Task Completion: A simple but powerful metric

Much of the discourse surrounding voice of the customer analytics centers around online customer satisfaction. I want to talk a little bit another another tremendously powerful metric that sometimes gets overlooked–task completion. While task completion will never displace its big brother, satisfaction, it can be just as powerful a metric for websites where success is cut and dry, and here I’m make specific reference to transactional sites and lead generation sites.

These kinds of sites are not destinations. They are not like Facebook, MySpace, recently acquired Bebo, or any other of the burgeoning Web 2.0 communities. Visitors are not onsite for the heady sense of self-casting that Web 2.0 purveys; rather, they have come with the intent of doing something. They have taken time out of their busy days for very specific reasons, and they are undertaking very precise tasks. The most critical challenge as a site owner in such a situation is shepherding people to the completion of these tasks. If websites are to be held accountable as mature interactive channels, then this maxim must ring true.

If visitors’ tasks are not complete, it is of little value if they are left feeling engaged or if the site managed to monopolize a sizable chunk of their time. For these sites to operate at optimal efficiency, buyers must be buying, support seekers must be obtaining support, content creators must be creating, and learners must be learning.

This is not just a deep rooted belief of mine; it is also a contention based on a solid bedrock of evidence. Consider the following results, taken from iPerceptions’ automotive industry database and covering the period from June 2007 to January 2008, inclusive. Task completion was a tremendously strong ROI predictor among visitors with a purchase horizon of 3 months or less—even stronger than overall site satisfaction. Close to 70% of respondents who completed their onsite tasks also expressed an increased likelihood to purchase a vehicle further to their website visit. This share fell to 63% among visitors who reported that their overall site satisfaction was “Good” or better. These findings stem from a dataset of more than 15,000 respondents; therefore, the sampling error is negligible.

Task completion is a sensible, simple, and powerful metric. Most importantly, it ties back to hard actions taken by visitors. While respondents can be more forgiving when reporting their satisfaction with a website or their loyalty patterns, often opting to cling to a safe, noncommittal response, when they are asked whether they completed their tasks, it’s a cut and dry equation—they either did or they didn’t.