B2B/B2C online strategy and enterprise eBusiness blog

Earlier this year, the Amerock Cabinet Hardware brand within our corporation was merged into our business unit already consisting of Levolor and Kirsch to create a combined Global Business Unit called “Decor”. The Decor Business Unit rolls up under the Home and Family Group of Newell Rubbermaid as outlined here.

What’s exposed when businesses merge

Previously, Amerock was grouped under a different Global Business Unit and run independently of operations at Levolor and Kirsch. The merging of these business units has presented an interesting challenge from a website strategy perspective. The challenges are not unique to us and the purpose of this post is to not outline the specific challenges we faced but rather to focus on the high-level areas that mergers and acquisitions will eventually uncover:

Business processes, software platforms, job responsibilities, and online strategy must adapt to the new environment.

Enterprise E-Business must be scalable

I am fortunate to manage a team of people who are eager to take on new challenges and responsibilities. What we quickly discovered as it related to our Online Platform was that it had all been built around a single business (blinds & shades). This meant some of the software was specific to business processes unique to Levolor and Kirsch but more specifically, our business processes were very tied to Levolor and Kirsch.

When Amerock was infused into the mix, we had to re-engineer several areas (listed below). I won’t go into how we modified these processes but at a high level, these were the core areas impacted:

Enterprise E-Business must function on repeatable processes

I cannot stress this enough particularly in the past few years in working in a Fortune 500 environment after coming from a small business of 20-25 employees. The enterprise is too massive for any one person to “know it all” so processes must be rigid, repeatable, with good people employed to manage through the processes and modify the processes when they identify deficiencies.

Tribal knowledge is acceptable in small business and is what enables small business to be agile. Tribal knowledge contaminates the enterprise, especially in the E-business arena. If an enterprise process cannot be repeated by more than one person without significant “hand holding,” then it is not a repeatable process. A merger or acquisition will quickly expose deficiencies in processes.

Scalable, repeatable processes does NOT equal inflexible online experience

Perhaps one area where IT folks get it wrong most often is deploying a scalable, repeatable process that limits creativity (particularly as it relates to an online experience). Scalable and repeatable processes must inherently have a mechanism for dealing with unique business requirements and the ongoing management of these “exceptions.” This is all the more reason why the E-Business/IT group needs a seat at the (business strategy) table. Without knowing the direction of the business, it is impossible to anticipate every possible scenario and build scalable, repeatable processes that will last.

I was recently interviewed for a series of articles published both online and in print for Internet Retailer. I always find it interesting to see which quotes are chosen by the writer and how comments are represented when an article is finally published. The two articles in which my comments were featured were:

Laying the Groundwork

Rich media wows shoppers, boosts sales and builds brands—if e-retailers build it right.

Consumer insights refine early version of Levolor.com product configurator

This article is specific to our site in which more of my comments about launching a product configurator were used from the original interview below.

Original Interview

The article was published as a result of the effort of Adobe Scene7’s PR firm which is why you’ll see a few of the questions below specific to Adobe’s Scene7 product which we use for the interactive imagery in our product configurator.

In the spirit of full disclosure, and because I think the information in the answers below provides good background for companies considering product configurators, here is the full Q&A from the interview with additional links:

Q: When was the site launched? How long has the product configurator been on the site?

The product configurator was launched in June 2007.

Q: Please describe the product configuration capacity on your site and the underlying technology that powers it.

The product configurator is designed specifically for window treatments and supports 100s of billions of product combinations that are unique to the window covering industry. Technology used:  PHP for the application layer, MySQL for the database layer, and Ajax for much of the real-time calls to the server throughout the configuration process. Scene7’s dynamic imaging component is used to visualize window treatments as they are built throughout the configuration process.

Q: Why is rich media and this tool in particular important to selling at Levolor.com? What does this interactive capacity add to the proposition that text and static images can’t accomplish?

Since we deal with a home décor product, the ability to visualize the custom-order product prior to ordering is important to our customers. The interactive capability allows for the many billions of combinations of our product to be visualized on-the-fly without having to individually create the accompanying static images. Scene7’s dynamic imaging technology enables us to dynamically call the visual components of a configured product.

Q: In choosing across the standard and custom options – and the different product categories (blinds, drapes, etc.) – how many combinations are possible? If that number isn’t available, how many options are there to choose from?

There are over 100 billion combinations for ordering our custom blinds and shades. This doesn’t mean there are 100 billion questions to answer in a single configuration, but rather the combination of product options, colors, and sizes equate to over 100 billion different ways our products can be ordered. For a consumer, custom blinds and shades are an investment in their home and the ability to see a visual representation of the product before it is ordered adds peace of mind.

Q: What were the challenges associated with getting this many images up online? How did you resolve the challenges?

The need for dynamic imaging was obvious. There was no way it was financially feasible to maintain billions of image combinations. By leveraging Scene7’s dynamic imaging technology, we were able to resolve this product data challenge.

Q: What are the challenges associated with making sure this many images are served in a timely way in response to site visitor requests?  Could you have handled this on your own servers, do you use a content delivery network, or is this something Scene7 provides?

Scene7 provides the necessary capacity and delivery requirements to meet the needs of our end-users. Scene7’s technology was more of a foregone conclusion than it was for us to try and solve the “challenges associated with making sure this many images are served in a timely way in response to site visitor requests.”

Q: As you prepared to implement the product configurator, was there anything you learned in the process that caused you to adjust your initial plans in any way?  How did you resolve that?

Assembling a team of product experts, web development experts, interactive experts, and usability experts proved to be the most challenging. Each functional expert approaches a product configurator from their own point of view and it made identifying the ideal user interface for our end-users a very time-intensive initiative. Having the ability to deliver dynamic imaging is only a fraction of the equation to a successful configurator. For Levolor, the product configurator is an ongoing product which is updated and improved on a daily basis based on changing consumer insights, trends, and technological enhancements.

Q: What advice would you have for other online retailers considering adding this much rich media to their site, from an operational perspective? Is there any different way you would approach this, based on what you learned from you initial experience?

A product configurator is an ongoing commitment and should be treated as a part of your organization’s product offering. It’s easy to launch a functionally-sound configurator online but very difficult to achieve consistently positive customer satisfaction without continuous improvement; particularly if your configurable products change on a yearly basis. All too often we see organizations invest in a product configurator but neglect to plan post-launch improvements. The end result is a product configurator plagued by costly & massive one-time updates because the budgets align with advertising & promotion rather than research & development. A&P budgets fluctuate considerably and having the budget significantly reduced one year (due to economic conditions or otherwise) can single-handedly cripple your product configurator’s effectiveness on your website.  With interactive technology changing as quickly as it does, it’s important to stay on top of interactive and usability trends so you can stay ahead of the curve when it comes to customers interacting with your product configurator.

Q: What does it cost you to have the product configurator up on your site?  Has the return been worth it?

No comment.

A couple weeks back we rolled more changes out on Levolor.com, one in particular included the implementation of Google’s hosted Site Search product: http://www.google.com/sitesearch/.

Considering we had never offered site-based search before and nearly every day we heard from our feedback tool that visitors wanted to be able to search, this was a really straight-forward, quick, and easy implementation that I wish we had done it sooner.

Search can help reveal visitor intent

Google Site Search offers several customization options within their interface. Perhaps the biggest thing we’ve learned thus far is what people are wanting to find on the site based on keyword reports. This offers another slice of valuable data to layer on top of navigation/pathing and conversion analytics to better understand the wants and needs for your visitors.

While search will certainly help search-savvy visitors find the products and content that already exist on your site, perhaps the more interesting piece of data is what they’re searching for that doesn’t exist on your site. This data can assist in providing you the necessary insights on what additional products and features to add to your site.

At a minimum of $100/year, the barrier to entry for site search is extremely low

Google’s pricing methodology is very smart — starting out at just $100/year for indexing up to 5,000 pages and offering 250,000 queries. That is very impressive technology and search sophistication that can be added to virtually any site on a budget. This really lowers the barrier to entry for smart, savvy search tools for websites thereby making it almost completely inexcusable to not have search on your site.

What Google Site Search is not

Google Site Search is not a search merchandising tool like the Fast Search and Omniture Site Searches of the industry. One can only hope that over time Google will integrate new merchandising-related features that make it a viable competitor to give these other industry players good competition. What Google Analytics has done for web analytics I imagine it will do for merchandise-based search optimization as their engineers continue to improve the product features and functionality.

This month we launched an industry first: we have built a custom product configurator API. We have teamed with American Blinds, the largest online retailer of window treatments, to put the API in production with the launch of our previously-mentioned custom draperies program.

The B2B benefit

The API allows American Blinds to effectively “shake hands” with our product configurator enabling online ordering of custom draperies from Levolor without having to do any product programming. This enables us as the manufacturer to focus on effectively managing the hundreds of billions of configuration possibilities with our custom product lines while American Blinds focuses on the marketing of the products to their consumers — essentially the best of both worlds.

Here are screen shots of the experience:

The American Blinds Curtains & Draperies landing page:

The Levolor Draperies landing page on AmericanBlinds.com:

Now entering the Levolor.com product configurator:

The completed configuration passed back to the American Blinds shopping cart via the API:

The American Blinds checkout process with a Levolor configured product sent via the API:

The B2C benefit

The benefit to consumers is a seamless experience as they are passed unknowingly from server-to-server with no interruption in navigation. To them, it is like picking up another product sample book in the store. At the time of purchase, regardless of products they have in their cart, they still go through the same checkout line for a completely seamless purchasing experience.

After many months of site development and many years of new product development, I’m very happy to announce that we’ve launched the new features & product on Levolor.com. Here are a few screen shots:

The updated homepage featuring new custom draperies and all of our product lines:

Preview of the inspirational pages:

Virtual Decoration: choose wall colors, trim colors, and drapery fabrics

Full product configurator: custom draperies at the convenience of your computer screen

Free samples. It doesn’t get any easier than this page.

And of course, drop-down menus for easier/quicker site navigation. What a concept!

And as with any major product or site re-launch, these few screen shots don’t come close to capturing the amount of “behind the scenes” work that went into the site — you know, the stuff that only the development team truly appreciates!

Now it’s time to start digging into the analytics to see how online visitors navigate this product category. It’s a much different process than custom blinds & shades, so the online insights will be interesting to learn from.

In light of Levolor.com exiting the beta stage, we’ve distributed a press release with high-level details of the “new” online store available on the site.

This release made the rounds beginning on 2/18/08. While I didn’t personally anticipate much coverage from the release (outside of the blinds & shades industry, releases like this get a “So, what?” reaction), it’s interesting to see the increased traffic from visitors from North Carolina. Presumably, because we’re based in North Carolina, the local publications picked up the press release and the information resonated more with consumers who happened to come across the release in their home state.

One thing which I still don’t understand is why press releases on most sites (like our release at Internet Retailer), don’t hyperlink our website address, or better yet, even provide our web address. It’s funny to see an industry publication not only whiddle down a press release, but also ignore the very features and functionality that make the Internet what it is.

I’m happy to announce that Levolor.com has finally left the realm of being in “beta.” We ran the site in its beta form for a little over 6 months and just rolled the first round of updates and fixes (since leaving beta) to the site last week. Here’s an overview of what’s new:

New Products Added:

As we begin to expand our web presence, we are also beginning to add our full line of products to the website (though only custom blinds & shades may be purchased online). “Blinds, Shades, & Drapery Hardware” is the tagline under the logo on the website and you can now find all of this product information under the “products” tab on the website.

New Product Page Layouts:

We’ve also updated our product pages to reflect the content and end-user experience found in our in-store sample books. This combines beautiful room scene photography with nice, large pictures of product options, and best of all, videos to help describe product options.

Online Store

Our online store now features all of our custom blinds and shades. During our beta period, we only offered a limited selection of products.

What was learned during the beta period
I’m normally opposed to plastering “BETA” across the heading of a website because it’s become more a buzz word than anything in the online industry. Everything seems to be launched in Beta and because it’s in Beta, it gets more hype from online bugs for one reason or another. That being said, I’m glad we did it because end-users were more understanding if something went wrong on the website during the beta period. I was actually surprised to see how many consumers shopping for our products mention the “Beta” moniker in their comments.

Consumers are browsing online first
What we didn’t expect was a backlash from consumers who couldn’t find all of our product information online. Even though we don’t sell a large portion of our products on our website, it didn’t seem to matter — consumers wanted the information on the site. This is not necessarily specific to us but is really a trend in consumer shopping habits across the board. Not everyone goes online to purchase, they are going online to research so they can be educated before they purchase.

Consumers are arming themselves with information (because the store associate doesn’t have the knowledge)
In our retail channels (big box stores), store associates are hard to come by and they are not always experts in the area of the store you happen to flag them down in (ever grabbed the “electrical guy” at Home Depot who happened to be passing through the patio furniture display?). Being armed with full product information and narrowing down your options between one or two final products that you’d like to take a look at in store before purchasing seems to be the trend these days.

This really comes as no surprise as my wife and I do the same thing. Recently we purchased a Dyson vacuum, researched it on the Dyson website, and went to Best Buy (retail store) to close the purchase after we compared two models in the store. Naturally, the “car audio manager” helped us and did nothing more than read the description of the product off of the box as we asked questions about the two models we were interested in. About all he was good for was helping with the honoring of the online price from bestbuy.com (which was cheaper than the in-store price).

Beta launches are a Good Thing
Despite my reservations about jumping on the Beta bandwagon, the Beta period helped us understand more of what consumers were looking for on our website and this has fueled the online effort. I would recommend releasing a site in “Beta” if it encompasses major changes for consumers — they’ll be understanding and will be a bit more candid if they run across a problem or frustration. The general public is becoming more familiar with what “Beta” means.

Next steps for Levolor.com
While I won’t outline the roadmap for Levolor.com, I’ll continue to post updates as we make major updates to the site. For now, we’ll just focus on incremental improvements now that all of our custom blinds and shades are available online for sale.

As the blogosphere ogles at the “success” of the “Elf Yourself” campaign, I find myself wondering if the old cliché “there’s no such thing as bad press” is true. While this particular campaign has been positive for Office Max, will it (ever) contribute to the bottom line? Or does this campaign simply go down in the books as “fun” and win an award?

The “Elf Yourself Campaign
Put together by Officemax, here’s the comparison of the ElfYourself.com demographics and Officemax.com demographics:

The above graph is for ElfYourself.com

The below graph is for Officemax.com:

Demographic & site analysis
Officemax.com hits the internet average for female and male visitors skewing slightly higher in the 55-64 and 65+ demographics. The ElfYourself.com campaign however is highly skewed towards 65+ females. We do see an obvious jump in traffic to OfficeMax.com during the same timeframe that the ElfYourself.com site has been running (presumably due to the coupons offered on ElfYourself.com when you click on the OfficeMax logo).

Will it translate to revenue? Time will tell.

PR firms focusing on “viral” vs. product
Switching gears from OfficeMax to my day job…it’s interesting seeing the campaign ideas we are pitched from marketing firms who aspire to earn our business. There’s an overwhelming amount of focus with online marketing, but in our industry (blinds & shades), is making it up the ranks of digg.com really going to translate to revenue? Many marketers think so and go out of their way to focus on links we receive due to PR, blog mentions, and diggs. Let’s step back for a moment and focus on digg.com’s demographics (courtesy of Quantcast):

Skewing higher than the internet average on the 25-34 Male demographic is not exactly the sweet spot for us when it comes to spending money on press that end up on digg.com.

Common sense in online marketing
Viral campaigns are fine — if they are targeted towards the demographic you are seeking as customers. digg.com is not a “mass consumer” demographic and should not be treated as one by marketers, but for some reason it is. This is nothing against digg. There comes a time when you have to ask yourself the “So, what?” question when a marketing pitches you a concept. With the viral success of the Elf Yourself campaign, be sure to ask yourself the “So, what?” question if a marketer comes to you with a great viral idea that does not pave a clear path to sales revenue.

Marketing campaigns can and should be measured in sales
Some marketing agencies are not held accountable to revenues generated from campaigns. Generating impressions is great, but if the campiagn cannot be tied directly to sales, then you should find a way to measure it. Every campaign we run is measured — sometimes we may not know the potential return (which is often the case testing new ideas/technologies surrounding promotions and marketing), so we measure it to see what the return is after the campaign is over with.

Your sales cycle may be a long sales cycle, so campaign “success” may not be measurable immediately — it could take weeks, months, or even years. If this is the case, plan your campaigns accordingly because the sales cycle should help drive the types of promotions that work for your business. OfficeMax seems to have played their cards right with the coupons/discounts on ElfYourself.com and the traffic spike to Officemax.com.

However, traffic spikes do not always equate to revenue — especially if the campaign is driving unqualified customers to your site. This is the one thing that many agencies fail to grasp in this new age of viral campaigns and del.icio.us, YouTube, and digg.com’s of the world.

On November 27th December 4th, my new role in the organization was announced although I’d been unofficially been performing tasks within the new role since November 1st. My new position is a promotion and my title is E-Business Manager, Application & Development. This serves as another step in the direction of heading down a career path towards a CIO position (what’s a CIO?).

In this new position, I “give up” some of my previous responsibilities as Web Marketing Manager and take on additional responsibility for managing and guiding application development within the organization. While it is hard to pass on some of the responsibilities and fun aspects of web marketing to other people, I have a real passion for what the new position has me doing. The job description is as follows:

E-Business Manager
Define and direct overall strategy for development and maintenance of business process applications spanning the netire value chain. Partner with business units to determine the correct uses of technology to:

• Drive new business and capture market share
• Improve efficiency and the bottom line

Path-forward
I will still have significant responsibility of overseeing development of Levolor.com, which was important to me taking this role, as the site and its offerings are still in its infancy. I will be getting exposure to more aspects of the business outside of marketing and B2C (business-to-consumer) e-commerce, which is very exciting.

On the “about page” of this blog, I describe myself as an analytical, process-oriented thinker, focused on leveraging technology to solve business problems in B2C/B2B environments and am passionate about providing outstanding online experiences. In this new position I will be able to apply this strength and enthusiasm towards enterprise applications — an area where usability, information architecture, and end-user experience are often taken for granted and/or under-valued.

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.