Ifbyphone Blog

Only a handful of e-marketers include customer satisfaction in their Web marketing metrics, according to Antone Gonsalves at Intelligent Enterprise. This data, from a recent eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit survey, shows just how far Web marketing can detour around the reality-based world.

It doesn’t take a rocket to understand that customer satisfaction drives that all-important metric, conversion rate – or that without it, conversion rates nose-dive.

While online surveys are useful for gauging customer satisfaction, they force answers into predetermined boxes – they’re black and white. Adding voice to the online marketing mix adds the Technicolor of inflection, phrasing and context to build a full color picture of customer satisfaction.

For example, “I’m working on my car and I need to remove a bolt from the carburetor. I had to look all over for the right wrench and then when I finally found the automotive wrenches, there was hardly any information,” supplies insight about how customers expect to navigate your store or site — and why they might abandon before buying. Plus, it delivers context information for keyword optimization and ad buys.

The familiar click-to-call supplies the mechanism for smoothly incorporating voice into the online mix. Here’s how:

Ask customers to participate in a brief survey by simply clicking on a phone icon on the page or in an email. This connects them directly to a voice-directed survey that includes multiple choice as well as open-ended questions. While you have them on the phone, you can even immediately route unhappy customers to a service representative, pre-briefed from the survey results.

You can also reuse the results to add customer comments to your website for a more compelling testimonial. Let’s face it, hearing and talking is our natural communication medium, not reading and writing.