Caught in the Web

As local companies get caught up in the Internet frenzy, analysing the strategies of successful key players on the Web highlights that customer care, personalisation and brand building are vital ingredients.

The key to success over the Internet is to attract and then retain your Web surfers.

It is easy to get caught in the Web frenzy, either positively or negatively, so I thought it might be useful to bring together some insights gleaned from what is visible about some of the key players in the Web space. Is the Internet really assisting companies to help serve their customers better?

Fedex frequently says that it learned a long time ago the power of serving customers through technology. No wonder it has applied this to its view of engaging the Web in its ongoing quest around customer service. The company`s objective is to make the online experience the preferred way of doing business, gradually converting its clients to the convenience of Web-service. Currently this means that Web page views now outnumber calls into Fedex`s call centres.

This allows the call centres to deal with real problems while clients take care of their own information requirements via the online service. It also means that the company can provide increasingly better service while lowering its costs. For example, by Fedex`s own estimation, it would probably need about 10 more call centres if it was not for the online service.

Its secret from the outside looking in? The firm really uses the power of technology in an integrated way (it is not about the Web replacing call centres but it is about both, each fulfilling a specific purpose in their customer service approach). Fedex really cares about keeping clients informed and in control.

Another great example of applying the Web to great effect is that of Amazon.com, probably the most analysed Web company in the world. The key value in its approach to the Web is customer care. At first glance this would almost be at odds with the electronic world of the Web. Here is a company that rarely, if ever, sees or speaks to its customers directly. The contact is made over the Web and the relationship continues through the Web, but it is nonetheless famous for its happy customers.

Today Amazon serves over 8 million registered customers. So what drives this growth? This is a company that constantly innovates to find new products and services for its online customers. It innovates and others follow. Amazon increasingly hones its ability to tailor its products to individuals. The company has also learned that over the Web things have to be easy and fast. The site is easy to navigate, it gathers its information in little bits over time without imposing on customers with lengthy surveys, and uses the information to anticipate what clients will want. It has become very good at gathering information about customers and using that information to tailor products and services and to invent new ones.

The key to success over the Internet is to attract and then retain your Web surfers. To attract we need to understand the power of the brand, which has been covered in some depth in a previous column.

The next issue is to keep the surfers you have attracted. A key to doing this is personalisation. Understand who your customer is and what would be useful, interesting and exciting to them, and do this continuously. You have to keep them coming back for what they know you will have for them and also for the things that might be new today. They come to your site for their e-mail, updates to pages, stock quotes, virtual clubs to discuss and share content, and to use services like auctioning. The key, however, is in the personalisation. Your consumer gets only what they are interested in, either chosen specifically or what you have interpreted via analysing the data. Spam is still out.

Yahoo! is a good example of getting this right in a major way, with around 47 million registered people, and with an average Yahoo! user spending about an hour a month on the site.

The Web should also be used to take care of the regular stuff while your staff focuses on customers.

We have looked at Dell in a previous column and how the company has used technology to automate much of its supply chain. This simply means that most of the regular process stuff has become self-service to customers. Dell has a very slick service for its corporate clients, built around a personalised set of premier pages, which simply means that the client can access these pages to configure their requirements, order and track online and pay online. Meanwhile the sales force can focus on selling!

Not nearly enough focus goes into applying technology inside our organisations, to serve the people and management who work there. The intranet should be a powerful mechanism for disseminating information and connecting the organisation. For example, providing an online discussion forum, disseminating the ongoing and evolving plans of the organisation, and creating an executive dashboard that tracks the key metrics.

The problem with most discussions around the Web and its role in business is that it is often associated with a level of daring and cutting-edge that seems at odds with most organisations. This can do with a little bit of de-mystification.

The Web is primarily about connecting things together. The rest is simply about imagining how such connectivity can be put to work for your organisation. Can you benefit from customer self-service? I would be surprised if the answer was no, likewise could you benefit from "stickiness"? Sure! You have been doing this for years as you develop account plans to ensure ongoing business with existing customers. The trick is to connect this thinking to the electronic, connected world of the Web.