Customer Interface: So Many Toys, So Little Time
| Category: Customer Service | Date: 2003-10-31 |
These days you can dress up your Web site with every capability short of scratch-and-sniff. The question is: should you?
The thing that attracts most of us to the World Wide Web is its infinite variety and penchant for constant change. I have never seen a business that continues to require so much learning on a daily basis. It keeps life very interesting.
There are so many new technologies. So many new toys to play with. So many new ways to attract people to your Web site and hold their attention. When the Internet was an ACSII environment, the message was the message. Now that we can muck with server-push, 3-D space, streaming audio and video, the media is the media.
There is serious danger in ignoring the pell-mell, head-long rush of new technology. Get behind for ten minutes on the Web and, like Alice in WWWonderland, you have to run twice as hard just to stay in the same place.
But there is an even greater danger of overdoing it. The sheer joy of puttering with new technology can carry you over the edge of good design. Admit it, your all-time favorite movie moment is the scene in Apollo 13 when the chief engineer walks into the room with a carbon dioxide filter in one hand and a box of miscellaneous parts in the other and says, "Gentlemen, we have six hours to make one of these, using nothing but this." Tinkering to save lives. Kludge as king.
The danger is making your Web site so crowded with fun toys and new gizmos that your audience gets sidetracked at best, or frustrated at least. Remember, your Web site is there for a reason. Keep that intent uppermost in your mind at all times.
To help restrain you from overburdening your Web site with nifty techno-gadgets, heres a tempting look at several, tempered with some warnings on how they might be less than ideal so supporting your Webs special purpose.
Newsgroup Tools
Put a newsgroup on your Web site to drum up conversations between your happy customers. Its nice to have real people telling real stories about how really pleased they are with your products. You can even have separate discussion groups for each product line. But dont get carried away. With too many conversations to choose from, any site visitor may be confused about where to click first.
Getting people to post to a dozen groups is not a minor task. You could easily end up with a healthy number of categories suffering from an unhealthy amount of interchange. If you commit to this approach, assign somebody the responsibility to start conversations. Even is they have to use the telephone to do it.
By the way, the Internet newsgroups hold a wealth of information, including comments you may want to re-post on your site. It behooves you to take a continued interest in them. The best way? DejaNews or InfoSeek. These sites let you search the newsgroup postings for instances of specific keywords including your product, company, you name it. No, you dont need to hire somebody to scan the postings every day, let the computer do it for you.
If you find yourself dealing with unhappy customers, use a private listserve. These are easy to set up and make customers feel special. Ask a select group of people to give you advice on your products and services and theyll reward you with their loyalty and their opinion. They pay the bills, so you should take an active interest in how they feel.
Be Seen as Well as Read
To see your face on the small screen try WebChat from the Internet Roundtable Society. WebChat lets you indulge in on-screen discussions with photographs displayed next to each participants comments. Open forum? Dont be tempted. The Internet has a great many people who like to say a great many things. Not all of the cogent. Not all of them polite. Instead, plan an on-line panel session of experts in your field. Invite your customers and prospects to listen in to your company-sponsored event. It may even be worth a press release.
Chat tools are also great for personalized customer service. "Im looking for something about your new widget on your Web site and cant find it. Do you know if it comes in green and works with my video card?" Just like thumbing through a catalog, its nice to have the virtual 800 number handy. By the way, you DO have your real 800 number posted on your Web site, right? And it IS connected to people who know what is on your Web site, right? Just checking.
For site visitors who need to be drawn a map (and face it, there are lots of them), a new technology for TCP/IP enabled whiteboards might help. Paradise Software is touting a digital sketch-pad called Simplicity Whiteboard Teleconferencing. Now your customer service people can draw circles around the link to the on-line manual.
Should you extend this customer interaction to video? White Pine Software and XING Technology say the time has come. The Mystic Eight Ball says: "Try Again Later." This technology crawls very well, but tends to be a bit unsteady on its feet. The majority of site visitors are still on modems and at 28.8, this video looks more like a flip-book than a VCR. More time needs to be spent on compression. Either that or we need our modems to magically turn into ATM routers and our phone lines all be upgraded to T1s overnight . Best to give it a couple of more days.
Be Heard as Well as Seen
If there is something on your site that just begs verbal description, try RealAudio from Progressive Networks. The Santa Monica Bank has done a nice job describing their back-of-the-bus placard advertising. You look at pictures of the ads while the voice-over explains the origin of the idea, the objective and the results. I was fascinated, being a marketing type. But you can see how this might be useful for some of your products. Viewing a product photo while its being verbally explained is excellent for comprehension.
Record companies and radio stations have latched on to RealAudio in a big way. But how long can you study the album cover while listening to a song clip? If the audio track were there to add value to what was being seen, this tool can be quite powerful. But please, no more, "Hello, Im Lou Gerstner, chairman of IBM. On behalf of all of us at IBM, Id like to welcome you to our World-Wide Web server."
Internet telephone tools like Camelot Corporations DigiPhone, and WebPhone from Quarterdeck let you use your computer as a telephone. With a local connection to the Internet you can talk with your customers around the world. When we all have sound cards, this will be great. When bandwidth is plentiful, this form of communication will be standard fare. Until then, best to keep the Internet-as-telephone on hold.
Information Inundation
If you have a sea of information to impart, you have two choices; make it easier to find, or deliver it en masse. To make it easier for site visitors to find that one bit of tasty data theyre looking for, hire some computer scientists to create the optimal search tool for you Web site. Or, you could try AnchorPage from Iconovex. AnchorPage automatically indexes your text files into link-filled HTML pages. Very good for the serious data hunter. Piece of cake for the webmaster.
If you have oceans of data, you might consider a unique helper application from the Voyager Company called CDLink. This nifty software lets you play specific selections of a CD on the client PC. Current examples only show off music appreciation. But consider how you might use it to tie your Web site to your pre-delivered-on-CD catalog or industry report. maybe you have a base of data and keep coming up with new ways to slice and dice it. Send out the data on the CD and let your customers slice it and dice it at will. Instead of your servers running millions of instructions per second for countless happy customers, use their cpu cycles.
From Magazine to Museum
If the prospect of putting up yet another static Web page has you feeling jaded and youre already weary of Netscapes server-push a la Levi Strausss wonderful collage, maybe its time to bring your Web site into the third dimensional. Take a look at Silicon Graphics WebSpace. WebSpace has you coding Virtual Reality Mark-up Language to create mathematical models of your corporate building, room, space station, product line, etc. The visitor navigates through this 3-D space to find the text, graphics and links you have scattered about.
Is this an exciting new techno-doodad? Oh, yes. Does it have drawbacks? Does a lap-top battery give out just when you need it most? Picture the pages of a Web site nailed to the walls of a virtual room. Picture the extra time and trouble it takes to download the external viewer application. Picture the effort to maneuver over to the image you think you might be interested in. Picture yourself surfing over to The Amazing Fish Cam because its more interesting.
If you want 3-D on your site, it had better be worth while. Show us a model of your product. Let us walk through a model of your process. Give us something that gives us information we wouldnt get in any other way. A picture is worth a thousand words. A 3-D model is worth doing only if its done very well.
Web Site Caffeine
The ultimate test of your marketing imagination is figuring out what to do with HotJava from Sun Microsystems. HotJava lets you embed small software applications (applets) into your Web pages. How is it used now? Tracking live sports scores, displaying stock market prices, holding live auctions, adding animation, including executable spreadsheets, inserting rotate-able product pictures. What could it be used for? Almost anything.
Netscape has thrown their support behind it and Microsoft is working up something to rival it beyond mere OLE. As a result, the race is on. Be the first one on the Web to implement some really nifty, object-oriented, client/server, artificially intelligent, marketing masterpiece. But just dont forget to keep it simple.
Whats Your Objective?
Before you run out to buy more RAM to handle all these new toys, think back to the main purpose of your Web site. Is your principal aspiration to show off your skills as a programmer? Are you running a Web development company and need to prove youre up to date on the latest techniques? Do you aspire to be number one at the Enhanced for Netscape Hall of Shame? Then youd better buy another disk drive along with that memory, youre going to need it.
If you want to attract prospects and turn them into customers, determine your objective, get to the point, and use the only best tool for the job. Then play with the GEWIS Student Associations Futplex on your own personal home page.
======
So Many Toys, So Little Time
WEB SITES
Yahoo! www.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Internet/World_Wide_Web/Communication
DejaNews
http://www.dejanews.com
InfoSeek
http://www.infoseek.com
WebChat
http://www.irsociety.com/webchat.html
Camelot Corporation
http://www.digiphone.com
QuarterDeck
http://www.qdeck.com
Paradise Software
http://www.paradise.com/productinfo/Simplev2.html
White Pine Software
http://www.wpine.com
XING Technology
http://www.xingtech.com
Progressive Networks RealAudio
http://www.realaudio.com
The Santa Monica Bank
http://www.smbank.com
Iconovex
http://www.iconovex.com
Voyager Company CDLink
http://www.voyagerco.com"
Levi Strauss
http://www.levi.com
Silicon Graphics Web Space
http://www.sgi.com/Products/WebFORCE/WebSpace
Sun Microsystems
http://java.sun.com
Enhanced for Netscape Hall of Shame
http://www.europa.com/~yyz/netbin/netscape_hos.html
GEWIS Student Association
http://gewis.win.tue.nl/applications/futplex
About the Author
Jim Sterne stays active as a public speaker and as a consultant, helping each client set Internet marketing goals and determine customer relationship strategies.
Please contact Jim Sterne at (805) 965-3184 to find out how his talents might help you achieve your marketing objectives. Or to visit his webpage see details below.
jsterne@targeting.com
http://www.targeting.com
The thing that attracts most of us to the World Wide Web is its infinite variety and penchant for constant change. I have never seen a business that continues to require so much learning on a daily basis. It keeps life very interesting.
There are so many new technologies. So many new toys to play with. So many new ways to attract people to your Web site and hold their attention. When the Internet was an ACSII environment, the message was the message. Now that we can muck with server-push, 3-D space, streaming audio and video, the media is the media.
There is serious danger in ignoring the pell-mell, head-long rush of new technology. Get behind for ten minutes on the Web and, like Alice in WWWonderland, you have to run twice as hard just to stay in the same place.
But there is an even greater danger of overdoing it. The sheer joy of puttering with new technology can carry you over the edge of good design. Admit it, your all-time favorite movie moment is the scene in Apollo 13 when the chief engineer walks into the room with a carbon dioxide filter in one hand and a box of miscellaneous parts in the other and says, "Gentlemen, we have six hours to make one of these, using nothing but this." Tinkering to save lives. Kludge as king.
The danger is making your Web site so crowded with fun toys and new gizmos that your audience gets sidetracked at best, or frustrated at least. Remember, your Web site is there for a reason. Keep that intent uppermost in your mind at all times.
To help restrain you from overburdening your Web site with nifty techno-gadgets, heres a tempting look at several, tempered with some warnings on how they might be less than ideal so supporting your Webs special purpose.
Newsgroup Tools
Put a newsgroup on your Web site to drum up conversations between your happy customers. Its nice to have real people telling real stories about how really pleased they are with your products. You can even have separate discussion groups for each product line. But dont get carried away. With too many conversations to choose from, any site visitor may be confused about where to click first.
Getting people to post to a dozen groups is not a minor task. You could easily end up with a healthy number of categories suffering from an unhealthy amount of interchange. If you commit to this approach, assign somebody the responsibility to start conversations. Even is they have to use the telephone to do it.
By the way, the Internet newsgroups hold a wealth of information, including comments you may want to re-post on your site. It behooves you to take a continued interest in them. The best way? DejaNews or InfoSeek. These sites let you search the newsgroup postings for instances of specific keywords including your product, company, you name it. No, you dont need to hire somebody to scan the postings every day, let the computer do it for you.
If you find yourself dealing with unhappy customers, use a private listserve. These are easy to set up and make customers feel special. Ask a select group of people to give you advice on your products and services and theyll reward you with their loyalty and their opinion. They pay the bills, so you should take an active interest in how they feel.
Be Seen as Well as Read
To see your face on the small screen try WebChat from the Internet Roundtable Society. WebChat lets you indulge in on-screen discussions with photographs displayed next to each participants comments. Open forum? Dont be tempted. The Internet has a great many people who like to say a great many things. Not all of the cogent. Not all of them polite. Instead, plan an on-line panel session of experts in your field. Invite your customers and prospects to listen in to your company-sponsored event. It may even be worth a press release.
Chat tools are also great for personalized customer service. "Im looking for something about your new widget on your Web site and cant find it. Do you know if it comes in green and works with my video card?" Just like thumbing through a catalog, its nice to have the virtual 800 number handy. By the way, you DO have your real 800 number posted on your Web site, right? And it IS connected to people who know what is on your Web site, right? Just checking.
For site visitors who need to be drawn a map (and face it, there are lots of them), a new technology for TCP/IP enabled whiteboards might help. Paradise Software is touting a digital sketch-pad called Simplicity Whiteboard Teleconferencing. Now your customer service people can draw circles around the link to the on-line manual.
Should you extend this customer interaction to video? White Pine Software and XING Technology say the time has come. The Mystic Eight Ball says: "Try Again Later." This technology crawls very well, but tends to be a bit unsteady on its feet. The majority of site visitors are still on modems and at 28.8, this video looks more like a flip-book than a VCR. More time needs to be spent on compression. Either that or we need our modems to magically turn into ATM routers and our phone lines all be upgraded to T1s overnight . Best to give it a couple of more days.
Be Heard as Well as Seen
If there is something on your site that just begs verbal description, try RealAudio from Progressive Networks. The Santa Monica Bank has done a nice job describing their back-of-the-bus placard advertising. You look at pictures of the ads while the voice-over explains the origin of the idea, the objective and the results. I was fascinated, being a marketing type. But you can see how this might be useful for some of your products. Viewing a product photo while its being verbally explained is excellent for comprehension.
Record companies and radio stations have latched on to RealAudio in a big way. But how long can you study the album cover while listening to a song clip? If the audio track were there to add value to what was being seen, this tool can be quite powerful. But please, no more, "Hello, Im Lou Gerstner, chairman of IBM. On behalf of all of us at IBM, Id like to welcome you to our World-Wide Web server."
Internet telephone tools like Camelot Corporations DigiPhone, and WebPhone from Quarterdeck let you use your computer as a telephone. With a local connection to the Internet you can talk with your customers around the world. When we all have sound cards, this will be great. When bandwidth is plentiful, this form of communication will be standard fare. Until then, best to keep the Internet-as-telephone on hold.
Information Inundation
If you have a sea of information to impart, you have two choices; make it easier to find, or deliver it en masse. To make it easier for site visitors to find that one bit of tasty data theyre looking for, hire some computer scientists to create the optimal search tool for you Web site. Or, you could try AnchorPage from Iconovex. AnchorPage automatically indexes your text files into link-filled HTML pages. Very good for the serious data hunter. Piece of cake for the webmaster.
If you have oceans of data, you might consider a unique helper application from the Voyager Company called CDLink. This nifty software lets you play specific selections of a CD on the client PC. Current examples only show off music appreciation. But consider how you might use it to tie your Web site to your pre-delivered-on-CD catalog or industry report. maybe you have a base of data and keep coming up with new ways to slice and dice it. Send out the data on the CD and let your customers slice it and dice it at will. Instead of your servers running millions of instructions per second for countless happy customers, use their cpu cycles.
From Magazine to Museum
If the prospect of putting up yet another static Web page has you feeling jaded and youre already weary of Netscapes server-push a la Levi Strausss wonderful collage, maybe its time to bring your Web site into the third dimensional. Take a look at Silicon Graphics WebSpace. WebSpace has you coding Virtual Reality Mark-up Language to create mathematical models of your corporate building, room, space station, product line, etc. The visitor navigates through this 3-D space to find the text, graphics and links you have scattered about.
Is this an exciting new techno-doodad? Oh, yes. Does it have drawbacks? Does a lap-top battery give out just when you need it most? Picture the pages of a Web site nailed to the walls of a virtual room. Picture the extra time and trouble it takes to download the external viewer application. Picture the effort to maneuver over to the image you think you might be interested in. Picture yourself surfing over to The Amazing Fish Cam because its more interesting.
If you want 3-D on your site, it had better be worth while. Show us a model of your product. Let us walk through a model of your process. Give us something that gives us information we wouldnt get in any other way. A picture is worth a thousand words. A 3-D model is worth doing only if its done very well.
Web Site Caffeine
The ultimate test of your marketing imagination is figuring out what to do with HotJava from Sun Microsystems. HotJava lets you embed small software applications (applets) into your Web pages. How is it used now? Tracking live sports scores, displaying stock market prices, holding live auctions, adding animation, including executable spreadsheets, inserting rotate-able product pictures. What could it be used for? Almost anything.
Netscape has thrown their support behind it and Microsoft is working up something to rival it beyond mere OLE. As a result, the race is on. Be the first one on the Web to implement some really nifty, object-oriented, client/server, artificially intelligent, marketing masterpiece. But just dont forget to keep it simple.
Whats Your Objective?
Before you run out to buy more RAM to handle all these new toys, think back to the main purpose of your Web site. Is your principal aspiration to show off your skills as a programmer? Are you running a Web development company and need to prove youre up to date on the latest techniques? Do you aspire to be number one at the Enhanced for Netscape Hall of Shame? Then youd better buy another disk drive along with that memory, youre going to need it.
If you want to attract prospects and turn them into customers, determine your objective, get to the point, and use the only best tool for the job. Then play with the GEWIS Student Associations Futplex on your own personal home page.
======
So Many Toys, So Little Time
WEB SITES
Yahoo! www.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Internet/World_Wide_Web/Communication
DejaNews
http://www.dejanews.com
InfoSeek
http://www.infoseek.com
WebChat
http://www.irsociety.com/webchat.html
Camelot Corporation
http://www.digiphone.com
QuarterDeck
http://www.qdeck.com
Paradise Software
http://www.paradise.com/productinfo/Simplev2.html
White Pine Software
http://www.wpine.com
XING Technology
http://www.xingtech.com
Progressive Networks RealAudio
http://www.realaudio.com
The Santa Monica Bank
http://www.smbank.com
Iconovex
http://www.iconovex.com
Voyager Company CDLink
http://www.voyagerco.com"
Levi Strauss
http://www.levi.com
Silicon Graphics Web Space
http://www.sgi.com/Products/WebFORCE/WebSpace
Sun Microsystems
http://java.sun.com
Enhanced for Netscape Hall of Shame
http://www.europa.com/~yyz/netbin/netscape_hos.html
GEWIS Student Association
http://gewis.win.tue.nl/applications/futplex
About the Author
Jim Sterne stays active as a public speaker and as a consultant, helping each client set Internet marketing goals and determine customer relationship strategies.
Please contact Jim Sterne at (805) 965-3184 to find out how his talents might help you achieve your marketing objectives. Or to visit his webpage see details below.
jsterne@targeting.com
http://www.targeting.com
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