Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD)

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) has been pioneering continuous improvement of its website with Foviance's (formerly The Usability Company and WebAbacus) new Experience Management Service.

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) is the UK's leading professional organisation for those involved in managing and developing people. The CIPD website is an important meeting place for the organisation's 120,000 members, providing community forums, news updates, a bookstore, a training directory and study resources.

Foviance’s new Experience Management Service has enabled CIPD to identify and correct usability problems across its website, so it can increase customer retention and improve the service members receive.

"We had huge amounts of analytics data but we had to interpret what it was telling us," says Eileen Pevreall, IT Director at CIPD. "Separately, Foviance helped us as we redeveloped our website and we could see the benefits of the testing being delivered as we relaunched the site. We had both analytics and usability, but we weren’t pulling them together. This new managed service does that for us and delivers real business intelligence. Now Foviance can interpret the stats on our behalf and make recommendations on how to improve our website." 

Each month, CIPD selects a different area of the site to focus on and defines the business goals for that part of the site. Foviance uses website analytics to measure user behaviour on the site so that any potential usability problems can be spotted, such as drop-off points in a transaction. If necessary, questionnaires can be set up at the appropriate point on the website to ask users why they are dropping out of a process or what other concerns they might have.

"Because the site is extremely large, we couldn’t perform web analytics analysis across all of it at once," says Pevreall. "We choose just one or two areas a month to work on. Sometimes we choose an area we know we will modify soon and other times it might be an area where we're getting a lot of support calls on a particular issue or seeing people dropping out of a transaction process. We define the business goals and key performance indicators for the web areas we’re testing. Then we look at the metrics – what is it we want measured? Which elements of the website do we want visitors to look at? We plan a month in advance, so in July we plan what we’ll monitor in August and Foviance shows us their analysis in September," says Pevreall.

Foviance makes actionable suggestions that can be used to correct any usability problems on the site. "Based on Foviance's recommendations, we put a schedule of changes in place. We can then monitor that site area again to see what impact the changes they have recommended have had on our site," says Pevreall. "Foviance's expertise is really strong, they bring the benefit of an external perspective. They are experts on how people use websites and add value with their experience from their work with their other customers."

One of the services on the CIPD website which was investigated with the Experience Management Service is a directory of 450 CIPD short courses and certificate programmes. When plans were made to redesign this section, CIPD first used the Experience Management Service to investigate how users deal with the existing training directory. "We talked about what we were trying to achieve with this directory and told Foviance about the types of people (personas) we believed we had using this online resource ," says Pevreall. "Foviance advised us on which elements we should look at. We put the tagging in place for the analytics service and started to monitor what users were doing."

She continues: "We discovered people were leaving at certain points because they thought they had to pay online. They could reserve a course place online, but because they thought they had to pay at the same time, they were dropping out. The person who searches for the course might not be the person who ultimately pays for it, it may be their employer. We hope to decrease our dropout rates by clarifying payment points."

Once necessary changes have been identified, these are fed into development projects. "Most of the web areas reviewed are currently being revised as a result of the analytics," says Pevreall. "Most of the sweeping changes (by their nature) are being fed into projects rather than being done ad-hoc including those in our Membership Renewals web area and Search, to name two."

The membership renewals cycle was also studied with the Experience Management Service. Pevreall says: "In our membership renewals cycle we were able to monitor where the drop off occurred, what the renewal rate was and what the influencing factors were and then modify the payment journey to prevent people dropping out."

CIPD has been working with Foviance for over two years. The first project was to audit and test the website as it underwent a redesign leading up to the relaunch in January 2004. Since then, Foviance has worked closely with CIPD and CIPD’s website design agency. "To make recommendations to change someone's website, which might have an impact on their customers or business, is fundamental," says Pevreall. "So it's very important that you work with someone who you trust and who is interested in what you try to achieve as a business and who can understand that. Foviance feels some ownership of the site and wants CIPD to succeed and the site to get better. We treat them like an extension of our team."

Since the CIPD website was relaunched a year ago, traffic has increased by over 50% to 3.5 million user sessions per year and the number of users that return has increased significantly. The average user session is around 15 minutes and the number of unique users has increased 25% to 100,000 per month. Pevreall says: "In the past year website traffic to the CIPD site has increased substantially. I believe we can attribute some of this to improved usability. We have been able to monitor these figures for some time but the Experience Management Service work on differentiating new visitors and existing visitors provides a more thorough insight."

CIPD is able to use the precise analytics to drive its offline marketing campaigns. Keren Sutherland, Sales and Marketing Manager at CIPD, says: "What excites me the most is that we can at long last start using the web data to inform our offline marketing communications. This is something that we have aspired to do for years. For example, if we can easily identify those people who repeatedly visit the member only employment law section of the site, we can use these names to supplement the names selected from the main database for the direct mail campaign."

The usability work delivers a return in the improved relationship CIPD can have with its members. "If we can keep and retain customers and they can find their way around the site, we can provide more products and services to them and improve their access to our offer," says Pevreall. "For us the customer acquisition and retention return on investment is key."

"The best thing to come out of the rolling Experience Management Service programme is the confidence that we’re doing the right thing," says Pevreall. "The message we are receiving from our customers using the site shows us that we must be doing the right thing. That confidence is important – it’s exciting to think that our site’s getting better and better. I won’t be blasé enough to say it’s there, but we know we’re constantly improving it."

She advises other companies to use analytics and usability expertise together to inform continuous improvement. "Just because you already have analytics data and think you already understand how your customers behave, it’s not the same as actually putting it all together," says Pevreall. "The benefits of truly understanding what you customers are doing and being able to keep developing and enhancing the service you offer reaps both financial and customer relationship rewards."

About Foviance

Foviance is a new company created from the merger of usability specialists The Usability Company and web analytics software specialist WebAbacus. The merger creates a unique company that combines the strength of The Usability Company's expertise in the area of user experience with the power of WebAbacus's web analytics technology to provide a complete service to help organisations measure, understand and enhance the quality of the online systems they provide for their users.

Foviance's client roster includes 43 of the FTSE top 100 UK companies, as well as international clients across Europe, Asia and the United States.

Tel:
Email: Web: www.foviance.com

About The Usability Company

The Usability Company is the UK's foremost provider of independent usability consultancy, and is now at the forefront of design technology aimed at improving ease of use for websites, wireless services, intranets, mobile devices and interactive digital TV.

Numerous clients have benefited from The Usability Company's expertise in delivering websites, applications and devices that provide a satisfying experience for the end user. Current clients include Barclays Bank, Camelot, BskyB, LG Electronics, RNIB and Charcolonline.

Time and again The Usability Company has demonstrated that with its focus on the requirements of the end user, usability testing has a significant impact on the bottom line.

About WebAbacus

WebAbacus' highly flexible and powerful online behaviour analysis software is the product of choice for organisations who are serious about improving the service they deliver to their customers by understanding their online behaviour. Now in its fourth release, WebAbacus software is in use at companies across the world, including Volkswagen, Johnson & Johnson, TNT, Online Travel, Confetti, Screwfix, Haymarket, Centaur Communications, IDeA and Ocado.

The CIPD website as at September 2005

 
© The Usability Company 2007