About Customer Carewords

About

Gerry McGovern Partners

Customer Carewords: Customer-centric since 1994

Customer Carewords is built around the following ideas:

Customers come to your public website or intranet to complete tasks. (Staff are the intranet's customers.)
Customers have a small set of top tasks (the Long neck). These tasks are vital to the success of your website and you must seek to continuously improve the ability of your customers to complete them quickly and easily.
Customers use a small set of words to describe their top tasks (carewords).
The words that your customers use to describe their tasks are often very different from the words your organization uses.
Organizational words (jargon, marketing waffle) are one of the key reasons for task failure on the Web.

Customer Carewords is a set of research tools and techniques that helps you identify on an ongoing basis:

Your customers' top tasks (and their related words).
How well your customers are able to complete their top tasks on your website (completion rates, completion times, disaster rates).
What specific factors on your website are causing problems as your customers seek to complete their tasks (the navigation, the content, the search, etc.).

The company was founded by Gerry McGovern, who started his Web career in 1994. Gerry is widely regarded as the number one worldwide authority on managing web content as a business asset. He has published four highly acclaimed books on web content and has spoken on the subject in 35 countries. Our clients include: the BBC, HP, HSBC, IKEA, Microsoft, Pioneer, Rolls-Royce, Schlumberger, Tetra Pak, UK Ministry of Justice, U.S. Internal Revenue Service, Vanguard and Wells Fargo.

We have a network of partners who help us implement Customer Carewords across North America, Europe and Asia/Pacific. Our partners have deep experience with creating customer-centric, task-managed websites utilizing Customer Carewords.

The primary activity on the Web is reading. Words drive action. We have spent years identifying the words that work best with customers. Organization words are often different to customer words. A car designer, for example, may think about "engines", "design" and "brand", while a car consumer is likely to be thinking about "affordability", "reliability" and "low fuel consumption".

We have built up databases of words and phrases to which various customer groups react favorably. We also have databases of words that organizations love to use. Through special statistical analysis, we can clearly show the difference in thinking and emphasis between the customer and the organization. Our Customer Carewords databases are particularly strong in the areas of intranets, government, business and universities.

Customer Carewords is about fact, not opinion. We get customers to vote and so we get numbers associated with words. One of the problems with content is that it has been controlled far too much by emotion and opinion. Customer Carewords shows in a precise way what customers really want when they come to your website.

Search words will bring people to your website but Customer Carewords will bring people through it. Someone may search for "executive MBA" but when they arrive at a university website other terms such as "advance your career" become important.

Customer Carewords is part of what we call a task management approach. Customers come to your website to complete tasks. The words that mean most to them describe the tasks that mean most to them. Identifying and simplifying the top tasks of your website is probably the most important thing you can do.

Customer Carewords helps you identify top tasks. Our Task Performance Indicator offers techniques for measuring task completion and gives you a clear roadmap for improving your top tasks. In addition, our Customer Centric Index allows you to understand what your customers truly care about when they come to your website. These solutions allow you to focus your scarce resources on the areas where they will achieve maximum improvement and impact.

Since 1994, we have been working on understanding the unique characteristics of web content. Customer Carewords solutions are the result of intensive and ongoing research. If you think choosing the right words is fundamental to your website's success then we can help you better achieve that success.

About Gerry McGovern, Founder and CEO of Customer Carewords
Our partners
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