Interview:

Mirroring the Way that Customers Shop & Buy: The New Panasonic Web Site

Intro: In September 2007, Panasonic launched a completely redesigned consumer Web site. More than a year in the making, the new site more intuitively reflects the tasks and processes customers go through when shopping for electronic devices. Benchmark recently caught up with Jeremy Dalnes, Panasonic Consumer Electronic’s vice president of e-business, to learn what’s behind the redesign and Panasonic’s approach to customer experience.

Benchmark: What has been your methodology for delving into the customer mindset, evaluating the customer experience and determining customer expectations — both prior to the Web site redesign and on an ongoing basis?

Jeremy Dalnes: We use a variety of online measurement tools to understand the customer experience, in addition to Keynote Transaction Perspective. One of those is iPerceptions, a tool we use to measure customer satisfaction on our Web site. The other tool we have is a feedback button provided by Opinion Lab. If a visitor has an issue they can click that and respond, and every single one of those responses is evaluated by our consumer affairs department and gets distributed to a wide variety of folks.

We measure and we watch trend lines of satisfaction across our site, at a variety of different touch points. There’s navigation, there’s product depth information, there’s search — and it all rolls up to what we’re hoping to provide, which is one visit resolution.