Complete Web Monitoring

Advantages, Concerns, and Caveats

VOC is an essential tool for understanding your visitors’ mindsets and their reactions to the changes you make. However, it’s not a substitute for other forms of tracking and analysis, and it requires rigorous statistical analysis of data distributions to avoid misinterpretation. Results may be biased toward a subset of your visitors rather than reflecting the opinions of all your users.

Learning What to Try Next

If you can harness VOC, you have a real advantage: you learn what to try next. Discover a possible improvement, and you know what to measure with analytics, EUEM, and WIA. If you can adopt a mindset of quick iteration that collects and analyzes the voice of your customers, you’ll be much more likely to succeed online.

Becoming Less About Understanding, More About Evaluating Effectiveness

VOC is a poor substitute for actually interacting with your customers. As the Web shifts from a one-to-many monologue to a many-to-many conversation, there are less intrusive, less misleading ways to determine what your target audience is after. We’ll look at this in Chapters 11 through 14 of this book, when we turn our attention toward online communities.

VOC won’t be marginalized, however. It will be disseminated differently—through Twitter threads and Facebook groups. There will be a human element to it, as we invite social contacts to give us more detailed information resulting from a survey. Community managers will have several predefined surveys running ...