How digital agencies keep clients on tasks

Task Analytics (TA): Why does Netlife use Task Analytics?

Jostein (Netlife):
To sum it up: it's a powerful tool to improve our project delivery. To be more precise, I can give you three reasons: First, added value to our clients. Task Analytics provides an unequivocal picture of what their customers really want to do on their websites. This is really helpful information before we embark on a redesign, and the result for Netlife is that we hit the mark with much greater accuracy when crafting new web-design solutions.

Secondly, if a client uses Task Analytics over a longer period of time, continuously measuring, that really helps us prioritize our work. We, and our client, can know which improvements are most effective, which help us when we build a website or add some new functionality.

Last but not least, as an agency we often find ourselves in the middle of a client’s internal politics and conflicts. A lot of that conflict is due to a lack of data about what their customers really want. One example is that companies typically want company news promoted on their front web page. Yet we know that customers rarely care about the company’s bragging. Google Analytics might show that a few people click the news, and then some employees argue that customers are interested in it. But Task Analytics can get user specific user feedback about that part of the site, and can be very helpful to end those discussions at an early stage. No need to argue over what your customers really want once they’ve told you!

(TA) How do you use Task Analytics in a situation when there is a mismatch between the current users’ intents and your clients’ goals for their business?

(Netlife):
This happens all the time. Our clients get an a-ha! moment discovering such a mismatch, and what happens is the clients’ goals don’t change, but we can much more effectively allocate efforts and resources. Together with the client we can take the right measures with a higher probability of success. It might be all about boosting marketing efforts. In other cases it might be to altogether change the function of the website. it. But Task Analytics can get user specific user feedback about that part of the site, and can be very helpful to end those discussions at an early stage. No need to argue over what your customers really want once they’ve told you!

(TA) Can you please share a recent use case example where your agency benefited from using Task Analytics?

(Netlife):
We worked with a very successful financial-payment service provider in Norway, with about three million app users. Our hypothesis, before measuring with Task Analytics, was that a great deal of business customers were coming to their site because they wanted to sign up and get started with their service. However, Task Analytics uncovered that over 90 percent of site visitors were actually private consumers seeking help for concrete problems. And only about 50 percent got the help they needed and completed whatever task they set out to.

The point is: If we didn’t solve the problem of that 90%, we’d be working under a false impression of who our users were, and letting down the vast majority of the client’s users. At the same time, there still was the goal of getting new business customers to use the payment service. The conclusion was to first solve the problems of the private consumers BEFORE focusing on the business customers. The end result is that this client now satisfies both their business customers as well as their private customers.