Gene Alvarez

One of the things I have noticed over the years is that websites continually change their UI without much notice. This common place practice follows what many software firms have done to their enterprise customers. However, today I visited a site that did something different. Http://www.corporateperks.com/ offered a Guide-bot (after logging in) that asks if you would like to be shown around the site so that you can take full advantage of the site. I thought this was a great way to be customer centric when introducing new UI features to your web sites. It is based on the idea that not everyone using the web site is in the IT field or is willing to figure it out on their own. Perhaps you may disagree with me or know of more sites like this but I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on the subject. How much should we help the user when we change our sites UI?

In a discussion with others about whether to Tweet or Blog, and if tweets are of value to the followers, I came to the realization that it is not the value of one individual social tool (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, eblogger, etc). The value is in the collection of tools one uses to communicate with their community of friends and associates and the content delivered via the tool.

For example, a while ago, I posted an entry as to whether to tweet or blog and my followers told me that some preferred the blog because is was a little “meatier” while others preferred the tweet because of the brevity of the response and a feeling of interaction and then my YouTube followers liked the see and listen format. Because of this, I use tweets, blog posts, and YouTube posts as well as my Facebook, Plaxo, and Linkedin status line to keep my followers up to date on my research and other activities.

These thoughts then lead me to think that social tools are just like tools in a carpenter’s toolbox where one saw is used to cut rough framing material and yet another for fine molding finish work and it is the carpenter that delivers the value to the customer.

Accordingly, is your organization taking a toolbox view of social tools or is it just trying to build a relationship with only one type of saw in it’s toolbox?

An interesting story on a court ruling that enabled students to rate teachers sparked an equally interest discuss discussion around reviewing people performance.

As the e-commerce person here, I have been talking with clients about product rating for years. It has been my belief that with all product review ratings the reader should apply the “grain of salt theory”.

Ratings or reviews are only part of the customer (in the case parents and students) evolution process and are subject to gaming by many parties.

Moreover, one rating alone does not tell the whole story; have you gone to move just because it says “Excellent Movie…” NY Times on the poster – Most likely not.

However as the producer of a product or service once should be aware that people has a public forum to use and that anyone with an opinion can shout it out on the internet. Even if that person never even used the product or service, they may just not like the company for instance. Therefore, I thought I would list some attributes that bring value to ratings.

• Depth – How detailed is the rating? – Only the word “great” or did the writer provide information on their position?
• Number- How many are there only one or thousands?
• Timeliness or the rating – Are the ratings current or three years old?
• The profile of the rater – Do they do many ratings on these types of products or services? Are they an avid user of these types of products or services? Simple things like are the male or female can also help, for example male skiers will rate ski’s differently than female skiers, also rating can vary by age of the reviewer.
• Belief in the rating quality – Ever read a rating the looks like the product manufacturer wrote?

Therefore, product reviews are only a guideline they are not law and with all things – “Caveat emptor”.

An interesting phenomenon that I am seeing is that a company can go bankrupt and yet its online store can outlive the physical business. Take for example Linen – N – Things (www.lnt.com) and Circuit City (http://www.circuitcity.com/) both who filed for bankruptcy and closed their stores in 2009 have new owners of their website operations. (See http://www.circuitcity.com/sectors/opt-outv2.asp and http://www.lnt.com/content/6/help-faqs.html for the stories on the new owners.) I believe this trend confirms that your organizations website is the primary face of the organization and the customers can become loyal to your online operations. Moreover, it is possible for these online businesses either to remain as pure play online retailers or to resurrect their stores when the economy picks up.

I know this may seem like I am reaching here. However why else would the online sites survive the demise of the business? In addition, I cannot help to point out that the Linens – N- Things site still has a store locator on the homepage and when you click on the store locator, you will find a statement that Linens – N -Things is “presently” an online only store.

Now the next challenge for these businesses is to provide a superior online customer experience that makes customers want to come back for more. So as I see it, the bottom line here is make sure you website customer experience can interoperate with your stores for sales, service and marketing or else it may be the only thing left in the end.

Ok, I have been swamped with client inquiries, research and the upcoming Internet Retailer Conference (Come to my session if you are there it will be quite interesting. http://www.internetretailer.com/IRCE2009/session_detail.asp?sess_id=76 ). Anyway, I was up late last night planning my much-needed vacation and being a web person I used an online booking service that I have used in the past. Well, I booked a room that according to the information on the website would fit my family and me. Well when I received the conformation email, something in the email did not look right about the type of room reserved. For that reason, I called an agent, the agent confirmed that I had booked a smaller type of room that would not accommodate my family, and she pointed out some other items that were not offered at the resort. Well after speaking with her, I spent $10 more to book my stay but the agent canceled my web order and reserved me the proper accommodations at different resort in the same location for the same time. Consequently, for $10 more I avoided walking into the wrong room type and accommodations all because the agent had better information than the web site. Ever wonder if your site has the same problem?

In a discussion on social software and online selling, Amazon is one of the most often used examples.

However, in the examples used in these discussions Amazon’s perceived image is different to each person. So as beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Amazon’s business model is in the eyes of the user. For example, if I asked you to complete this question Amazon is…

What would be your answer?

Here are some of the ones I hear.

• An online mall where it enables vendors to sell within the Amazon experience
• A retailer where they sell goods they stock and ship
• A brand  in itself representing the bench mark for online shopping (from product research to purchase)
• A destination site (start all your shopping here)
• A technology provider of cloud computing?
• A technology provider that can run your online store for you

However, one of my most popular inquiry questions I receive is “How do we create a customer experience like Amazon?”

Well the answer to the second questions lies in the first. What do you think Amazon is?

The other day in my blog, I asked my followers to vote. The vote was for me to tweet or blog. Additionally, I posted a link that asked my Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and Plaxo friends to “Please read my blog”. What I found out from this little experiment was interesting. Putting aside people saying I was shamelessly plugging my blog or accusing me of being lazy because I like to tweet over blogging, I found that almost no one was willing to leave the community they were in to reply or comment.

Instead, All but two of the replies were within each persons “home” community, now this test may not have followed the rules of scientific testing but it still pointed out to me that people have an affinity to stay “home” online.

So can this mean that organizations seeking to create their own communities instead of taking part in existing ones are going to fail? Alternatively, do they need offer a clear value proposition, purpose and benefit to the user to draw them into the organization’s community? What is your view?

OK, I admit it. I prefer to Tweet. There it is out. I have said it. I know I have not been the best and most diligent blogger and for my readers/followers I must apologize. I find Tweeting from my mobile device a much easy way to let my followers know what I am up too than blogging. Blogging requires me to sit down, write, edit and post while Tweeting is short and sweet. Therefore, I thought I would ask for your opinion on this matter. So if you want tweets respond with the word “tweet” and if you prefer blogging, respond with the work “blog” and your comments are welcome in either case. Let’s see where we go from here.

Here is the link to my twitter page http://twitter.com/galvar60 please join in following me.

What a week! As the economy goes up and then back down, I am finding that more clients are concerned about thier web sites customer experience. I am not just talking about business-to-consumer (B2C) organizations. I am seeing business-to-business (B2B) organization looking to the web as a way to improve sales, build brands, work well with partners and much more. Many are asking questions like How to improve my partner portal? How do I offer a more B2C sales environment like some of the top B2C sellers for my partners? We want to run promotions, campaigns, product recommendations, self-service sales process such as configurator price and quote. I believe we will see more pressure on B2B organizations to offer a rich internet customer experience instead of old green screens over the web. Do you agree?

In between all that I had to do today; I couldn’t help but watch the Whitehouse online “Open for questions” voting. Although some question such as health care were no surprise. One topic I didn’t expect as the top question was the legalization and taxation marijuana. Moreover, I was surprised that is ranked the highest in three sections (Budget, Financial stability and Green Jobs and Energy) of today’s agenda.

When I viewed the results I could not help but smile at this use of the web to gather and monitor what is on the public’s mind only to discover it may not be something you are ready to address or want to address.

This use of ‘crowd scoring” can only show that Governments and enterprises will need to learn a new set of skills on how to manage the gathering information about their products and services via the web.

With this “crowed scoring” come the problems of handling the good opinions with the bad and more importantly the unexpected controversy.

Will the Whitehouse speak on this topic since it placed as the top question in three sections of today’s poll? Only time will tell reveal this answer. But for enterprises that seek to do the same thing with their customers – remember if you ask for input be prepared to deal with the unknown.

How do you feel about this?  Should enterprises ask their customers “How are we doing?” so directly?  Is this the death of the focus group?  What are your views? Should I take my own advise?