Case Study: Deluxe Cashes in With Voice-of-Customer Analytics Tool

PROBLEM: Deluxe Corp., a cross-channel provider of office products and marketing services for small businesses, sought to provide its e-commerce site visitors a more user-friendly experience, ultimately helping to grow sales from the channel.

SOLUTION: Implemented a voice-of-customer analytics tool to get direct feedback from its site visitors.

RESULTS: Since going live with a voice-of-the-customer analytics tool in May 2010, Deluxe’s task completion rate on its checkout page has increased 11 percent.

Deluxe Corp. implemented a new e-commerce platform a few years ago that identified what visitors were doing on its website (e.g., what they were clicking on), but it lacked a systemic method of tracking user data around why visitors were behaving the way they were.

To remedy this problem, Deluxe went in search of a tool that could help it better measure customer satisfaction by obtaining voice-of-the-customer feedback. After testing a host of solutions, it settled on iPerceptions’ 4Q Suite.

“The reason for acquiring the 4Q tool was first and foremost to establish a benchmark of customer satisfaction on our website,” notes Kristi Olson, senior user experience analyst at Deluxe. “Once that benchmark was established, then have a business conversation around what we understand about those benchmarks and what kinds of improvements we think we can make. That conversation is fed by data from various sources like 4Q and web analytics. Then we determine what we want to do to move the needle on that benchmark.”

This customer feedback tool manifests itself in the form of an overlay survey request that Deluxe’s website visitors are presented with on certain web pages (e.g., homepage, product page or checkout page). The pages are chosen by Deluxe. Users give a yes or no answer to whether they want to take the survey. If they respond “no,” the survey window closes and they never see it again. If they click “yes,” the tool is coded so the survey becomes a pop-under — i.e., an underlay to the current window — so it’s hidden until the user exits the website. At that point the survey appears.

Feedback Yields Checkout Solution
Standard questions such as purpose of visit along with open-ended questions have yielded valuable insight into the mind-set of Deluxe’s website visitors. The retailer has taken this information and acted upon it.

A recent example of this comes from Deluxe’s checkout page. Upon learning there was a step on the checkout page preventing users from completing tasks, Deluxe’s IT team implemented a solution. The result has been an 11 percent increase in task completion — the metric Deluxe tracks to measure the effectiveness of its website — on the checkout page. Deluxe is also receiving less negative comments via the 4Q tool since the checkout issue has been resolved.

The 4Q tool provides Deluxe with data in real time via a dashboard, although the retailer conducts reporting on a monthly basis.

“I look at the trends and patterns that visitors are saying about our website,” says Olson. “It’s then a matter of taking that knowledge and doing a business impact analysis to determine if we were to increase task completion of a given business process by 3 percent, what kind of incremental revenue might we be looking at.”

Deluxe is using voice-of-customer analysis to explain the why behind observed behavior, prioritizing and aligning its initiatives based on its visitors’ expressed needs. Now that the checkout page has been addressed, identifying improvements around the shopping and browsing experience is next on Deluxe’s list of projects.