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December 4, 2000

Help For Building Sticky Web Sites

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

By Lenny Liebmann, reprinted from InternetWeek

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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.