Emetrics: The Big Picture - report from Days 2 & 3

It was a busy couple of days on Days 2 and 3 of the Emetrics Summit here in Washington. I was moderating a track on the “Voice of the Customer” which was great but it also meant I didn’t get the chance to get round some of the other presentations that looked really interesting.

The keynote on Tuesday was by Duane Schulz, VP of Internet Marketing for Xerox. A couple of things that struck me about what he said was on the training they put their analysts through in the presentation of data. This struck a chord with me as I spent my early days at ACNielsen going through a rigorous training programme on how to present marketing data and some of the principles have stuck with me for ever. With all the dashboarding technology available today there is a capacity to be overexcited about the technological capabilities and lose sight of the message you are tryingt to get across in the first place.

Of course, I had to take in Avinash Kaushik’s presentation. He’s a great presenter who also talks a load of sense. What I took away from Aninash’s presentation was his explanation between reporting and analysis, something that I talked to John Marshall about recently in this blog. Avinash said that “at the end of analysis there is always action”, which is so spot on. I think we really have to hold ourselves accountable and say “what am I going to do about this?”. Insight without action is merely an interesting fact.

I then headed over to moderate the “Voice of the Customer Track”. Over the course of the last two days on this track there has been a great variety of input and thinking about all aspects to do with customer centricity. There is a lot of evidence from the US that organisations now see the monitoring of customer satisfaction and customer perceptions as a vital component of their understanding of the effectiveness of their web channel. Rick Blair from Equity Residential demonstrated how they had integrated their customer satisfaction data into their Omniture reporting so they could look at the relationship between satisfaction and activity on the site. Dre Madden from StubHub.com reminded me that customer satisfaction is not the same as site satisfaction; they also survey their customers two weeks after their site experience to ensure that the follow up service was on track as well.

Today, there was a presentation from Dave Mickleson from 3M on how they have been linking customer satisfaction data to ROI by looking at the financial impact of changes in the customer’s experience on the site and their resulting propensity to buy. It’s all a reminder that we can’t run our web sites purely on web analytics data, understanding what visitors and customers think and say is a vital component as well. Probably here in the UK there are an increasing number of businesses that are running some kind of customer satisfaction tracker. My sense though is that there is more work to be done integrating that data into the way that we monitor the health of the business. The data tends to site in silos and as once speaker said today “we even have silos within our silos”.

So my impressions of Emetrics overall is, to some extent, one of sensory overload and it will take me a bit of time to process it all. This has actually been my sixth Emetrics Summit and we have both come a long way since the first one I attended in Santa Barbara in 2003, sitting in a room with 80 other people. This event has obviously been a lot bigger with more people and more speakers. But it has also made more impact because we are not focussing on the data that comes out of a web analytics system and debating to death the differences between logfile analysis versus page tagging. Web analytics is necessary but not sufficient. The issues have moved on and the good news is, so has this conference. I’m hoping that the Emetrics in London in March next year takes a similar approach and broadens the scope beyond the bits and bytes of visitor behaviour tracking. On the basis of this conference, I feel confident it will.

You can take a look at my own presentation by downloading it from here.

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