From the Highway to My Way
Tracing the Evolution of the Web Self-Service Experience

"There’s certainly some controversy surrounding ‘behavioral targeting’ for online advertising," Paige admits, "because it’s based on information collected from customers that they may not know you’ve collected. And there is a tremendous amount of that ‘one-way’ advertising happening right now."

But the trick, Paige insists, is not to use customer information just to push an ad at someone, but to "help drive the entire experience in a positive way," as she puts it. "If an ad for boots that I like is pushed to me, and I follow it only to find information about products I’m NOT interested in, I probably won’t continue to use that site. Ever again. But if they use information about me to provide information I’m really interested in... for instance, the boots are at a store two blocks from me, they’re on sale, push this button to see if they have my size... then I will buy from that site, and use it again."

She continues: "I don’t know if you’ll ever get to the utopia that we sought with direct mail—of 1,000,000 direct mail offers and 1,000,000 purchases—but an effective Web service site can get a whole lot closer than direct mail ever could."

When the Pendulum Swings
During the course of promoting this KMWorld White Paper, we got an email from an end-user company which said, basically, We went down the Web self-service path for a while. But we came to the conclusion that we’d rather have more control of our customer engagements, even it it’s more expensive. So we have reversed our strategy, and done away with Web-based self-service.

I mention this to Paige, and ask whether she’d ever heard of a company’s pendulum swinging so far back in the other direction? "It depends on the industry you’re in and the market you serve. Web self-service is not a one-size-fits-all strategy." She shared a personal story: "I had to do a wire transfer the other day. I went to the bank’s website, which told me: ‘Go to your local branch.’ I said—are you serious? I hadn’t been inside a bank in years! But I suppose there could be a scenario where I could be convinced that going into the branch was a better option. Maybe there’s a security reason. Maybe they wanted to provide a more personal touch. But they thought that I wanted a more personal touch. It certainly is true that’s possible. And if they had taken the opportunity on the website to explain WHY I needed to go to the branch, what value the visit would bring to me, that would have made the experience much more reasonable. In my opinion, that’s a case of a missed opportunity. I am somebody with a very high expectation of Web self-service, but I could appreciate the personal touch... if they had explained the value to me."

She continues with her opinion that "multiple channels" represent the best of all possible worlds. "The big thing is basing your strategy on a multi-channel approach," she says. "Know that all different kinds of customers are going to go through the process in different ways, having the correct information available in a variety of ways, and to be able to have your customers reach out to you personally if necessary, and be able to interact with them, through ANY channel, is the key. There should be a ‘click to chat’ option, for example. Web experiences should be consistent with all the other channels."

But isn’t that exactly NOT the experience with the so-called pioneers and visionaries, I ask? I may be wrong, but I can’t imagine getting onto Amazon, and then being able to talk with a human being about a book. As far as I know, that is not much of an option at ANY of the "famous" e-commerce sites. Paige agrees: "They have managed to have their customers self-select as the type who don’t expect the personal touch." People who shop on Amazon do so with the full knowledge that there is no human being, I suppose. If you want to discuss the relative merits of a book with a person, that’s what bookstores and libraries are for.

This goes back to segmenting your audience, knowing who your customers are, and managing the experience in the best way for them. Creating a "different navigation for the category of ‘grandparents’ versus the category of ‘teens,’ is the way Paige phrases it.

Well, I’m in neither of those categories (yet), but I get Paige’s point. Web self-service, as you’ll read in the following pages, is neither an easy nor a precise science. It requires constant attention. "Optimization is never done," says Paige, and she’s right about that. Web self-service is not a "thing," it’s a "process." And if this White Paper you’re about to read does anything, I hope it underscores the value of constant vigilance, sophisticated measurement and an unerring devotion to improving the customer experience.  

 

 

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