The UX Toolbox - Benchmarking

How benchmarking can help you meet user expectations

People have come to expect great user experiences online – and you can be sure that if your website isn’t meeting their expectations, they will go somewhere else. How can you be sure that your site is providing a top-notch experience across the full user journey?

Our approach to measurement and benchmarking lets you take the customer pulse, assessing the user experience on your site over time and across your specific industry sector.

Benchmarking provides a clear picture of all of your customers’ touchpoints and interactions, so you can see how your site is performing at different stages in the customer journey. We help you identify pain points and areas for improvement and collect data that let you put your site’s performance in context.

We work with you to understand your organisation’s structure and business goals, establishing key performance indicators (KPIs) for your website that can be measured and monitored. We help you develop a strategy for collecting data to track your progress with regards to those KPIs, and present you with regular reports and dashboards summarising your online performance. The insights we provide allow you to make decisions from a truly customer-centred perspective.

How will we help you?

We offer three primary benchmarking services:

• website tracking
• true intent studies
• industry benchmarking

Website tracking

We use website tracking to track your site’s performance over time, to make sure that you are continuing to satisfy your customers’ expectations.

To benchmark your site over time, we collect selected metrics on how your customers perceive your website and brand. These metrics may include satisfaction ratings, including the Net Promoter Score, as well as success rates.

By tracking these measures over time, we can see how changes to both your site and to the competitive landscape impact the user experience. We can offer detailed recommendations to help you provide the best possible experience for your customers.

True Intent studies

One of the primary tools we use to collect these metrics is a True Intent study. True Intent studies are surveys that bridge the gap between analytics and user testing, by capturing both user feedback and user behaviour. Analytics can give you plenty of information about what your customers are doing on your site, but they cannot tell you why they do what they do – and that’s where True Intent studies come in. True Intent studies give you direct access to your users, letting you find out

1. who your users are,
2. why they come to your site,
3. whether they are able to get what they came for,
4. what they think about their experience.

Study participants are recruited via unobtrusive website intercepts. The feedback you get comes not from a panel of professional participants, but from actual users of your website.

Unlike other surveys, our True Intent studies aren’t designed by marketers. As with everything else we do, we design these surveys with usability in mind, keeping them short and easy to complete. The goal is to collect actionable insights from a representative sample of your users without harming the user experience on your site.

Industry benchmarking

Industry benchmarking allows us to compare your site’s performance to your peers’, to make sure that you are keeping up with – and exceeding – the best user experiences in your sector.

To benchmark against competitors, we perform similar tasks on different sites in your sector, tailored towards the needs and expectations of your users. Whether it is finding information, registering for an account, getting offline support, making a purchase, or accessing other services, we develop a consistent approach that allows us to score and compare the experience offered by you and by your competitors.

By applying a structured and systematic method of comparison, the relative pros and cons become apparent. We feed back recommendations and insights to show where you can learn lessons from the best practices of your peers, as well as where you are already providing a great customer experience.

All three approaches to benchmarking allow us to construct a customer experience dashboard, which visually summarises the KPIs and highlights of our research.

What next?

To learn more about how User Vision’s benchmarking services can help you, contact us to discuss your specific requirements.