Many conversations we have had over the past year have revealed to us that there is a certain amount of confusion among website owners regarding the feedback tools available to them on the web. Many of them feel confused, or are not aware of the differences between the various services such as “Voice of Customer”, “Surveys”, “Feedback Analytics” etc. That’s why we thought they could benefit from a post explaining the available methodologies to collect the website users’ subjective data and the differences between them.

More and more website owners today understand the importance of knowing “Why”: “Why did the user behave as he did on my website?”

Measuring a website with analytics tools (objective data) just isn’t enough, because it leaves the website owner with too much guess work to do. There are too many possible reasons for each of the user’s actions, and there is a great need for tools that can help you make the best choices. For instance, why did a user abandon the shopping cart? Was it the price? Shipping issues? Or was it bugs; missing information; usability issues…the list goes on.

The big question is: what are the available methodologies to collect the subjective user-data and which one better fits your site’s needs?

Here at Kampyle, we usually see these as divided into 3 categories: Feedback, Surveys and Polls, and Idea Management. Here is a quick description of each one:

1. Feedback Analytics – (Kampyle Feedback Analytics) Provides website owners with the ability to create feedback forms that can be customized to fit the website and placed on all pages, so that website users can submit feedback in case they run into a problem, do not find something, have an idea, etc. A feedback button is visible all the time on each of the sites pages. Feedback analytics will provide you with page level and website level high quality (i.e. specific comments) and actionable data, allowing you to read and manage feedback and also get back to the users. The feedback will be accessible to you (the website owner) only, therefore protecting your brand, and making Feedback Analytics suitable for all lines of businesses. Feedback analytics also gives you the ability to prioritize feedback collection: you can choose to actively ask your users to submit feedback in the pages in which you feel that you need it the most, using a pop up mechanism (you might want to use this option in your site’s shopping carts for instance). The ability to choose the location as well as the frequency of this pop-up makes this a very non-intrusive approach. The data can also be integrated with Web Analytics, allowing you to understand both the ‘What’ and the ‘Why’. This flexibility makes it suitable for all lines of business.

2. Surveys and Polls – (Most popular tools: SurveyMonkey, 4Q, OpinionLab) by using these methods you will get high level understanding of what’s going on your website. You can ask your users to answer 5/10/25 questions that you’ve composed in advance and get a statistical review of their answers. You can use this option to ask ‘site level’ questions such as: “Where did you hear about our site”, “What are you looking for”, “How old are you”, etc. The answers to those questions can help you to know your users better, but will not necessarily help you to find problems in your shopping cart, missing information and products etc. The fact that the data is ultimately statististical might cause the solution to be relevant mainly to large websites with a lot of traffic. This means that not all lines of businesses can benefit equally from it. Some issues need to be addressed, such as how to initiate the survey without annoying your users.

3. Idea Management – (Most popular tools: GetSatisfaction, UserVoice, SuggestionBox) Have users suggest ideas, report problems, vote for other users’ ideas and have them made publicly available to all. This solution resembles live forum with an open discussion about your products. It can be very helpful to reduce support efforts, since in some cases people will see that their comment, problem or solution has been reported previously. It may also be useful for businesses looking to use their users to publicly vote for their next development steps. This solution can, however, damage your brand, in cases where lots of users report complaints, and others see them. This makes this solution less suitable for certain businesses for which this would be a sensitive issue.

For the benefit of our busiest readers, here is all that information in one “Executive Summary” table:

For those of you who wish to go into further details, we’ve prepared the following table which contains an in-depth comparison of the various subjective data collection services available. The table is divided into categories representing characteristics of the services (General, Submission, Results), and sub categories representing specific features:

We hope that this explanation will have clarified several issues for website owners searching for subjective data collection solutions.

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