The Top 10 Ways to Make a Website Customer-Centric

Most business leaders think their websites work better than they do. Too often, the evidence they're given from department managers about the effectiveness of their websites fails to match the customer experience. When evidence is gathered from a community of customers who are polled in focus groups or in managed communities, the information is deeper and richer than what's available through surveys. We outline 10 actions organizations can take to make their websites exciting destinations for visitors in general and customers in particular.

• The view of the end customer is often misrepresented in the evaluation of an organization's website, leading to a false sense of how well the site is performing.
• For a website to be customer-centric, the organization responsible for the site must determine the most important goal of the site.
• Most websites are suboptimized; even though individual areas of the site work well, the overall impact does not match customer expectations.
• The best approach to creating customer centricity on the website is to have an internal design and execution team that spans departments and channels (for example, sales, supply chain, marketing and IT).

• For learning purposes, examine the top-rated websites that are alternatives or competitive to your site, and understand why they are seen as more relevant and entertaining (effective, useful) destinations.
• Carefully measure trend data to see how your site compares to competing sites, and report this quarterly to the customer-centric Web team.
• Communicate with customers and all internal staff on the current state of your customer-centricity efforts and how they are improving — or not improving. Use customer insights to evaluate the website's degree of customer centricity, in addition to internally driven information.

The art of listening to the customer is taking on the attributes of behavioral science, rather than an IT project or the selection of CRM-related software application. This includes the collection of a broad range of statistical data on consumer communications (see Note 1).

Analytical tools are readily available to track a customer's interaction steps. For example, customers may begin a process or start looking for information about a product or service before they reach your website (often referred to as "off-portal"), and reach your website only to continue with another form of interaction, for example, telephoning your organization and being placed in a voice response unit. From there, they might transfer to a service agent, and eventually return to the corporate website — or leave for a competitor's site.

Other tools can generate personalized content, and still others can measure the efficacy of any and all sections of a website.

Despite technology advances, visitors to websites continue to find the experiences largely unsatisfying. We have gathered observations on the top 10 traits of high-performing sites (such as Amazon, Moosejaw, Staples and Future Shop). Below are the top 10 best practices that are used by the world's leading websites. Consider adopting them for use as appropriate in your organization.

We have arranged these 10 best practices in the order they should be undertaken. It is not that one is less important than the next, but that there is a sequential order to building a great site.

An issue that continues to hinder customer centricity on websites is the lack of coordinated action across teams. Often, separate teams or individuals are tasked with functions such as (although not all organizations manage websites the same way):

• Building and managing the technical infrastructure for a site (IT)
• Designing the content for the landing page of a website (marketing) versus underlying pages or links (for example, marketing content and sales content, service, logistics information, billing, supply chain data — where design and process steps may not match the landing page)
• Site analytics (business intelligence team, looking at uptime, click rates, traffic volume, security attacks)
• Running the sales process (sales)
• Running the customer self-service processes (customer service and support)

The challenge is that these groups do not always work tightly as a single team under a single manager on an agreed-to set of measurable objectives.

User Advice: Whether you create a formal team reporting into one department, or a virtual team reporting into a C-level executive, be sure to centralize the coordinating of the project under an individual with broad authority to act. Base decisions for improvement on customer descriptions of what specific parts of the Web experience are successful, and/or are not successful.

The first thing to determine, prior to going through the list and understanding how it might apply to your enterprise, is the primary goal of your site. Most sites participate in more than one of these activities, but it is important to recognize which is your central focus and which are secondary emphases. Gartner has broadly defined four types:

• Informer: Gartner.com is a good example of this type of site. The design of the processes and creation of information is meant to drive traffic to the site and support membership.
• Influencer: Honda and P&G are good examples of sites where the information is meant to enforce the brand and selling that might happen through a partner, retail store or other channel.
• Seller: The goal is to create an environment for transactions, and driving business online. Moosejaw.com, Amazon.com and Overstock.com are prime examples. These sites invest most of their time and effort on tools to support sales transactions. The information built into the site is just enough to support an online sale. The seller site will put a tremendous amount of focus on supply chain, order entry, configuration and other e-commerce functions. The best sites build in superior customer service experiences, such as returns and advice to differentiate themselves.
• Facilitator: The facilitator seeks to extend the relationship that it may have with the customer through direct sales, branch office or retail operation out to the online channel. Any company, from a retail bank to a health insurer, manufacturer or others (examples include Pitney Bowes, Banco Santander and SouthWest Airlines), would be completing an integrated multichannel environment.

User Advice: Begin the process of defining the website as one of these types, or a variation thereof, and map the top processes and technologies using language that demonstrates exactly what business metrics you hope to achieve.

Many organizations use a very narrow range of customer feedback to determine whether a process on the website was effective. For example, was a shopping cart transaction completed or not, or how many knowledge cases were accessed on the website, e-mails were received or chat sessions run. These are not as meaningful as the insights that would be available from the dialogue in a managed community where more open-ended questions could be posed, or deeper sets of information analyzed. For example, we have seen sites where customers rated the individual interaction as a success, but when asked in a session on a Web community, would elaborate that, while successful, the interaction was not satisfactory.

User Advice: Plan to fund a pilot program that forms a customer community, perhaps for a small product line. The goal is to compare the customer feedback from the existing methods with the new insight, and measure the value of any resulting benefits to the community.

Be proactive. A corollary of dynamic content creation is the move to becoming proactive in making real-time and relevant offers to the visitor to your website. Every organizational type can do something in this area. A government agency can send alerts specific to a borough or district, while a private bank can provide a notification on new offers when a client is securely logged onto the site with a user name and password. Dynamic content is important, but the next generation of content not only is interesting, but also provides advice specific to the customer's intentions with that organization — whether the customer is aware of this or not. An example of where the customer is not "aware" of his or her need for advice is in medical insurance, or with the government on voting dates, registration, parking or garbage collection.

User Advice: Use a cross-departmental team to discuss what end customers most want to hear from you, correlate this with actually asking the end customer, and set about obtaining permission and buy-in before delivering any messages on any channel.

Given the popularity of sites such as Facebook and Twitter, one of the most significant changes in the Web is that consumers aged 40 years and younger seem to want greater personalization. The desire to be heard and understood in part explains how, according to Gartner research, from 2000 to 2009, worldwide Internet growth was up 361%, and mobile phone usage was up 289%, while Facebook went from an idea to 250 million users.

Visitors to websites and users of mobile Internet devices are expecting more-unique content. This will require more data collection and analysis. It requires aligning content with particular customer segments, as well as better communication of the availability of that content.

User Advice: Examine the cost and benefit of moving from static content delivery (not unique to a specific visitor or customer segment) to a practice of optimizing content delivery to customer wants and needs. Don't forget mobile customer processes and how they link to the Web.

Some of the most important product and design features that corporations have developed in the past six years have been based on ideas that did not come from the organization itself, but rather from the customer community. The range of organizations that has engaged customers to create and improve products and services spans all industries and most geographies. Currently, this ability to listen and moderate has been a standard feature of only the top 10% of organizations. The primary factor has been a shortage of trained employees and a poor understanding of the value of communities and "crowdsourcing." This is when you use as large a set of contributors as possible to solve problems and generate ideas (see Note 2).

User Advice: Rather than recreate the wheel, marketing organizations should look to the best practices already defined by leading users of communities, such as P&G, Kraft Foods, Starwood and HP, and should involve communities in a wide range of corporate activities.

In many cases, customers are more savvy than the organization in creating and managing social-network sites. The cost and complexity of creating and managing a social site have dropped to the point where every organization faces at least one community or blog. Rather than leave collaboration up to customers and others interested in your company (or university or government agency), investigate the advantages of setting up your own social-networking capability. Establish the purpose of the network to your organization, such as the goal of understanding how to improve a business process like marketing effectiveness, brand or reputation management, selling or servicing.

User Advice: Rather than relying on customers to make all the connections themselves, a small investment in resources can help build a social network for your customers. While it is valuable for the business to create and manage a customer community, it must also acknowledge customer-created and customer-led communities. It may be appropriate to connect to this other community — with the appropriate permission and after explaining the benefit to the other community of the connection.

Failing to connect Web self-service with human-assisted service is a source of frustration for customers. Organizations have spent the past 10 years adding the Internet, mobility, partners and/or local branches to their call centers. The implicit promise to customers is that all of these communication channels will be integrated. Links to third-party sites (such as communities, forums and blogs) make the challenge even more difficult. However, the technology to provide unified communications exists, as are the CRM business applications to create consistent customer interactions.

User Advice: Survey a cross-section of users (for example, most-profitable customers, newest customers, defecting customers, midtier customers) to understand their degree of satisfaction with your multichannel communications, then launch projects to implement the suggestions.

Along with the competency to show customers and visitors to the website how the organization is listening and responding, it is important to expose the customers' point of view and their feedback. A crucial part of the success of any Web initiative is to show the customers:

• What was said
• When it was said
• Who said it (this could be a persona, or the actual name of a person or organization)
• How the community rated that remark or advice
• What steps were taken to respond to the input

User Advice: The act of showing customers that they are being heard is as much art as science. A great deal of cultural anthropology and ethnography goes into responding. Consider this when hiring for this position.

A well-known phrase says that next to doing the right thing, the next most important step to take is to let people know you are doing the right thing. We find that most organizations undercommunicate their progress in embracing the social aspects of their customer initiatives. This results in the customer or visitor being unaware of improvements to the website, or of new features, or of the organization's degree of "listening."

User Advice: Set up a formal process for communication, and demand that the resource assigned to this task documents the types of communication and the responses from the customers.

Ask yourself: What is so fun and rewarding about this website, anyway?

We are seeing the acceleration and magnification of an observation made by Marshall McCluhan over 40 years ago in The Medium is the Message. McCluhan was one of the first experts to realize that immersive technologies such as TV had an important dynamic: People interact with the medium for the sake of the interaction alone. This means that with more communication channels, we should expect people to spend more time interacting through posts, tweets, messaging, e-mailing or speaking. This is, in fact, exactly what is happening. The implication is that there will be an almost insatiable demand for content, entertainment, advice and cross-linking.

User Advice: To compete in the market, an organization's website has to show a high degree of customer centricity, or it will risk visitors seeking alternative sites with more relevant and entertaining (effective, useful) destinations. Carefully measure trend data to see how your site compares to competing sites, and report this quarterly to the customer-centric Web team.

• Coordinate responsibilities for the entire customer experience.
• Determine the top goal of your website as informer, influencer, seller or facilitator (including the metrics that define the goal achieved).
• Model the level of success of the top Web processes, including a range of customer-provided data.
• Get personal, delivering relevant, focused advice and offers in real time.
• Create Web content that is dynamic and relevant.
• Learn to listen: Integrate the concept of communities and the collective.
• Connect your customers with their peers.
• Integrate the rest of the interaction channels with your website.
• Make customer impressions of your site visible internally and externally.
• Make the site fun and rewarding. Ask yourself: What is so fun and rewarding about this website, anyway?