THE CUSTOMER IS KING. It’s a Universal Law, right? Like Newton’s are to physics, this one is to business. That’s why I’m a really big fan of our latest investment, a company in Ann Arbor, MI called ForeSee Results. Lots of companies devote heaps of money to trying to understand how customers interact with—and ultimately perceive—the business. In an offline world, where service providers, customer service reps, cashiers, and a host of other folks observe and talk to the customer 1,000 times a day, every day, it’s hard enough to get good, measurable, useable information. But in an online world, the waters get really muddy. Plenty of tools exist for watching what the customer does when he or she visits your web site. Such “behavioral web analytics” tools have been around almost as long as the web itself, and they are great for determining which pages a customer viewed, how long he lingered on a particular page, or which page he was on when he decided to leave the site altogether. Throw in some number crunching capabilities, and these tools can give you a great view of the macro trends and behaviors taking place in your slice of the online world. Imagine being the manager of a real world store and watching everything that happens there through a one way mirror. With a clip board and a calculator and a stopwatch, you make some nice flow charts and spreadsheets and ultimately your observations will generate good predictions of what will (or won’t!) happen in your store going forward. You might even be able to postulate how a few changes could make a positive impact on sales or at least the time customers spend in your shop. Now, if you were this manager, what would you do next? Would you really jump right from the spreadsheets and flow charts to rearranging the store, or changing the mix of products on your shelves, just because you found out that people tend to spend more time in Aisle 3 than in Aisle 7? I bet not. In fact, I bet that once you had all that data, you’d head down to Aisle 7, march up to that customer, and say, “Hello, Mrs. Customer, do you really like Aisle 7 more than Aisle 4? Is Aisle 4 easy to find? Not lit well enough? Are you afraid of even numbers?” My point is, knowing WHAT is happening in your store is nice, but it’s pretty hard to effect positive change without knowing WHY those things are happening. ForeSee Results provides online customer satisfaction measurement to web site purveyors around the world. In a nutshell, they tell you how much customers like your site, and the reasons behind their opinions—the WHY that you don’t get from the web analytics WHAT vendors. However, ForeSee takes the WHY two steps further—far beyond what other survey-based systems can do—because it’s powered by the same technology that underpins the American Customer Satisfaction Index, the go-to source for info on customer satisfaction around the world. For step 1, ForeSee can tell you how important various pieces of the satisfaction puzzle really are to your customers, allowing you to determine what kind of impacts you will get from potential updates/changes/improvements. POWERFUL STUFF—going back to our offline example, that store manager probably would love to know if spending $1000 to repaint the store would have a bigger impact on customer satisfaction than installing $100,000 worth of self-checkout kiosks! And for Step 2, ForeSee gives you a wide range of benchmarking information, so you can compare your customer sat scores to the rest of your industry…always nice to know if you are keeping up with (or blowing away!) the Joneses… Like I said, I really like this investment. It’s about gathering data, crunching the data, and pushing useful info out the other end, along with actionable, value-added recommendations…a model and value prop that I could get behind in several industries and verticals. ForeSee does that very nicely, delivered via a SaaS model that is chugging along like a locomotive, and with spectacular customer satisfaction of their own. With this great product, proven management team (several consecutive years of high growth), and profitability, what’s not to like? |
