Identifying & Solving Client Pains

On Tuesday Manoj Jasra (http://manojjasra.blogspot.com/) started a multi part series in which expert Web Analytics Analysts from the industry explain the "pains" they hear from their clients or have encountered. The expert Analysts also talk about strategies to deal with these pains. I think this is a great effort by Manoj to bring different perspective on client pain points.

Contributing to this series are:
- Eric Peterson
- Marshall Sponder
- Gary Angel
- Avinash Kaushik
- Anil Batra (me)
- Justin Cutroni
- Jason Van Orden
- Robbin Steif
- Akin Arikan
- Manoj Jasra

Yesterday he featured Avinash and I, you can read the full article at http://manojjasra.blogspot.com/2006/12/identifying-solving-client-pains-part.html

The two most important pain points that I have encountered over and over are:

1. Accuracy of the Data - The tools are purchased and set up without understanding the goals of the business. Since the goals of the business/site are not properly understood clients start measuring and reporting on whatever out of the box reports the tool can provide. In most of the cases tool is capturing information that should not be captured and skipping information that should be captured (improper tagging and other issues). To avoid this issue our approach is to start with understanding the business goals and then make recommendation for the tool and configuration of the tool.

2. Acting on the findings - One of the major issues is acting on the finding. Once we make recommendations many customers can’t take any actions on them. Why? Because of organizational structure. IT, who is responsible for making the changes to pages, reports elsewhere. Marketing can ask for changes but won't get them because IT has other priorities.

How should this be fixed:
1. Change in organizational structure
2. Help the whole organization know the impact of these changes, show the impact these changes will have on the bottom line.

These are not the only pain points but are the most common that come up almost all of the time. In future I will write about all of the different issues (pain points) that I have come across, so stay tuned.