Many financial institutions spend considerable time, resources and money on usability testing for their Web site…and with good reason. Usability testing is a critical qualitative step for identifying how to make banking Web sites more user-friendly and effective. But usability testing by itself doesn’t deliver maximum value. Why? Because its strength is its weakness: the narrow, lab environment that enables web managers to solve usability problems doesn’t adequately represent the diverse population of customers that use the site.
In order for a Web site to be customer-friendly (the goal of every banking site), usability testing should be guided by what key users value most and what will have the greatest impact on their future behaviors. Usability testing is most effective when its design is shaped by “voice of customer” input that’s quantitative as well as qualitative.
Measuring customer satisfaction with your Web site through online surveys can be a convenient and relatively inexpensive way to capture customer (and potential customer) feedback. One of the most reliable, accurate and credible ways to obtain online voice-of-customer input is with the methodology of the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), which is used by hundreds of private sector sites and more than 90 government Web sites to measure customer satisfaction. It is the only methodology that is linked to future financial performance and can actually predict and show you how to affect future behaviors.
Usability testing is a great tool but it can be time-consuming and expensive. By using scientific customer satisfaction metrics to inform usability testing, you can identify where to focus improvements that will have the greatest positive impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Following are four strategic steps to employing customer satisfaction analytics to direct usability testing:
STRATEGIC STEP #1:
CAPTURE REPRESENTATIVE FEEDBACK
You can’t possibly fit hundreds or thousands of people into your usability lab. If you begin the process with customer satisfaction analytics, you don’t need to. Although usability labs are limited in terms of the number of people you measure, it’s important to make sure they’re representative of the key target audiences for your Web site. To recruit the right participants, you’ll need to know who is coming to your site and why. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell. You may be attracting a large audience of loyal “regulars” who use bill-pay services, or a significant number of people who just check account balances. Your customers may tend to be web-savvy, or not. You’re definitely serving different types of customers, as defined by age, account status, assets, reason for coming to the site or other criteria.
Unless you have the right customers in your usability lab, the results won’t be accurate or useful. Ensure valuable, constructive results and the right usability testing group by first determining who is coming to your site, then selecting a usability test group that mirrors your actual site visitors.
STRATEGIC STEP #2:
PRIORITIZE AND FINE-TUNE IMPROVEMENTS
You probably know your Web site could be better. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be thinking about usability. But where do you begin?
It’s hard to know unless you have a way to prioritize based on what’s most important to your customers. That’s where a cause-and-effect metric, such as the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) methodology, comes into play. It prioritizes potential areas of Web site improvement based on their impact on satisfaction which, in turn, influences desired future behaviors.
Beginning with this information, you can better focus usability testing to delve into specific changes that should be made in high-priority areas. Then, once usability testing has identified some key problem areas, you can determine which are the biggest priority and which will most influence your customers and visitors in the ways that are important to you.
For example, you might want to do navigation testing to pinpoint where users are having problems with your Web site. You might learn from a customer satisfaction survey that customers are having no problems navigating but instead find it difficult to transfer funds between accounts using the online system.
STRATEGIC STEP #3:
MEASURE CONTINUOUSLY
Usability testing provides a snapshot; a portrait in time of a select group of visitors to your Web site. Measuring visitors on your own site all the time, on the other hand, enables you to take your customers’ pulse in any given week or month. This enables you to quickly pinpoint external or internal factors that may affect satisfaction or loyalty without additional usability sessions. A few of these factors, which vary by financial institution, include promotions and offers as well as the time of year. (For example, you may get different visitors during tax season or after a new television campaign).
STRATEGIC STEP #4:
GATHER BASELINE CUSTOMER FEEDBACK
The ultimate goal of usability testing is to determine how to enhance a Web site so that it better serves customers, which will in turn impact their loyalty and likelihood to give you additional business. To know that you’ve reached that goal with the changes you make as a result of usability testing, it’s critical to first have a baseline measure of customer satisfaction in order to provide a reliable comparison for post-design measurement.
The only way to know that you’ve met your goal of effective site enhancements in the eyes of site customers is to ask them. And, the best way to get voice-of-customer feedback following a Web site redesign (whether major or minor) is to survey customers post-launch and compare those results to pre-launch measurements. Customer satisfaction measurement that asks how well the site is meeting the needs and expectations of the site customers is a good basis of comparison. It also provides some common customer experience metrics that can be used to track trends in future behaviors and to ensure that you are meeting your business objectives.
Larry Freed is CEO of ForeSee Results.
