B2B/B2C online strategy and enterprise eBusiness blog

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.

As we continue to fine-tune the usability and comparison shopping on our site, I’m also paying close attention to how other manufacturers are executing as well.

After traveling over the past few weeks, I’ve been privy to sleeping on several different beds in hotels, friend’s homes, and family members’ homes. My wife and I need a new bed as ours has developed half-pipe indentations (who really enjoys flipping and rotating a king-size mattress every month?).

Tempur-Pedic has been pouring money into marketing dollars on this half of the year — at least I feel like we’ve been seeing their ads more often (certainly more than the Sleep Number bed). For some reason I just cannot mentally buy into the sleep number bed, so I took a gander at the Tempur-Pedic offering this morning on their website. I never knew buying a bed was so confusing. Let’s start at the product page for their “sleep systems”:

Wow, 9 different beds to choose from just based on the primary feature alone. They’ve at least given them unique names, but I have no idea which one is right for me. Oh wait, there’s a comparison option, great, let’s check that out:

Ouch, look at all of these options and names that mean absolutely nothing to me. What is the difference between a Quilted TEMPUR-HD and a Quiltend TEMPUR “comfort layer? What about the diference between the Grand AirFlow System and T-Flex Support System as the base layer? Can these options not be combined? What if I want both of them in one bed?

Comparison Shopping Flaws
The fatal flaw this website makes is that it does not SELL me on the “WHY?”. It is a brochure which assumes intimate knowledge of the differences in products and what each of the features means (it comes across as an assisted-sale tool for sales people). The comparison page should add clarity to the products offered, not additional confusion. If there are confusing terminologies and/or features, then at least provide pop-up windows or links to definitions of the features that provide feature and benefit statements for the consumer. This Tempur-Pedic comparison page does neither.

How we’re testing comparison shopping
We have an initial implementation of comparison shopping between product models of blinds and shades. The added benefit we provide are descriptions of product options listed on the comparison page.

I’ve received more information from a commercial about the Tempur-Pedic “sleep system” than I did on their website.

Additionally, pricing is also available on our page, too, so the consumer can determine if they are even in the right ballpark for their budget. This was another thing I noticed that was missing from the Tempur-Pedic comparison page — I have no idea what the cost ranges are for their product. While I expect to spend a decent amount of money, I’m unable to determine generally what that amount is going to be. Do you shop for cars online without seeing the price? Probably not.

Provide the context in which the feature is beneficial to the consumer
One thing I’ve found is marketers are not the best salesmen. They do a great job at drawing you into the store to take a look at the product, but a big part of online marketing is also selling. I expected to go to the Tempur-Pedic site to find exactly the right bed for me based on the features and benefits of those features of their various offerings. All I’ve taken away is that there are 9 models and I probably need to go to a store to find out more information from a real salesmen on which bed is right for me. Frustrating.

We’re getting there, but it’s not perfect…yet
While I don’t believe we have perfected the model in our online store, we are certainly learning from consumers, soliciting feedback, and analyzing site usage reports to determine how people are currently shopping vs. how they want to shop. Manfacturing companies like us tend to be far too feature-focused instead of being benefit focused. This is forcing companies like ours and like Tempur-Pedic to change their method of selling and marketing of products — which is a good thing.

I think many companies get in their own way when trying to communicate to the consumer — this further stresses the importance of usability testing both from a site architecture standpoint as well as a marketing/selling standpoint. The site may be fully usable, but at the end of the day, is it influencing a sale or better yet, is it converting a browser to a buyer? Tempur-Pedic has yet to convert me.

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.