It has been my experience that business owners often cannot define what success is for their websites. So, they can’t even frame ‘need’ correctly.

Often you have to turn the questions back to them and start with “How will you know if you are winning?” If the business owner can (with or without your help) articulate what determines success, then you can move to how they can get what they need.

This is one of the most important reasons why investing in smart people is so critical for analytics, the analyst need to be able to take business success (and failure) criteria and translate those to the available quantitative and qualitative measures available via survey, customer service, and web analytics data.

A software package, no matter how robust just can’t do this.