November/December 2012 CyberSelection: Foresee

It has happened to you, too, I am sure. You approach a website with a specific goal in mind. But before you get to what you need--almost before the front page is finished loading--up pops a window asking you to complete a survey at the end of your visit, evaluating your experience. One day last summer when I was interrupted three times within seconds of opening three different websites by such a pop-up invitation, I decided to find out where all that data was going. Coincidentally perhaps, all three survey requests had come from ForeSee (www.foresee.com).

I did not spend much time at the ForeSee site then--only enough to note that ForeSee defines itself as a "pioneer in customer experience analytics" and claims to "collect millions of satisfaction survey responses annually." That number seemed about right! I also noticed that there was a supply of research and white papers, webinars and transcripts, and blogs, all of which seemed to be free. I looked at a couple blog entries (http://blog.foresee.com/) and typed in my email address to get email notification of new posts. All summer I have been receiving a steady stream of emails with teasers and links to topics relating to customer satisfaction and its measurement, e-retail, social media, mobile, usability, and more. Sometimes I have even followed the link to read more.

Blog postings, from 20 contributors, are frequent--about three times per week--and full of factual content. You can limit blogposts to one of 19 different topics, including Analytics, Case Stories, Customer Satisfaction, and ForeSee Original Research. RSS or email subscription is available.

Research & White Papers

Moving beyond the blogs, though, let's look at the main site. Click on the Research & White Papers tab to browse papers by industry, subject, or date (2010, 2011, or 2012). ForeSee has six industry categories: E-Business, Financial Services, General, Government, Healthcare, and Retail, and divides its work into five subjects: American Customer Satisfaction Index, Best Practices, Social Media, Trends in Satisfaction, and Web Analytics.

Each industry and subject topic offers a handful of recent reports, each with a brief informative description that gives its major finding. The ForeSee Daily Deal Commentary (2012), for example, says:

Daily deal sites like Groupon and LivingSocial have come under criticism lately from merchants and business analysts who are not convinced the business model is good for retailers. But new research from ForeSee shows that daily sites attract new customers and inspire loyalty. Groupon leads the way with the largest share of the market. Download the free report to learn more about how daily deals can increase business awareness, purchases, and repeat purchases.

You have to fill out a rather lengthy registration page before downloading the report, but after you have done this once, the site tracks you so that subsequent download requests skip past that page (I'm still waiting to see how many reports I can download before wearing out my welcome and getting requests to pay). The Daily Deal report is an attractive and easy-to-read 8-page PDF, filled with statistics, tables, and color-coded summary statements. Data for this March 2012 report was collected from the ForeSee 2011 E-Retail Satisfaction Index (U.S. Holiday Edition), apparently an annual investigation, and noted comparisons with an earlier daily deal survey conducted in the spring of 2011.

Government Sector

ForeSee has been working extensively with the U.S. government since at least 2010, when it released a year-end E-Government Transparency Index, confirming that "online transparency is a key driver of online satisfaction and overall trust in government for many of the websites tracking it." The corresponding report is no longer available, but pointers were given to more recent press releases and research and white papers. Indeed, there are government-related white papers issued for each quarter in 2011 and 2012.

The Q1 2011 report found that "good federal government websites save the government money and foster democracy." Q2 recommended that "the .gov Task Force consider traffic, the amount of redundancy, and citizen experience as criteria for making their decision on how to consolidate e-gov websites and reduce duplication." Q3 analyzed the state of social media in federal government, and Q4 documented the not surprising finding that "customer satisfaction with federal government websites remains near record highs and far surpasses satisfaction with the federal government overall."

Sandwiched between the Q1 and Q2 2012 E-Government Satisfaction Index reports was the news that ForeSee President and CEO Larry Freed had testified before the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Social Security on May 9 about citizen satisfaction with the websites of the Social Security Administration (SSA). Freed's full written testimony was available as a free download, and in it he acknowledged that ForeSee has been working with SSA websites for eight years. 

Webinars and Media Coverage

An upcoming webinar titled Cause and Effect: How Mobile Impacts the Retail experience, was promoted under the News & Events tab, and I registered. I should have expected it but I didn't: the confirming email told me that the webcast was viewable on smartphones and tablets including iPads, iPhones, and Android devices.  I watched it on desktop machine, however; it was presented by Eric Feinberg, ForeSee's mobility guru, who said, among other things, that slightly more than half of all in-store mobile use is directed to that store's website. Does this say something about onsite customer service these days?

Some--not all--past webinars are recorded and available for playback or download. I was attracted to one reporting the results of the 2011 online banking study. You need to click on the + sign before the title to view the webinar synopsis and then fill out a registration form again to gain access to this content.

The Media Coverage tab (www.foresee.com/news-events/media.shtml) under News & Events reveals a fascinating list of articles that are worth scanning for their headline value alone, though you can click through to get the full article from an excellent and diverse set of publications. This is a long list of articles (though not as long as the press release list; www.foresee.com/news-events/press-releases/) in which ForeSee, or more usually its flagship publication, the American Customer Satisfaction Index (www.theacsi.org/) is quoted. Interesting stories in late August included the news that "Hatred of Timeline Causes Satisfaction with Facebook to Plummet" (FoxNews.com), "Google+ Trumps Facebook in Customer Satisfaction" (CNN.com), and "Netflix Reputation Ticks Up Slightly In Consumer Survey" (CNN Money). I couldn't resist taking a look at "Survey Fatigue: Do Companies Care What You Think?" (MSNBC; http://lifeinc.today.com/_news/2012/06/20/12300983-survey-fatigue-do-companies-care-what-you-think?lite), where, in addition to a discussion of the issue by Herb Weisbaum, there was a one-question live poll at the end. It was not a survey from ForeSee, however.

The Polling Experience

I had been wondering whether I would get through the week of focused research and writing about ForeSee without encountering a survey. As a matter of fact I was getting a little worried, because I hadn't. But it was the end of August--maybe not a good survey time, statistically speaking. And then it happened. I clicked on a link within a ForeSee research report that went to a different ForeSee URL (www.foreseeresults.com) and up popped a survey!

I agreed to answer at the end of my visit. (ForeSee always gives you the option to say "no, thanks.") I did a lot of investigation and navigated back and forth and all around, so I wasn't entirely sure when I was on www.foresee.com and when I was on www.foreseeresults.com, as they seemed to contain the same content. I was horrified, however, to find that the survey was 20 questions long, and the first 19 were marked with an asterisk to indicate they were required. This fit in with my recollection of these surveys, which was that they were always long, always forced an answer between 1 and 10, and rarely had questions dealing with the issues that I wanted to complain or praise about. The same thing happened this time, but there were a couple additional questions: one open-ended "anything else you want to say about the site?" (there was and I did) and another about whether I wanted to be contacted (I didn't).

I still don't like the polls. I realize, though, that when I choose to respond, my answers get encased with millions of others and sold to a particular client; there are lots of places on the site that make this obvious. But I like the opportunity to make a difference, especially in government websites, and I like the fact that some of the answers I give come back, with millions of others, as information for free.

Susanne Bjørner provides editorial services to publishers, librarians, authors, and researchers. Contact her at bjorner@earthlink.net or www.bjorner.info.