New Study Reveals Customer Service Is a Hotly Researched Topic Online 

Your reputation for customer service precedes you on the Web–that’s the warning from The Society for New Communications Research, whose latest survey reveals that 72% of Internet users research companies’ customer service reputations online prior to at least some of their purchases. Other important findings:

•  74% of respondents choose a company based on others’ customer service experiences shared online.
• Search engines, online ratings, and discussion forums are considered the most valuable online tools for researching customer service.

Yes, behemoth sites like Amazon.com, eBay, and Expedia have made it easy for customers to trade war stories in retail and travel for several years now. But local search is making it much easier for customers to post public reviews of local businesses–just do a local search for “salon” or “day care” in your town to see just how often local businesses are being reviewed in your market. 

Industry-specific customer review sites are also popping up at an amazing rate.  Do a search for “doctor reviews” for example and see how many sites come up. Or check out the RatingZ Network, a network of websites that allows customers to post reviews on just about every vertical at places like VetRatingz.com and MechanicRatingz.com.

Large or small, national or local, B2B or B2C, no business is safe from bad online customer service reviews anymore. How you treat your customers today could either come back to haunt you or reward you when they get back to their computers.

Measuring Relevance and Popularity

Here’s a quick history lesson for you: did you know that modern commercial search engines rely on the science of information retrieval (IR)? IR has been a science since around the 1950s, when computer-powered retrieval systems first came into use in libraries, research facilities and government labs. Early in the development of search systems, IR scientists realized that two critical components made up the majority of search functionality:

Relevance - the degree to which the content of a document matched the user’s query intention and terms. The relevance of a document increases if the terms or phrase queried by the user occurs multiple times and shows up in the title of the work or in important headlines or subheads.

Popularity - the relative importance, measured via citation (the act of one work referencing another, as often occurs in academic and business documents) of a given document that matches the user’s query. The popularity of a given document increases every time another document references it.

These two items were translated to Web search 40 years later in what search engine marketers now know as document analysis and link analysis.

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Understanding Search Engine Speed Bumps & Walls

In Part One of our “How Search Engines Work” series, we showed you  how search engines go to work the nanosecond you submit a query. But search engines aren’t perfect machines, and some very basic navigation errors can hinder or entirely prevent search engines from reaching your website’s content.

As search engine spiders crawl the Web, they rely on the architecture of links to find new Web pages and revisit those that may have changed. Complex links and deeply buried site content often create “speed bumps” in the search engines’ process. And data that cannot be accessed at all by spider-friendly links qualify as “walls.”

Possible “Speed Bumps” for SE Spiders:

• URLs with 2+ dynamic parameters –take this beast for example http://www.url.com/page.php?id=4&CK=34rr&User=%Tom%.  Spiders may be reluctant to crawl complex URLs like this because they often result in errors with non-human visitors.
• Pages with more than 100 unique links to other pages on the site. Spiders may not follow each one.
• Pages buried more than 3 clicks/links from the home page of a website. Unless there are many other external links pointing to them, spiders will often ignore deep pages.
• Pages requiring a “Session ID” or Cookie to enable navigation. Spiders may not be able to retain these elements the way your browser can.
• Pages that are split into “frames” can hinder crawling and cause confusion about which pages to rank in the results.

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