Basic site technology performance measures include the speed of page downloads, frequency of site crashes and the number of broken or missing links. Service delivery performance is another critical hard measure of customer satisfaction. This essentially means doing what your site promises it will. The most effective metric for service delivery performance is the percent of deliveries that failed to meet a performance mark. While the consumer services that you should be monitoring are specific to your site's function, common activities that various Internet businesses will want to keep metrics on are the percentage of orders not delivered on time or shipped with incorrect contents, customer service requests not responded to on time and file downloads that took longer than a stated time.
Customer behavior is the final hard measure.
As commercial businesses that must turn a profit, we are most interested in customer behavior that affects our profitability. Customer behavior measures must include purchase or visit frequency, purchase size or visit length, customer defections, customer referrals and the number of customer complaints. Next month, we'll tackle soft measures. Jody Dodson is executive vice president of cPulse, a developer of customer service applications for Internet businesses.