Why search and Findability is critical for the customer experience and NPS on websites

To achieve a high NPS, Net Promoter Score, the customer experience (cx) is crucial and a critical factor behind a positive customer experience is the ease of doing business. For companies who interact with their customers through the web (which ought to be almost every company these days) this of course implies a need to have good Findability and search on the website in order for visitors to be able to find what they are looking for without effort.

The concept of NPS was created by Fred Reichheld and his colleagues of Bain and Co who had an increasing recognition that measuring customer satisfaction on its own wasn’t enough to make conclusions of customer loyalty. After some research together with Satmetrix they came up with a single question that they deemed to be the only relevant one for predicting business success “How likely are you to recommend company X to a friend or colleague.” Depending upon the answer to that single question, using a scale of 0 to 10, the respondent would be considered one of the following:

net-promoter

The Net Promoter Score model

The idea is that Promoters—the loyal, enthusiastic customers who love doing business with you—are worth far more to your company than passive customers or detractors. To obtain the actual NPS score the percentage of Detractors is deducted from the percentage of Promoters.

How the customer experience drives NPS

Several studies indicate four main drivers behind NPS:

  • Brand relationship
  • Experience of / satisfaction with product offerings (features; relevance; pricing)
  • Ease of doing business (simplicity; efficiency; reliability)
  • Touch point experience (the degree of warmth and understanding conveyed by front-line employees)

According to ‘voice of the customer’ research conducted by British customer experience consultancy Cape Consulting the ease of doing business and the touch point experience accounts for 60 % of the Net Promoter Score, with some variations between different industry sectors. Both factors are directly correlated to how easy it is for customers to find what they are looking for on the web and how easily front-line employees can find the right information to help and guide the customer.

Successful companies devote much attention to user experience on their website but when trying to figure out how most visitors will behave website owners tend to overlook the search function. Hence visitors who are unfamiliar with the design struggle to find the product or information they are looking for causing unnecessary frustration and quite possibly the customer/potential customer runs out of patience with the company.

Ideally, Findability on a company website or ecommerce site is a state where desired content is displayed immediately without any effort at all. Product recommendations based on the behavior of previous visitors is an example but it has limitations and requires a large set of data to be accurate. When a visitor has a very specific query, a long tail search, the accuracy becomes even more important because there will be no such thing as a close enough answer. Imagine a visitor to a logistics company website looking for information about delivery times from one city to another, an ecommerce site where the visitor has found the right product but wants to know the company’s return policy before making a purchase or a visitor to a hospital’s website looking for contact details to a specific department. Examples like these are situations where there is only one correct answer and failure to deliver that answer in a simple and reliable manner will negatively impact the customer experience and probably create a frustrated visitor who might leave the site and look at the competition instead.

Investing in search have positive impacts on NPS and the bottom line 

Google has taught people how to search and what to expect from a search function. Step one is to create a user friendly search function on your website but then you must actively maintain the master data, business rules, relevance models and the zero-results hits to make sure the customer experience is aligned. Also, take a look at the keywords and phrases your visitors use when searching. This is useful business intelligence about your customers and it can also indicate what type of information you should highlight on your website. Achieving good Findability on your website requires more than just the right technology and modern website design. It is an ongoing process that successfully managed can have a huge impact on the customer experience and your NPS which means your investment in search will generate positive results on your bottom line.

More posts on this topic will follow.

/Olof Belfrage

Findability on an E-commerce Site

Findability on any e-commerce site is a beast all on its own. What if visitors’ searches return no results? Will they continue to search or did you lose your chance at a sale?

While product findability is a key factor of success in e-commerce, it is predominantly enabled by simple search alone. And while simple search usually doesn’t fulfill complex needs among users, website developers and owners still regard advanced search as just another boring to-do item during development. Owners won’t go so far as to leave it out, because every e-commerce website has some kind of advanced search functionality, but they probably do not believe it brings in much revenue.

Research shows:

  • 50% of online buyers go straight to the search function
  • 34% of visitors leave the site if they can’t find an (available) product
  • Buyers are more likely than Browsers to use search (91%)

What can’t be found, can’t be bought:

  • Search is often mission critical in e-commerce
  • Users don’t know how to spell
  • Users often don’t even know how to describe it

First of all, Findability can accelerate the sales process. And faster sales can increase conversions, because you will not be losing customers who give up trying to find products. Furthermore, fast, precise and successful searches increase your customers’ trust.

On both e-commerce and shopping comparison sites, users can find products in two different ways: searching and browsing. Searching obviously means using the site search whilst browsing involves drilling down through the categories provided by the website. The most common location for a site search on e-commerce sites is at the top of the page, and generally on the right side. Many e-commerce sites have a site search, user login, and shopping cart info all located in the same general area. Keeping the site search in a location that is pretty common will help it to be easier to find for some of your visitors who are accustomed to this trend.

Faceted search should be the de facto standard for an e-commerce website. When a user performs a simple search first, but then on the results page, he or she can narrow the search through a drill-down link (for a single choice) or a check box selection (for multiple non-overlapping choices). The structure of the search results page must also be crystal clear. The results must be ranked in a logical order (i.e. for the user, not for you) by relevance. Users should be able to scan and comprehend the results easily. Queries should be easy to refine and resubmit, and the search results page should show the query itself.

Spell-check is also crucial. Many products have names that are hard to remember or type correctly. Users might think to correct their misspelling when they find poor results, but they will be annoyed at having to do that… or worse, they might think that the website either doesn’t work properly or does not have their product.

Query completion can decrease the problems caused by mistyping or not knowing the proper terminology. Queries usually start with words; so unambiguous character inputting is crucial.

Search analytics, contextual advertisement and behavioral targeting is more than just finding a page or a product. When people search they tell you something about their interests, time, location and what is in demand right now, they say something about search quality by the way they navigate and click in result pages and finally what they do after they found what they were looking for.

A good e-commerce solution uses search technology to:

  • Dynamically tailor a site to suit the visitors’ interests
  • Help the user to find and explore
  • Relate information and promote up- and cross sales
  • Improve visitor satisfaction
  • Increase stickiness
  • Increase sales of related products or accessories
  • Inspire visitors to explore new products/areas
  • Provide-increased understanding of visitor needs/preferences

–> Convert visitors into returning customers!

Why Web Search is Like a Store Clerk

When someone is using the search function on your web site, your web search, it tells you two things. First of all they have a specific need, expressed by their search query. Second, and more importantly he or she wants you to fulfill that need. If users didn’t care where the service was delivered from, they would have gone straight to Google. Hence, the use of your search function signals trust in your capabilities. This means that even if the majority of your website visitors doesn’t use the search function, you know that the ones who do have a commitment to you. Imagine you are working in a store as a clerk; the customer coming up to you and asking you something is probably more interested in doing business with you than the ones just browsing the goods.

This trust however, can easily be turned to frustration and bad will if the web search result is poor and users don’t find what they are looking for. Continuing our analogy with the store, this is much like the experience of looking for a product, wandering around for a few minutes, finally deciding to ask a clerk and getting the answer “If it’s not on the shelf we don’t have it”. I certainly would leave the store and the same applies for a web site. If users fail when browsing and searching, then they will probably leave your site. The consequence is that you might antagonize loyal customers or loose an easy sale. So how do you recognize a bad search function? A good way to start is to look at common search queries and try searching for them yourself. Then start asking a few basic questions such as:

  • Does the sorting of the search results make sense?
  • Is it possible to decide which result is interesting based on the information in the result presentation?
  • Is there any possibility to continue navigating the results if the top hits are not what you are looking for?

Answering these questions yourself will tell you a lot about how your web search is performing. The first step to a good user experience is to know where your challenges are, then you can start making changes to improve the issues you have found in order to make your customers happier. After all, who wants to be the snarky store clerk?