I have been asked to look into brand damage for a website and how this can be measured. The perceived damage was caused our on-line forms being down for a long period of time and we need to put forward a case detailing what the costs have been. Is it even possible to measure something like this effectively?

I’d be interested to find out what other people may have experienced along these lines?

Thanks for the useful feedback. Your suggestions seem like sound ways of getting information about the customers' beahaviour. The only problem seems to be that, because the site was down, we received no statistics during this period!

It would be nice to get some qualatitive feedback from all those that suffered the problem but the only way I can think of doing this would be to flag it up on the website. The problem is that it happened quite a while ago and it would almost seems like re-opening old wounds.

On 23:16:39 5 August 2006 MisterObee wrote:

Rob,

A nice challenge and addressable on a couple of levels.

First, have a look at the statistics available from your web analytics package - that should show you just how many of your users have experienced the problem by attempting to use the unavailable forms. You'll at least have a view on what sort of percentage of your site users have actually encountered the problem.

If you look further into the stats you should be able to see how many of these frustrated users simply abandoned the site, and how many continued using the site anyway. If you can see repeat visits clearly all the better, as you'll be able to judge how many users came back later to try again - greater frustration for those users if the forms were still unavailable.

On a higher level, you might consider a communication (where email addresses are available) that comes clean and apologises for the problems that users may have faced. It has been proved time and time again that users are more tolerant of a problem than of the bad handling of that same problem. If email addresses are not available for a high percentage of sufferers, you might put a banner on the homepage too, encouraging people to do what they wanted now that the problems have been fixed.

Own up, apologise and offer some sort of compensation - maybe you could ask your users to try the forms again with an incentive for all those who do - offer a prize draw of a weekend away or a hamper - anything that says "ok, we messed up, we confess, and we're keen to do the right thing as a result".

Companies do screw-up, but the joy of interactive is the ability to turn the mistake into a positive experience for users.

Stephen
Head of Digital
The Customer Insight Partnership

Thanks again for your reply. This sounds like a useful solution. From the research I've done this sounds like the most practical and workable advice I have heard. I think what they were after was some kind formula for working out damage to a brand but I guess with something as abstract as the perception of a brand, there is no such thing as an industry standard formula.

I appreciate your very useful insights. Thanks again.
 

On 11:45:57 7 August 2006 danielb wrote:

the fact that it happened a while ago may not be a disadvantage. it gives you a good pool of 'before' & 'after' stats to compare.

also - regarding qualitative data - you don't have to explicitly mention the exact issue you're interested in. you could send out an email to your permission base asking broad questions about reliability, whether they'd recommend you to a friend,  etc.

segmenting this by length of custom could help you to figure out the impact of the service issues. eg. one segment could be customers who've joined since the problems were solved. one could be customers who joined just before the problems started to occur. 3 months prior, 6 months prior, etc. hopefully that will give you an idea of whether you've suffered & how much was specifically to do with the issues.

On 08:45:42 7 August 2006 RobWood wrote:

Thanks for the useful feedback. Your suggestions seem like sound ways of getting information about the customers' beahaviour. The only problem seems to be that, because the site was down, we received no statistics during this period!

It would be nice to get some qualatitive feedback from all those that suffered the problem but the only way I can think of doing this would be to flag it up on the website. The problem is that it happened quite a while ago and it would almost seems like re-opening old wounds.

On 23:16:39 5 August 2006 MisterObee wrote:

Rob,

A nice challenge and addressable on a couple of levels.

First, have a look at the statistics available from your web analytics package - that should show you just how many of your users have experienced the problem by attempting to use the unavailable forms. You'll at least have a view on what sort of percentage of your site users have actually encountered the problem.

If you look further into the stats you should be able to see how many of these frustrated users simply abandoned the site, and how many continued using the site anyway. If you can see repeat visits clearly all the better, as you'll be able to judge how many users came back later to try again - greater frustration for those users if the forms were still unavailable.

On a higher level, you might consider a communication (where email addresses are available) that comes clean and apologises for the problems that users may have faced. It has been proved time and time again that users are more tolerant of a problem than of the bad handling of that same problem. If email addresses are not available for a high percentage of sufferers, you might put a banner on the homepage too, encouraging people to do what they wanted now that the problems have been fixed.

Own up, apologise and offer some sort of compensation - maybe you could ask your users to try the forms again with an incentive for all those who do - offer a prize draw of a weekend away or a hamper - anything that says "ok, we messed up, we confess, and we're keen to do the right thing as a result".

Companies do screw-up, but the joy of interactive is the ability to turn the mistake into a positive experience for users.

Stephen
Head of Digital
The Customer Insight Partnership