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Shake-up at WebTrends; Omniture’s acquisitions and customer service

This year has been a good year for Omniture customers -- seeing their favorite web analytics vendor gobble up other businesses such as TouchClarity, Offermatica, and Visual Sciences. The recent shake-up at WebTrends as outlined by webmetricsguru.com, poses a lot of questions for web analytics customers.

We're actually in a unique position being both a WebTrends and Omniture customer. We use the WebTrends Dynamic Search product for SEM management and optimization. I would love to see Omniture acquire WebTrends so we can stop dancing around separate reporting for the WebTrends Dynamic Search product. However, it doesn't look like an acquisition of WebTrends will be a reality. Oh well, for now.

Omniture's Challenge: Information Architecture and UI
Included in webmetricsguru.com posting is the following:

I told Josh that I've worked with Omniture some, recently, but found the platform, while it can do everything, doesn't always do it elegantly - he responded that I should be using the newer technology Omniture has come up with - not the older stuff; I replied the newer stuff (IE: Discover 2) is very expensive and not everyone can afford it.

The above comment couldn't be further from the truth. The good thing about Omniture is it can do whatever you want. The bad thing about Omniture is it can do whatever you want. It can be a very complex system and for us, we have actually done 2 implementations. The first round established the basics, and after 2 months of being in production, we fine-tuned the implementation considerably after we learned more about the intricacies of the tool.

Taking a page out of the Google Analytics book
Omniture should take a page out of the Google Analytics book and check out the report designs, navigation, and general user interface of this free product. Omniture is a complex interface for the average business user. Google seems to master the ability to create interfaces that most users can figure out without any knowledgebases, tech support, or training. There is power in this and it's why Google is good at what they do. If Omniture could start adopting some of this thinking their SiteCatalyst UI, it'd be a great start.

Omniture's other challenge: Timely Customer Service & Support
What I really, really, really would like to see is for Omniture to focus on improving their customer support. Phone support is speedy, but rarely resolves in a question being answered if the problem is complex and doesn't involve basic functionality of their application. This is not to downplay the expertise of their tech support -- it's just that each customer's implementation is different and it takes time to dig into some issues. Perfectly understandable.

However, e-mail support is terrible. I'm not really sure why they offer it because the response rate is, on average, a week for basic requests (which can be handled on-the-fly with a single phone call). Support requests that require higher-tier support go unanswered for several weeks. It often takes an e-mail to our account manager to get an update that is more detailed than "we are working on the problem." As a customer, we feel like they are either blowing off our follow-up inquiries about open tickets or their support system does not do a satisfactory job at escalating stale tickets in the queue. Coming from an agency and project management background, this is a big no-no.

Soliciting Feedback from Customers
There are several usability issues throughout their interfaces. Nothing that prevents you from getting your work done, but just design issues that force you to do a lot of extra clicking. This, combined with the continued frustration we run into with support inquiries makes me believe they would really benefit from using OpinionLab or any feedback tool for that matter. My single biggest complaint is that it feels like there is no venue for customers to provide feedback.