How to Get Inside the Customer's Mind

Like a storefront in the Mall of America, our Web sites exist in cyberspace hoping for traffic, hoping for sales, or at least for leads.

How can we attract our target market to the site? How can we entice them to buy or at least to part with their contact information? What are they thinking? How can we get into the mind of our would-be customers?

Well, we can't. We can only use our own senses to observe, to listen and to infer. On the Web the effort is well worth the time, because customers notice and appreciate an honest attempt to understand and serve them. Here are some of the techniques to use and some of caveats regarding their implementation.

Empathy 101

"Do unto others . . . " This technique is so simple and so frequently overlooked. Put yourself into your customer's shoes. This is an especially helpful technique when trying to come up with a set of search engine keywords to optimize your site for.

Pretend you are a prospective customer who has never heard of you. Log into Google or Yahoo and begin searching for your products and services. Take note of what you are finding. Look at the Web sites that you find. What is helpful? What is confusing? What is totally repellent?

Try to put yourself in different modes. Pretend that you are just researching products and services. Where do you look first? How do you search? What are the authority sites? And note what you find and your impression of the resources available.

Next pretend that you are in buying mode. How easy is it to find your and your competitors' sites? How easy is it to find how to purchase a product or obtain a quote from the sites.

Now try being a secret customer. What happens when you contact customer service? Do you feel valued? Are you left hanging on a phone line with a recording telling you how important your call is every 2.5 minutes?

While empathy can get us past the most egregious faux pas, it does not totally get us inside the customer's head. Why? Well, because not all of our customers are like us. We each have our own ways of thinking about things and reacting with Web information. For example, if I were searching for a company to do search engine optimization, I would use the term "search engine optimization." However, more people search on the term "search engine ranking." So, if I based my keyword optimization solely on empathy, I'd be missing my market, because my prospects simply don't think the way I do.

So, we need some additional techniques.

Just ask them.

So, here's an idea -- ask them! This sounds simple enough, but professionals in a customer survey creation will tell you that you have to be very careful what and how you ask in order to get helpful results.

I recall several years ago, a company I worked for wanted to learn about employee attitudes toward the company and their jobs. It was a time of very slow business. People had been laid off and those that were left barely had enough work to occupy themselves. One of the survey questions was, "Do you feel you are being adequately paid for the work you are doing?" Since we did not have that much to do at the time, most employees answered, "Yes;" we felt lucky to have jobs and did not feel as though we were working very hard. Human services concluded that employees were happy with their salary levels.

Woops! That's not what they asked. They asked if we thought the salary was commensurate with the work we were doing. Big difference! We wanted more work; we wanted bigger salaries.

Even if you ask the right questions, you can't count on receiving correct answers. Not that customers are lying to you, well, that, too. Even in an anonymous survey, people are likely to want to put their best foot forward and report how they believe you want them to respond rather than how they actually would act in a situation.

In Web site usability tests, researchers have found that users often think that they will do things differently than they actually do them. When asked to explain how one will do a task in a survey or focus group the answer may well be different than what the subject actually does in the context of the activity. The decision made in theory differs from the decision made in action.

Observe them - Tracking Techniques and Services

Web logs and tracking tools are increasingly in use to track behavior through the Web site. This give us a means of observing the behavior of the customer interacting with the Web site. We can tell how often people abandon shopping carts, whether people tend to buy on the first visit or only after three or four, whether people who come to the site from Yahoo are more likely to buy than people who come from Google.

What logs information and tracking tools are not able to tell us was why a visitor behaved as one did. Why did more people come to the site from our ad with the green background than from the ad with the blue?

Using tracking tools to determine what is successful with the customer is a trial and error proposition. We can theorize as to why a behavior is taking place and experiment with another behavior, but we still are not inside the customer's mind.

Observe them - Usability Testing

The most effective - and most expensive - way of getting inside the customer's mind is through usability testing. This is the Web version of customer observation where a guy with a notepad follows the customer around the store making notes of what he/she does and where they look or a camera observes eye movement to determine what element of a package design catches the eye.

Usability testing may be done in a lab, though many researchers argue that it can only best be done on site, in the user's own milieu. In this kind of testing subjects are given assignments such as to buy a pair of jeans or find the answers to a list of questions. Step by step the subject reports each action taken and the reason for each action. This documents each individual's approach, what was helpful, what was frustrating and any reactions researchers have thought to ask about.