Revitalizing the Web experience

Companies are relying on knowledge management to better handle the Web experience of external and internal customers.

Consumers increasingly are using various mobile devices, laptops and PCs, all with different screen sizes, to bank, shop, communicate with friends, relatives and business associates and to handle other parts of their daily lives.

One of the challenges that faces companies continues to be delivering customer-friendly Web experiences and Web pages, regardless of the screen size the customer is using, because the same customer might use a smartphone when on the go, a laptop at home and a PC at work.

Such was the challenge facing The Murray Bank’s Tim Stark, marketing coordinator. “We needed to make the website more user friendly. We wanted to be able to add content quickly, and we wanted to freshen up our design,” Stark says.

The most important part of revitalizing the design, according to Stark, was the ability to have responsive Web design—automatically delivering the right Web page sizes to different sized screens—because of the trend of customers moving to mobile and other forms of remote banking, rather than banking at branch locations.

“People are going to mobile now more than to our brick-and-mortar locations. We consider the Web our online store, but our website wasn’t meeting our expectations. People who went from a tablet to the PC to the phone were all getting different versions,” Stark explains. “The website hadn’t been changed in 10 years; we needed to freshen it up. We wanted a content management system and a better way to make changes on the site.”

Much needed update

Previously, any site changes had to go through the vendor, ProfitStars, so revisions could take a couple of days, far too long when customers expect updates immediately.

So Stark went back to ProfitStars for the much-needed update of the website, complete with responsive design, content management and other changes, with the refreshed site debuting at the beginning of the year. The new site enables The Murray Bank to quickly alert customers to the latest fraud and scam warnings and other important news. That is essential, Stark says, because the bank makes sure any content comes from trusted sources, meaning customers can trust the information as well, rather than relying on an Internet rumor.

The page with community events and other local information is a particularly important community service for a small bank that needs to compete with much larger national financial institutions for customer accounts. Customer and community service are among the major differentiators for community banks.

Because the new website has capabilities only introduced a couple of months ago, no hard metrics on customer response are available yet. Stark, however, says that all of the comments he has received have been positive. “I usually get a person a day saying something like ‘Thank you for the new website,’ or ‘The new website is really good,’” he says.

With the new functionality, if the comments ever trend in a different direction or if other changes are expected to further enhance a customer’s Web experience, Stark can quickly make the necessary adjustments.

Improving internal Web communications

CoreLogic (corelogic.com), a global property information, analytics and data-enabled services provider, has grown to be one of the largest companies of its type through numerous acquisitions over the last several years. Like many other companies that have grown through acquisition, CoreLogic had the issue of different managers in different parts of the company making different technology decisions to solve the same problem, says Robin Gordon, the company’s senior VP of application development and solutions management. “We haven’t operated out of a centralized team environment. We still don’t know everything about the [acquired] businesses that we support,” she adds.

So when Hayes Drumwright, founder and CEO of PoPin, pitched his company’s offerings to CoreLogic, Gordon and her team were interested. PoPin enables companies to use the Web to leverage the knowledge of people throughout the company to uncover ideas to improve business productivity and engagement levels.

PoPin offers more than just an information exchange; The PoPin facilitator—in this case Gordon—can enhance the team’s internal Web experience by including “fun” videos and elements of gamification to better engage other team members. Gordon says, “It engages people in a more interactive way.” So after piloting PoPin, Gordon rolled it out to her team in November 2014.

The first campaign, in which Gordon engaged 115 employees via the Web to get ideas on how the company could be more effective, resulted in plenty of collaboration and feedback, something that was previously rare. The enhanced Web engagement also meant better sharing of knowledge across the organization—knowledge that had typically remained in silos in different parts of the company, according to Gordon. “PoPin offers a lot of knowledge management. The modules enable us to reuse a lot of capabilities, like product information, technical modules and help tickets,” she says. “It was a total turnaround. It was a highly interactive experience. We hadn’t normally engaged with one another.”

The first PoPin session worked so well that Gordon expects to use it much more in the coming year as the solution becomes more fully integrated throughout the organization.