top task analysis <\/a>help to separate the many trivial tasks from the critical few that matter to your customers.\nThink about all the things Microsoft Word can do: mail-merging, macros, desktop publishing,\u2026 Yet, most users only want to accomplish a few core tasks like writing and formatting documents. The same observation applies to health-insurance websites–they are full of places to click, information to read and features to use. Yet, when we conducted a top-task analysis with customers, we found that only two actions, finding a doctor and seeing if insurance would pay for a specific procedure, were top-tasks. Unfortunately, many insurance provider websites don’t make accomplishing these tasks easy. This affects both customer satisfaction and loyalty.<\/li>\n
Customer Loyalty<\/b>: Customers who come back, repurchase or recommend a product to friends or colleagues are key drivers of a product’s long term viability. The popular Net Promoter Score<\/a> is one way to measure customers’ likelihood to say positive or negative things about their experience with products or services. The likelihood to recommend is often a good indicator of the likelihood to repurchase as well. You should track both the intentions of customers (are you likely to repurchase or recommend?) and the actions (did customers actually repurchase or recommend?) to understand measure loyalty.<\/li>\nConversion Rate<\/b>: For online campaigns, direct marketing, donations, or just sales copy, it is useful to determine the percentage of customers who are exposed and who ultimately purchase a product (or sign-up for a service). It enables you to understand how small changes in design, pricing, features or content can increase or decrease the percentage of prospective customers that are gained or kept. When I helped the Wikipedia team understand the differences in donation rates they saw on their website, we looked at the different images, copy, and the time of day that led to higher rates of browsers becoming donating customers.<\/li>\nCompletion Rate<\/b>: Customers want to get things done. If they can’t complete tasks, especially their top tasks, with a product or website, not much else matters. I often call completion rates the gateway customer experience metric for that reason. Completion rates<\/a> are applicable to activities like finding products, information on websites, solving tasks in architecture software, entering a journal entry in accounting software or getting a problem solved by a customer service representative. Poor task completion rates lead to lower satisfaction levels and a drop in the likelihood to recommend.<\/li>\nChurn Rate<\/b>: It’s not just about getting customers; it’s also about keeping them too. If customers never repurchase a product or service, or abandon as soon as they can, that has a long term negative effect on profitability. This so-called churn rate is especially true since the cost of acquiring customers is generally higher than the cost of keeping them. Valuable pieces of information include the percentage of customers that abandon at time intervals (e.g. after 1 or 2 years) or stages (e.g. renewal time, product upgrades) and the reason for abandonment. For example, while offering products like a cable subscription at a low price for a few months to lure customers may generate more total customers, if too many abandon when the prices increase, it may outweigh the new customer incentives and drive potential customers away.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n