InformationWeek

December 4, 2000

http://www.informationweek.com/815/webapps.htm

Help For Building Sticky Web Sites

Simple, inexpensive site enhancements can increase visits, retention, and conversion

By Lenny Liebmann, reprinted from InternetWeek

hile the industry buzzes with the latest, greatest ideas about supply-chain integration, customer-acquisition strategies, and portal architectures, many E-business managers are focusing on a simple truth: If you want people to do business with you online, it helps to have a really good Web site.

Managers also realize that while the overall quality of a Web site may depend on factors such as interface design, links to back-office applications, and rich content, it doesn't hurt to add a nifty feature here and there. In fact, simple and relatively inexpensive site enhancements can substantially increase visits, retention, and customer conversion.

"Plain vanilla sites just don't cut it anymore," says Lydia Loizides, an E-business analyst at Jupiter Research. "The people visiting your site today are much more familiar with the Web and have much higher expectations than they did a couple of years ago. If you don't meet those expectations, you'll lose them."

Loizides points to site-search functions as a primary example. "Your online customers want to be able to find a wide variety of information about your products or services on your site," she says. "If they can't find it easily, they'll end up calling customer service or, even worse, just abandoning the site entirely."

Jupiter has hard numbers to back up Loizides' statement. According to a recent Jupiter survey, the top reasons why visitors leave Web sites are:

o Slow or failed links;

o The inability to find the information they're looking for; and

o Problems with search functions, including results that are too broad to be useful.

Allen Noren, managing editor at technical book publisher O'Reilly & Associates Inc. in Sebastopol, Calif., is grappling with the issue of site search. He began managing O'Reilly's online presence in 1992, when the company made its materials available via the now-defunct Gopher search system. During that time, Noren became keenly aware of how flawed most search tools are.

"They're very difficult to optimize," Noren says. "If someone did a search for 'Perl' on our site, for example, it wouldn't be very helpful for them to get every single reference without any weighting or organization of the search results."

The situation heated up even more for Noren during the last year for two reasons. First, the sheer volume of content on the site had risen significantly. Second, O'Reilly was preparing to launch its Safari service, which made the publisher's materials available over the Web on a subscription basis.

"If people are paying to get access to your content in real time, that obviously makes search an absolutely critical function," Noren says.

Allen Noren Photo by David Weintraub Noren's solution was to turn to site-search service provider Atomz.com. Using an application service provider model, Atomz connects to O'Reilly's site via the Web and indexes all of the site's content on its own servers. When visitors to the O'Reilly site click on the search link, they're transparently directed to results pages that have the look and feel of the O'Reilly site, but are actually hosted on Atomz servers.

The search results don't look like typical URL lists with weighting percentages that most site searches provide. Instead, relevant documents are presented by category, title, and subtitle. The covers of relevant books are even displayed, lending a more graphical feel to the user's search. Users can then click to a document's index or summary, letting them quickly ascertain the relevance of a given item. It also eliminates duplicate entries that cloud many other search engine's results.

In addition to helping site visitors locate the products they want more quickly, the Atomz service has also made life easier for O'Reilly's staff. For one thing, the ASP model made implementation easier.

"We just let [Atomz] connect to our site, and we were up and running in minutes,'' Noren says. "And every night, it updates its indexing of our site automatically. It's an extremely simple process."

The comprehensive, accurate indexing of the site's content is also useful for O'Reilly's customer-service staffers. "Not all of them are very technical or totally familiar with our content," Noren says. "Having such a powerful search tool can really help them answer callers' questions much more quickly."

Noren cautions fellow Webmasters not to think that search-engine implementation alone can deliver the navigation features that users want. To make the whole system work, everyone who generates or manages content must use similar HTML tags. "A consistent template is essential to presenting search results in a way that's extremely easy for the viewer to scan visually," Noren says.

Retailers are finding other ways to help customers find the specific products they're looking for and make their sites more engaging at the same time. At CornerHardware.com Inc.'s site, for example, a special feature called Tool Adviser helps online shoppers figure out exactly which item best suits their individual needs.

"From our experience in bricks-and-mortar hardware sales, we knew that power tools was one product category where consumers typically have a lot of questions," says Ken Hite, CIO for the San Francisco company. "It's also a high-volume category for us, so we wanted to make sure online shoppers were fully empowered to make a buying decision."

When customers shopping for power tools on the CornerHardware site click on the Tool Adviser logo, they're presented with a series of multiple-choice questions that cover selection parameters such as price, projected types of jobs and/or materials to work with, and frequency of use. Based on these selection criteria, Tool Adviser then presents the three products that best meet that customer's specific requirements.

The customer can then add the item to a shopping cart or drill down for more information about that particular product. The customer can also change criteria to see how that would affect the selection. Tool Adviser also provides a "Why ask?" link that explains to the customer how any parameter affects the application's selection logic.

While he declines to give specific figures, Hite says power-tool sales rose measurably after the deployment of Tool Adviser, and the company is planning to add similar features for other product categories. He also says the impact of an application such as Tool Adviser goes beyond sales in one particular product category because it makes the site and the CornerHardware brand appear easy to use and service-oriented.

"When you're in retail, you can only compete on three things: price, selection, and customer service," Hite says. "Since we don't plan on getting wrapped up in price wars, we need to excel at customer service. Tool Adviser supports that overall strategy."

Hite's Web-development team turned to E-services software vendor Brightware Inc. to create its Tool Adviser feature. Brightware's Concierge product allowed CornerHardware hardware experts to create a product selection decision tree that could then easily be translated into a graphical Web presentation. The Concierge tool also has features such as side-by-side product comparison.

Though the Brightware tool can accelerate creation of such site features, Web managers should still take their time in crafting the questions that are presented to shoppers.

"You have to ask them enough questions that you can pick the right item for them," says Hite, who ran the Tool Adviser interface by a variety of customer focus groups before launching it on the site. "But you have to avoid overwhelming them with a lot of technical jargon--especially if you're designing your questionnaire for novice buyers."

Web-site applications that let users enter information about their individual needs can do more than just steer visitors to the right product or content area. They can also help motivate a customer to make a purchasing decision. Increasingly, site designers are developing tools that help potential buyers justify the purchase of a product or service by allowing them to calculate the bottom-line benefits they could receive, based on their company's specific characteristics.

At Workscape.com, prospective customers can evaluate their return on investment for a wide range of business processes that the human resources software ASP can automate.

"It could be something as simple as providing employees with their pay stubs online, instead of printing and distributing them manually," says Kevin Dobbs, VP of the Reston, Va., company. "Someone may understand intuitively that it makes sense to do, but he or she may still need some hard numbers to present to management."

Kevin Dobbs Photo by Gary Laufman The Workscape spreadsheets let prospective users fill in all the information necessary to do a calculation of return on investment, including the size of the company, the method currently used to perform the given business process, and more general information about the company's human resources and accounting practices. Because customers may ascribe to any one of several approaches to measuring financial performance, Workscape's ROI tools can deliver results using a variety of metrics. Examples include payback period, net present value, and internal rate of return.

To bolster the credibility of the results it presents, Workscape has worked with an independent consulting group to establish the benchmarks it uses in its calculations.

"We supplemented our 'before-and-after' experiences with research to come up with a combined model for projecting customer ROI," Dobbs says. "That lends more weight to what we're presenting."

Dobbs says a significant number of Workscape's new customers have explicitly attributed their ultimate decision to go with the ASP's service to the ROI calculation tool. And, as with O'Reilly's use of the Atomz search engine, the calculator has also become a resource for Workscape's staff.

"It's just as useful for a salesperson on a sales call as it is on the Web," says Dobbs. "It's a very good way to quickly build a business case for a particular customer's characteristics."

Not all Web-site calculators have to be as complex as Workscape's to be effective. The Bush-Cheney campaign site, for example, featured a simple calculator function that let voters enter their own income and marital status to see exactly how much money the presidential candidate's proposed tax cut would save them. In just a few seconds, that feature gave site visitors a single dollar amount that probably delivered a more powerful message than a multipage PDF file outlining the economic theory behind the proposed tax cut.

"Calculators are becoming very popular on many types of Web sites, especially in the financial-services sector," says Jupiter's Loizides. "It's a great way to create interaction between you and your customer, and to provide content that's fully personalized."

Loizides adds that such calculators are a good way to keep up with changes in customer characteristics--whether it's a consumer's weight or a company's size. "Every time they enter values into your calculator, it's another opportunity to re-assess their changing needs," she says.

Calculators aren't the only way to demonstrate, rather than simply try to explain, the value of what you're selling on your Web site. For Opto 22, a developer of Web industrial and manufacturing equipment-management systems based in Temecula, Calif., an online demo including live video feeds made the most sense.

The Opto 22 demo page lets visitors watch a live shot of a small box at Opto 22's headquarters that contains a light bulb and a motorized wheel. A data display below the feed indicates the on/off status of the bulb and the wheel, as well as the temperature in the box. With a click of the mouse, site visitors can turn the light bulb on or off, as well as start or stop the wheel.

Benson Hoagland, Opto 22's marketing director, says the demonstration is as compelling as it is simple. "It's actually pretty easy for someone to extrapolate from the bulb and the wheel to their own real-world manufacturing or industrial environments," Hoagland says. "Plus, whether or not we want to admit it, we're all big kids who get a kick out of turning a light bulb on and off over the Net."

Video feeds are actually popping up all over the Web. From so-called "voyeur" sites to Discovery.com's selection of live cams that include everything from a baby in a crib to global weather patterns, site managers are finding that video feeds offer the ultimate in fresh content.

Hoagland says video feeds such as his company's don't have to deliver the image quality of entertainment sites, so bandwidth consumption can be kept to a minimum. "People aren't watching these cams like they watch a DVD movie," he says. "They just want to be able to register what's going on on the other side of the Net."

He also keeps costs down by using self-contained Ethernet cameras, which sell for about $300, rather than desktop cameras connected to full-function PCs. "That not only saves you the cost of the PC, it also saves you the trouble of supporting the PC over time," Hoagland says.

Other sites are starting to use video in even more innovative ways, too. At Athlete.com Inc. in New York, chief technology officer Howard Greenblatt is creating a special site area where geographically separated family members can view videos of children's sports events. "The great thing about the Web is that you can serve your membership even when they're not at their home PCs," Greenblatt says.

The AthleteTV section of the site lets someone with a video camera that can connect to his or her PC broadcast a recorded event to a limited number of viewers who have the necessary passcode. As those viewers watch the event, they can interact with each other by chat, voice, or even via their own PC cams if they have them.

"It's a wonderful way to enable family and friends to participate in the event, even if Dad's on the road or the grandparents live far away," Greenblatt says. "It's also a good potential source of revenue for us."

The idea of linking site users with each other to build community and provide value-added services is nothing new. Before the Web existed, dial-up bulletin boards managed to grow and even achieve profitability by linking users in primitive, ASCII-based chat applications. Similar functions are now being used on Web sites to build communities and enhance site "stickiness." But today's online discussion tools are far more sophisticated.

Lars Olsen, president of New York 3-D software developer Viewpoint Corp., sees his site's discussion area as more than just another informational feature. For one thing, such areas are very effective ways of delivering highly responsive technical support at relatively little cost. "Our customers are very proficient at a lot of things," Olsen says, "so they can answer a very broad range of questions for each other."

Olsen also says that site-discussion areas are extremely fertile sources for market research. That's one reason he decided to get his company's discussion capabilities provided by fellow New Yorkers at ASP CoolBoard.com Inc. As with the relationship between O'Reilly and Atomz, Viewpoint site visitors who click on a discussion link are transferred to pages hosted on CoolBoard servers. CoolBoard's software not only manages discussion threads and topic navigation, it also assesses discussion activity, providing Olsen with monthly reports he can use to make a variety of development and marketing decisions.

"Customers will tell each other about lots of things that they might never think of letting you know directly," Olsen says. "The information we get from CoolBoard is very useful in helping us stay in close touch with what our customers are thinking and feeling."

Along with discussion areas, companies are focusing on a variety of other site features to bolster customer support and communications, including instant messaging, live chat, and even voice. Many site managers are using new tools for managing FAQ content to make it easier to search and navigate. Others have created innovative applications that make it easier for customers to get answers to their questions without having to interact with a human help-desk operator.

Cisco Systems' Technical Assistance Center, for example, lets users submit router output directly into an application that responds automatically with an assessment.

"Effective customer support depends on two things: having the technical knowledge customers need and getting it to them in the way that's fastest and most convenient for them," says TAC director Steve Gordon. "The Cisco Output Interpreter fulfills both of those requirements."

Of course, not all site features are quite so practical. From Burton Snowboard Co.'s full-bore Shockwave graphics to the online crossword puzzles on Fool.com, Web managers are finding that it makes more sense to differentiate their sites with special capabilities and features. And, according to Jupiter's Loizides, users are more eager than ever for what they might encounter.

"Designing your entire site to accommodate the least-experienced user doesn't make sense today," she says. "You're not dealing with newbies any more."

Photo of Noren by David Weintraub
Photo of Dobbs by Gary Laufman