent. The survey goes on to include questions about the importance of design elements and awareness of new features. By collecting direct customer feedback, the company is able to evaluate and make changes to provide the best user experience.

iPerceptions

Founded in 2000 with the goal to improve and optimize websites by “tapping into the feedback of real customers in the context of actual online experiences,” iPerceptions developed the 4Q Survey solution. So how does it work? Website owners place a 4Q survey on their site for free by just completing a five-minute setup.

Visitors are then invited (upon arrival) to participate in a short website survey once their visit is complete. Businesses can leverage the information to implement website improvements and improve the online customer experience. Additionally, the 4Q Survey tool offers complete Google Analytics integration, which enables marketers to get a complete picture of their website visitor. The more information about a visitor a business has, the more personalized its communication and offerings can be. Today, personalized online customer experiences are less of a luxury and more of a necessity.

ForeSee Results

Brands like Ticketmaster rely on ForeSee to collect feedback from users during their online experience via tablets, desktops or mobile devices. This in-experience method enables brands to see how their experience measures up during the experience. Annually, ForeSee collect millions of satisfaction survey responses, which quantifies the voice of customer (VoC) and puts feedback in context to support strategic and tactical decisions – all to improve the customer experience.

ForeSee clients can also incorporate their surveys into SiteCatalyst to improve campaign segmentation capabilities.

OpinionLab

For more than 13 years, OpinionLab says they’ve invited consumers to share input in their own words. OpinionLab’s services extend to all touchpoints, including websites, mobile platforms, stores and products.

OpinionLab also counts half of Fortune 50 organizations as users of its VoC feedback solutions. Via OpinionLab, millions of comment cards are delivered in more than 200 countries around the globe. Additionally, OpinionLab promotes itself as offering the most holistic suite of VoC collection tools. Its services offer real-time feedback from engaged customers.

SurveyMonkey

One of the most well-known online survey tools is SurveyMonkey, which provides an easy way to send free surveys, polls, questionnaires, customer feedback and market research. Additionally, SurveyMonkey partners with other popular online tools to make integrating surveys simpler. Its partners include Eventbrite, MailChimp, Mad Mini, ActiveCampaign, GroSocial and CleverReach. For example, its partnership with GroSocial allows marketers to place surveys on their company's Facebook page and share the results with its fan base. The partnership provides powerful insights, so businesses can make more informed decisions regarding interaction with fans on the social network.

Has Social Media Helped Your Business?

Linc Wonham — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 11:01:00 GMT

Two separate reports on social media marketing were released this week with – on the surface, at least – what seem like diametrically opposite results.

According to the 2011 Industry Report from Social Media Examiner, 90 percent of more than 3,000 Web marketers say that social media is an important facet of their business today. Brand exposure was identified as the greatest benefit, with 88 percent of respondents citing it as a positive result of their social media campaigns.

Increased website traffic is another benefit (remember this when you get to the next paragraph), with 72 percent of the marketers claiming they gained traffic and subscribers through their social media efforts. Another advantage named by a high percentage of marketers was improved search rankings, gaining a 62-percent share of the response.

Then we have the research released by ForeSee Results, which states that, on average, less than 1 percent of website visits come directly from a social media URL. ForeSee surveyed 300,000 consumers on more than 180 websites across multiple industries to come up with that number, which sounds like an awfully poor return on a company’s investment of both time and resources.

Or is it? The ForeSee report also pointed out that while only 1 percent of visitors are coming to websites directly from social URLs, an average of 18 percent of visitors report being influenced in some way by a social media campaign, indirectly sending them to that site. That company’s ROI just got a whole lot better.

That's one of the challenges facing social media marketers right now, and why handfuls of companies are searching for the best solutions to accurately assess a business’ social media ROI.

It is also why marketers have to look deeper at the analytics they do have when dealing with social media than they would for most of their other campaigns – or take their focus off some of the analytics they rely on most.

Even though we have been hearing about it and using it for several years now, social media is still very much an enigma. But most will agree, like 90 percent of those responding to the Examiner report mentioned above, that it is in fact an effective tool for their business.

How about your business? Has social media helped, or do you feel like you are spinning your wheels on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and the rest? Please let us know in the comments section below, or cast your votes on our Facebook page.

Email the Leading Driver of Visitors to Top Retail Sites

Administrator — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 18:05:00 GMT

While we continue to hear about social media’s increasing influence over Internet consumers’ purchasing decisions, one recent study reveals that email and search continue to be the most effective tools for driving traffic to the best known retail websites.

ForeSee Results’ annual holiday e-retail customer satisfaction index includes a variety of helpful data, not the least of which is that 19 percent of shoppers surveyed said they visited a top retailer’s online storefront after receiving a promotional email from the company. Eight percent said they were driven there by search engine results, and only five percent said their decision to visit one of the top 40 retail websites was primarily influenced by social media channels such as recommendations on Facebook or Twitter.

Numerous studies show the growing importance of such recommendations at the point of purchase, but for driving visitor traffic, email promotions continue to be the most effective. “Tried-and-true online marketing tactics should not be abandoned or ignored in favor of newer media,” says ForeSee’s VP of retail strategy, Kevin Ertell.

The ForeSee Results index examines only the top 40 Internet retailers, and perhaps the most important theme common to all of them is achieving a balance between every available marketing channel – old and new. “Social media is growing as a retail channel,” says Ertell. “It’s just not the key driver of sales by any means at this point.”

The highest customer satisfaction ratings went to Amazon and Netflix for the second straight year, while Sears and TigerDirect scored the lowest.

Nearly 10,000 survey responses were collected from November 29 through December 15 from shoppers who visited the top 40 retail websites within the prior 14 days, and questions focused on four specific categories: price, merchandise, website functionality and content. Ertell said that one of the primary takeaways of the study was that website functionality was more important to consumers than price in all but a few cases.

Facebook Flop? We Think Not…

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 16:03:00 GMT

According to the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) E-Business Report, consumers don’t like Facebook (you could have fooled us).

The premier social destination scored 64 on the ACSI’s 100-point scale putting its satisfaction even lower than IRS e-filers and in the bottom 5% of all measured private sector companies right alongside airlines and cable companies.

“Facebook is a phenomenal success, so we were not expecting to see it score so poorly with consumers,” said Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results. “At the same time, our research shows that privacy concerns, frequent changes to the website, and commercialization and advertising adversely affect the consumer experience. Compare that to Wikipedia, which is a non-profit that has had the same user interface for years, and it’s clear that while innovation is critical, sometimes consumers prefer evolution to revolution.”

The ACSI is an economic indicator based on modeling of customer evaluations (provided in part we assume by ForeSee Results) of the quality of goods and services purchased in the US and produced by both domestic and foreign firms with substantial U.S. market shares.

What do Website magazine readers think? Is Facebook satisfying or is the ACSI report a flop? Let us know by sharing your comments.

ForeSee Formula Converts Fans, Tweets into Dollars, Cents

Linc Wonham — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 03:30:00 GMT

It’s taken a little while, but it seems that most Web professionals have finally come to recognize the power and potential of Facebook and Twitter. The next and most important part of the social revolution now becomes determining exactly what all those fans and tweets actually do for a business’ bottom line.

ForeSee Results, a provider online customer satisfaction measurement and management, says its new Social Media Value Calculation tool can do just that. ForeSee’s formula is designed to help businesses understand how much revenue is being influenced by social media versus traditional advertising, marketing e-mails, brand awareness and other channels. The tool merges the two pieces of data — what drove a customer to a site, store or call center, and what they did or did not spend as a result — to actually determine a company’s social media ROI.

For a brand website, financial institution, nonprofit organization, B-to-B or other non-retailer for whom there is no purchase, ForeSee ties what drove the visit to another valuable, business-specific outcome such as opening a new account, signing up for a newsletter or requesting more information. By using the Social Media Value Calculation, businesses can better calculate which channels will yield the most customer traffic, loyalty, purchases — and revenue.