Website Design Articles :: Useful Tools

Customer Focus Calculator

As proud as you may be of your company and your product or service, most customers only care about how well you can help them meet their wants and needs. If you want more of them to buy, your focus has to be on your customer. How do you communicate that to them? With the words you use on your site. Are you talking mostly about them and their needs or are you talking mostly about yourself?

To help you answer that question, Future Now have developed a unique and free customer focus analysis tool that counts certain words on your site that are key indicators of whether your focus is on the customer or not.

Dubbed 'we-we', it checks your page for self-focused words such as "I," "we," "our," and your company name (which functions much like "we"), as well as for customer-focused words such as "you" and "your." It then calculates several ratios that indicate whether your visitors are likely to perceive you as genuinely focused on them. The most important is the customer focus ratio (CFR). That's the ratio of customer-focused words to self-focused words. Then you can compare all the CFRs with a complementary set of self-focus ratios. Run the tool to check your site; run it to check a variety of sites. You're likely to have an eye-opening opportunity to see your site through your customer's eyes.

If you want a rough guideline, there seems to be a clear difference between sites with CFRs of 60 percent and higher, and sites with CFRs below 60 percent. If your site scores 35 percent, you can be sure that you have room to improve.

So test. Test each part of your site. Now look at your text, and make whatever changes you need to make to ensure your visitors feel your only focus is their satisfaction.

As you use it, keep in mind this is nothing more than a handy, but rough guide that will help you focus on something important. There are lots of variables and also remember there are no shortcuts to writing great copy.