The answer here Kate is that you don’t.

The only purposeful measure you can make is to compare the cost per visitor of your customer website with the cost per visitor of (say) your e-commerce website.

This comparison is useful because it will make the e-commerce site people think about putting messages in or around the customer service site to tap the traffic!

Of course, ultimately, customer service / satisfaction has to be measured as a whole – and then you look at the component parts of your cost of delivering that service in order to decide where and how to invest your cash.

Br
Neil

Thanks for an interesting article. I agree with what you have said, but I think that you have missed out one vital part.

The cost per visitor is very highly dependent upon how many visitors you have.

Let’s take an example. My website cost £1,000 to get built and setup (values for easy calculation), if I have 100 visitors per year, clearly the site costs me £10 per visitor per year. Now with 1000 visitors in the year it is £1 per visitor per year, etc.

The real metric which affects the numbers is the total number of visitors who visit. This is of course made more complex by, are the visitors doing what you would like them to do? In many cases of course the answer is no, they came to the site, found it wasn’t what they wanted, perhaps because the site is an e-commerce site and it is in the wrong country.

Do we now count total number of visitors or number of targeted visitors? I don’t really have an answer to that, it depends upon the websites goals, but knowing there is a difference is important.

I think the really important thing, as you suggest is knowing what you want from your website and being able to measure it.

I will pose a question to you, how does one measure the ROI for any non-tangible, such as customer support?
Kate