How Well Do You Really Know Your E-Customer?

Profiling, personalization, log-file and traffic-analysis technologies have advanced considerably over the past year and now offer a good, simple picture of what is actually happening on your site.

But the only way to really find out what customers want-and how your site fits into their total online experience-is to go beyond the bits and bytes of e-commerce and listen to the actual voice of customers and channel partners. Regardless of how advanced e-business tools become, there will never be a substitute for traditional customer profiling, segmentation and research.

All too often, large enterprises with considerable e-commerce infrastructure investment are more likely to put resources into Web applications with a quantifiable return on investment than into research designed to improve high-

But what matters most over time-and what some of the best e-commerce minds sometimes forget-is understanding actual users, not just their virtual activity. The best way to understand how your site fits into your customers', partners' and competitors' total online experience is to augment the latest e-business apps with a structured dialogue with users-ideally face-to-face.

After identifying the type of customers and users you want to speak with, it's necessary to develop a list of questions which will best approach-and quantify-the issues you want to examine. For manufacturers-who may or may not sell directly as well as through channels-this process is even more critical. Understanding where customers go to find out about a product, what they expect from manufacturers vs. channel sites, how they price-shop and who they rely on for production information is just the beginning. Without a careful analysis of this basic information, you're in more danger than ever of losing customers.

By speaking with a relatively small number of users-between 35 and 50-you'll be able to develop a focused understanding of how your online services match customer expectations. But you must focus on the right set of issues and questions to get the qualitative and quantitative information you're ultimately after.

After the discussion process, you should, at minimum, have a better understanding of the following questions: Who visits your site (and what segment do you profit most from)? How often do they return (and what do they do in the interim)? Where else do they go to shop, buy and conduct product/service research? What type of incentives do they respond to (and what type of offers would they respond to if you offered them)? How price sensitive are they? Do they expect one-stop shopping (or at least the perception of it)? What type of information do they value most?

While there are a number of tools and applications on the market that are beginning to enable collaborative e-business strategies-from interenterprise distributed content management applications to tools that enable joint selection of rules and permissions for selling-an exacting understanding of the customer is the most important issue for IT groups responsible for implementing tools for collaborative strategies.

Before getting into creative ways to improve cross-selling and upselling, it's necessary to align internal processes and performance with customer expectations-a task that comes from listening to the customer's actual voice, not merely their information exhaust.

Businesses that can segment customers based on a complete set of metrics-derived from both e-business tools and non-virtual segmentation and analysis-increase their chance for success in each market they serve.

It comes down to thinking far beyond your next cross-sell, incentive e-mail or product suggestion. To take full advantage of your online presence, you must align your entire set of programs, products and interfaces to match customer values-a task you'll never be able to complete without a human touch.