Customer Experience Marketing Resources Resource Center 

Passenger is a company that builds, hosts and analyzes online communities. What's unique about this company is that it provides really interesting analytics tools that help you peer into your community and see who's engaged, who's sharing information, who's talking to whom and the like.

The community tools available range from the basic -- member profiles, networking, chat and member polls -- to the very sophisticated. For example, you can create individual groups to give you feedback on your products or ideas for future products. There's a showcase where members can virtually review or try out a product and give their suggestions for improvement every step of the way. The communities can also be internal, such as for your sales force, which means you'll know who participates or interacts with your company, and how they do it. Clients include Coca-Cola, Sara Lee and the ABC network.

SiteBrand attacks the frustrating problem of shopping cart abandonment with an interactive marketing solution that changes your site on the fly. It looks for the appropriate messaging and features based upon visitor interests, past history and current online behavior. Their goal is to turn shoppers into buyers.

At the time of writing, an extensive gratis report presented an analysis of the ROI of what they call "persuasive e-marketing." It covers what you can expect in terms of ROI from changes to your first-time visitor presentation, personalized pay-per-click advertising, targeted email marketing campaigns and more.

There's also a blog, where frequent posts cover subjects like translating your personalization to Google Analytics tracking, the impact of social media and benefits of daytracking.

Of course, one way to engage visitors and find out how they feel about your site experience is to ask them directly. SurveyGizmo does just that. You can structure your surveys in many ways, including polls, quizzes, landing pages and even mobile marketing campaigns. Extensive analytics and reporting features are included.

At the time of writing, a basic account was available at no cost. This is an actual working account (as opposed to a test account) that allows you to gather 250 responses per month on an ongoing basis. Pricing for larger survey needs is available at the site.

Tealeaf offers a number of customer engagement tools that track the visitor experience on your website. They distill this information down into a variety of reports that analyze what they call your site's "life cycle." You can see where customers go, what they do and why they do pesky things like abandon shopping carts or decide not to sign up for white papers.

Each individual site visitor session is recorded, so you can analyze at the micro or macro level. For example, you can pull a report that lumps together all the site visitors who have taken five steps or more on your website to see what they have in common.

Many white papers are available at the site, including how to build a customer engagement competency and a Forrester report on what big brands are doing about customer engagement strategy. Not surprisingly, they are interested in more disciplined tracking and return on investment.

This blog is all about defining, aiming for and demonstrating the perfect customer experience. It is moderated by a number of editors, so you get a plethora of topics and more than one point of view. Categories are wide-ranging -- you'll find everything from the nitty gritty of operational management to experiential technology to branded environments to graphic design and social media.

The companies featured as examples are the big boys, including IBM, McDonald's and what's happening "AA" (After Amazon) in the world of experience strategies and enhancements. There are a many other resources available, including book recommendations and whitepapers. There are several dozen blogs that are in this niche, but this is the best and brightest that we found.

Jakob Nielson is the guru of the nuts and bolts of website usability. His advice is to keep things as simple as possible. This advice is based upon hundreds of reports, surveys and investigations into how people use websites. For example, at the time of writing, we found:

1. a report that stated people only read about 20% of the text on a site, which means you should make it easier for people to scan your site by using bullet points and short sentences; and
2. an analyis of four really bad website designs, including the Jazz at Lincoln Center site. This is too bad, because we are great fans (and subscribers) of JALC.

You will find many gratis articles about usability, usability news and fee-based reports. This editor found on her visit to the site that she suddenly needed every report, as there was so much to learn.

You have to visit this site, and not just to experience the simple yet intuitive layout. His copy adds yet another dimension to usability and your desire to get further involved. Take for example the following piece of writing that entices you into buying his $398 report on email newsletter usability:

"Users have highly emotional reactions to newsletters. This is in strong contrast to studies of website usability, where users are usually much more oriented towards functionality. Even a website that you visit daily will feel like a tool where you simply want to get in and get out.

"The positive emotional aspect of newsletters is that they can create much more of a bond between user and company than a website can. The negative aspect is that usability problems have much stronger impact on the customer relationship than they normally do." If you are an email newsletter publisher, aren't you strongly compelled to buy this report?

He goes on to say that the average email newsletter is read for 51 seconds. We do know that you spend a lot more time reading your Web Digest For Marketers newsletter. :) His weekly newsletter, Alertbox, will keep you up to date on his latest findings.