InformationWeek

December 4, 2000

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Help For Building Sticky Web Sites

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By Lenny Liebmann, reprinted from InternetWeek

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"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."

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.

Kevin Dobbs Photo by Gary Laufman 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."