Originally I had thought about the title, ‘Why Customer Service teams NEED Web Analytics and Why Web Analytics teams NEED the Customer Service team’. But that is really long. So I decided to go with my peanut butter cup analogy.
One word (well, two:) Cross-Validation
The Analytics team knows very well what is (and is not) happening on your site. They can make hypotheses, set up A/B tests, and prove or disprove them.
BUT – the Customer Service team knows what is REALLY happening (or not) on the site (and often even why) because they SPEAK with the human beings (not ‘sessions’ or ‘visitors’) who are trying, and likely struggling, to make a purchase on your site.
Sure, it is very easy to see droves of abandoned cart sessions and make assumptions why this happened. But, you know what is even better? To talk with the person who is abandoning the shopping cart. This brave person is trying to soldier-on, not just quit, really trying to make the purchase. This person is so invested, they take the time to call (or chat), to reach out for human help.
More than one-off navigation problems or questions, what bubbles up is real insight that cannot (easily) be gleaned from web analytics alone. For example, there are fundamental differences in web and human being behavior:
- What people search for vs. what they ask for
- What people enter vs. what they describe to you
- What somebody wants to accomplish vs. what your call-to-actions or navigation is forcing them to do
And who knows this better than the Customer Service team. The problem is, without the cross-pollination of information, the analysts may make assumption based on their data (large volumes) and the agents see smaller (but maybe more accurate or important) user experience trends.
So, if these two teams….talked and shared information, there could be significant improvements and fixes to the user experience.
