How to optimize your website based on customer happiness dimensions
By: Anton Graichen
Tags: Web Analytics, Web Optimization, Customer Success, Ds In The Real World, Customer Experience

As a professional or business owner you might know the feeling where you look at your website and think, “well, how can I improve my website and increase sales, leads or any other goal?”. For me, the problem of “where should I start?”, has always been one of the challenges when I looked at sites, especially new projects. Because if you want to improve your website, service or any other web-based product, you first have to look at the right data to know what’s going on. Understanding this data and finding the right metrics can be tricky. This article aims to give you a way of looking at your data in a customer focused way.

In my opinion, usually everyone developed an own way of optimizing website. Because during time, you develop a strategy and you know which important key metrics worked out and try to improve those numbers. For me, this way of doing things always had a bit too much of a random touch to it. I like doing things with a bit of structure, make data-oriented decisions and most important, I want to be able to share it with colleagues and peers…

I thought about how I can improve my optimization process and turn it into a structured procedure. I did the usual research and read some articles but couldn’t really find an answer to my question, since there was no real approach offered. Some authors had really good ideas about important key metrics or examples on what aspects of a website can be improved and where you should start. Don’t get me wrong, this is really good advice, but the ideas are mostly proposed actions if I know where the pain points are. Sometimes they fit perfectly to the purpose, often time they are just a fragment and don’t consider the overall process. My goal though, was to take one step back and figure out a framework I could use for all purposes where I conclude propblems and then take action.

After some more research, I came across an old friend from university — the Kano Model. It turns out, this model can be used as a really good framework for website optimization.

The model basically builds on the fundamentals of every businesses goal. Provide the best service or product solution for your customers, continuously improve it and your customers will become loyal friend. I dug around a bit to really understand this model, it changed the way I look at websites now and how I approach an optimization process. Here’s how I do it.

What is the Kano Model and why is it important for customer happines?

The basic concept of this model, firstly published by Noriaki Kano in 1984, defines that there are four different sets of quality requirements, a customer pays attention to. If a certain level of quality is satisfied, you will most likely get a happy customer. Therefore, the more useful your product is and more customer requirements are fulfilled, the more meaningful it is to your customers. Those different sets of quality requirements are built on each other, meaning, if you don’t get your basics straight, don’t even think about working on fine tuning.

Before we can actually apply the model to a website, let’s briefly find out about the requirements from customer. If you know all about it, you can skip to the data variables here.

The Kano Model according to Berger et al.(1993)

This chart displays all dimensions of customer requirements. The vertical y-axis of the chart displays customer satisfaction and the horizontal x-axis shows you how functional the product is. Let’s take a look at the different lines on this chart and how they can be understood.

1. Customer satisfaction reacts proportional to the functionality of the product

The better a product or service functionality is, the more satisfied a customer will be. I guess, this is our traditional way of how we think a customer reacts to all products or service features. The better a functionality is, the more satisfied a customer will be. This is how it should be right? But according to the Kano Model, this only applies to some requirements and can’t be generalized. As result the linear line represents all those one-dimensional features.

Think about your website, product or marketing efforts for a moment and try to find some requirements that fit into this box. Maybe you run a shop that sells custom socks where more colour variation means more choice for customers, resulting in higher customer satisfaction. Another example would maybe be a blog about remote work and the number of visitors you get on specific content pieces.

2. Customer satisfaction reacts disproportional to product functionality

Some requirements don’t react linear to satisfaction and even don’t result in any positive customer satisfaction at all. These requirements are displayed in the “must-be” curve. Here you’ll find needs which are considered as a must in order to be competitive. You won’t get any extra points here but those requirements are really important and are the first things for you to work on.

Considering the sock shop again, a must-be could be an easy checkout, the ability to pay by credit card, good site speed etc. If we have a look at the blog example, I’d say things like easy understandable content, mobile friendliness or up to date articles should be a must.

In the top of our Kano chart you’ll find the second disproportional curve. If theses “attractive” requirements are met, you’ll get positive feedback. At this point, customers don’t expect functionalities but are positively affected by them. Do you manage to provide a service that is just that bit better or has extraordinary features? Chances are high your website visitors will be very satisfied and maybe even become loyal customers. On the other hand, if features are deemed not functional, customers are nevertheless not dissatisfied.

Do you already know an example for our sock shop? What if you could customize your socks and print your favourite pet on it and get the socks delivered to your doorstep within 24 hours? I guess this would be an “attractive” requirement. I also heard that our remote blog hooked us up with a six-month free trial fpr the newest remote work tool. Very attractive.

3. Functionalities may not affect customer satisfaction

The last of the four dimension gets displayed along the horizontal axis. It states that your customers might not be affected by your product at all. This might be due to a lack of market research and as a result, functionality that is just not relevant.

In case you want to learn more about the Kano Model, how you can analyse and define each of your customer requirements, I’d recommend you to read this paper from Berger et al. (1993).

Since we now know what kind of different customer quality requirements exist and how all your functionalities might influence your customer happines, let’s find the right data from your website.

Finding the right website data variables for Kano dimensions

Although the Kano Model hasn’t been directly developed to improve websites, once we understand the principles, we can also use these fundamentals for a website optimization process. Let’s go through our web metrics and try to match them with the quality dimensions we just learned about. We start with the basic “must-be” elements, followed by the “one-dimension” and move on to the “attractive” elements.

The idea is to put yourself into the mind of the customer, define the right data variables and therefore visualize customer requirements in order to conclude improvements from each dataset. This is the moment where we’re now able to use all the helpful tips on different key metrics from what I mentioned at beginning of my article. Even though there is a set of general data you can use for almost all websites, in order to find the right metrics for the right dimensions, it is important to check each project separately — but have Kano’s quality requirements in mind.

Let me try to explain how I fit the right data to each dimension.

1. Must-be dimensions

Look for must-be criteria where requirements are seen as basics and don’t result in customer satisfaction. From a customer point of view, it would be a sites availability, the speed and sometimes also mobile friendliness. You should monitor your server-downtime, web speed and bounce-/exit-rates of your site. If people don’t like what they see, they’ll leave pretty quickly without even a chance to exite them.

You could also set up alerts in case your site reaches some critical numbers like a 3+ seconds load time. I would do exactly this for our imaginary sock shop. I’d even split the web speed to desktop and mobile view on my monitoring dashboard to monitor differences. If something drastically happens, I can react pretty quick.

2. Performance dimensions

Elements that are displayed on the one-dimensional line, are mainly performance indicators. This means, that if the performance rises, the customer satisfaction is also considered to rise. To get an overview on how your performance indicators perform, you should check basic measurements like page views or visitors. Also try to break down the performance to each user by looking at variables like pages per sessions. On a blog this can also be avg. time per session.

As a second performance group, SEO is a really good indicator. Just for monitoring purposes, you don’t have to be a SEO pro. Simply review your organic and referral traffic since this generally displays how popular your site is and how it performs compared to your competitors (just to be clear, this is a really, really simple indication, but works quite well for this purpose).

For a webshop, you should also monitor monetary indicators like the average order value, items per order, earning thorugh subscriptions, earning through advertisement (blog) and the list goes on depending on your business.

3. Attractive dimensions

The last set of data variables refers to “attractive” customer requirements. These are the ones where your customer might think, “wow, that’s a really cool service.” In this data set, try to focus on your quality and usability and the indicators that come with it. For a start, still try to keep it simple and check your important interaction rates on your site. This could be the order conversion rate, the buyer conversion rate, time on a certain page, the scroll depth of your content or category pages, the checkout abandonment rate etc.

In case of our sock shop, I’d always keep an eye on the conversion rates and how people react on the sock customization tool I mentioned. I would measure the bounce rate of this tool and the rate between customized and basic orders.

You know your website the best, really think about the extra services you provide and constantly check up on the interaction performance. As a last idea for more excitement dimensions. Have look at all the things that happen outside of your website. Think about tracking engagement rates of your social media channels and how many people talk about and follow your business.

Key Takeaways

The Kano Model is a great inspiration to build a framework for your website optimization process. You can create a monitoring dashboard of all important data variables based on this model and display the different quality requirements of your customers. Begin with the basic “must-be” dimensions, followed by “performance” dimensions and “attractive” dimensions at the end.