Keynote Competitive Research offers industry studies in the following vertical markets:
Provides a Complete View of e-Business Performance
Keynote industry studies provide you with a unique and comprehensive look at what drives online success
and what you can do to achieve it. Industry studies assess Web sites from the ground up; focusing not only on the
high-level business objectives of sites, such as customer acquisition and brand building, but also on the core
essentials, such as usability, visual appeal, availability, and responsiveness.
Industry Studies: How it Works
In order to provide a ground-up look at the performance of sites in an industry, Keynote implements three
unique methodologies to gather a comprehensive and broad set of customer experience and service level metrics on each site.
Customer Experience Rankings®
To get a complete picture of the customer experience, Keynote invites a large, demographically targeted sample of
participants to access a Web site from their normal setting. With the help of a virtual moderator
(a small downloadable browser companion, called the Keynote Connector) — participants are asked to perform
tasks and provide feedback as they use particular Web sites. Meanwhile, Keynote’s WebEffective tool tracks their
ability to complete these tasks, captures snapshots of the Web pages they are viewing, and collects their thoughts
and feelings as they interact with the sites. Keynote analysts use the behavioral, qualitative, and quantitative data
collected from the panelists to rank the sites according to how well they are accomplishing key business goals such as:
Keynote analysts then perform a driver analysis to identify which specific aspects of the sites have the biggest impact on these business goals. The analysts rank the sites on their performance on each of these areas. With this analysis, Keynote is able to tell companies what specific changes they should make on their sites in order to accomplish their business goals like acquiring new customers, building brand affinity, and driving customer loyalty.
Service Level Rankings™
To gather data on the operational excellence or service levels of sites in a study, Keynote uses its Transaction
Perspective® measurement computers ("agents") to replicate the actions of a consumer using the Internet Explorer
browser to perform a common transaction on the sites. The agents perform this transaction on each site once an hour between 8AM to
12AM EST for a one-month period. The agents track more than 35 performance metrics and collect over 6500 data points on each site.
Keynote analysts use these data points to rank the sites in the study on each of seven key performance factors, which are critical
aspects of an operationally excellent site. These factors include:
For each of these key performance factors, Keynote identifies which sites excel, which do not, and exactly what changes the sites can make to gain a competitive edge. Keynote then uses the rankings and scores for each of these key performance factors t o rank the sites in terms of their *overall* reliability and responsiveness, thereby providing a high-level competitive benchmark of operational excellence.
Scorecards for Financial Services
For the financial services sector, Keynote also provides a third methodology to capturing insights about industry best
practices. Keynote Scorecards are bi-annual financial industry scorecards that use a framework of 200+ expert-determined
criteria to measure sites’ ability to meet best practice guidelines.
Criteria are grouped into industry-specific "user tasks" (e.g., apply for an account, transact, learn & plan) and "categories" (functionality, usability, privacy & security, quality & availability) in order to help firms identify the strengths and/or opportunities in specific areas of their sites.
Scorecards are available for the following industries: banks, brokers
(both full-service and discount), credit card, insurance carriers, and mortgage.