Measure customer success to measure yours

Recently Rashmi had written if the page views are dead essentially in a world of rich internet apps the concept of page is diminishing so how does page view mean anything.

I think the intent behind page views was to check how much customers like your site, the question to be asked is how would they like your site. It'll only be if "their" goals are being met.

Here are my thoughts in context of Slideshare.net, but these apply to other domains as well.

Define user segments, you might already have done personas.. in any case.. one way could be publishers, consumers (might be a separate consumer who is download heavy) , by standards/occasional consumers

The goal of each of these guys is different but connected. The publisher’s goal would be to offer great content and gain visibility.. so how do you measure if content is great or not - one way is star rating, another could be sharing of links by other users (more thinking can draw more ideas), similarly visibility - if you track who is getting how much visibility (in terms of views) and then map these two, you’ll see how successful are in you in helping publisher achieve her goal.

Another matrix you could build on top of this is what I call “Zero to Sixty” - as in acceleration measure (like in cars) is amount of time it takes for someone to visibility, may be that 10% presentations on on slideshare.net reach 10,000 viewership in 30 days

For consumers - they care about quality of content, so you can start taking the above matrix and looking at it at site level and see if the quality of content is improving.

The other part with consumers is presentation completion rates - how many reached to the end. And second aspect is how much time.. a parallel example to this is market research using online surveys, there are mathematical models available to find outliers (by measuring who run through surveys very quickly etc..). You could explore similar models to see what is the amount of time one should spend on online presentations for it to be valid.

These could be interesting stats to include in product blog as well….

Similarly with other user segments.. this really tells you how successful your product is in meeting customer needs which will drive business value..

Lets take an example of facebook - why would one visit facebook - to connect and communicate. I have had a facebook account and I do visit it once in a while - am I a loyal customer .. I don't think so, am more of curious customer. There is less in the site that pulls me. For facbook, it's just a repeat visit.. they could look at frequency of this and decide if they made progress or not.

Instead if they see how many friends i have added by inviting others, or if I have posted content, they'll find I am not as active. That should say that for some reason am not such an 'involved' customer, even if I visit every so often..

Steve Jobs had said once that the purpose of the company is not to make money but to build great products. It's important to measure customer success and company's success will follow.