Web Reliability

So you have managed to assemble a team and motivate them to build and support a web property dedicated to driving good customers smoothly through a sales pipeline. You have developed a strategy to achieve that end. Now you are watching as the execution takes shape.

As a customer makes their way through the system a healthy focus on maintaining their sense of purpose and motivation is important. Reward the customer for choosing you by offering ways that the system can better understand and predict their needs.

A system that supports and enhances customer desire is a system that more precisely meets their needs and supports them as they proceed through the flow. If your customer is a native Spanish speaker, try to detect that and support them with an experience tailored to their language. If your offering to them is region specific, detect their zip code and curate the data they see by their location. If they demonstrate interest in a specific line of products or services, provide them with better ways to drill down into the details; curate, tailor, customize. These ideas touch upon strategy, but I place them within the execution conversation because they are so interactive and user-directed and user-defined.

One of our very first serious websites as a company was a website for a person running for San Francisco mayor. The constituents of such a candidate spoke a number of non-English languages as their native tongue. So we provided easy switching between Spanish, Tagalog, Chinese and English. This served to receive the site visitor well, as an honored guest. Tailoring the experience to them and making them comfortable helped maintain their motivation to engage with the candidate. The feature was among the most successful on the site. It is of course quite commonplace nowadays.

Another of our clients some years later was an educational training organization. They taught teachers a certain method of teaching. We built up a feature in their CMS that observed what a site visitor initially did, what they viewed, what they clicked. It then offered more refined and tailored product choices as it learned about them. This showed the visitor that they were seen and cared for. Their interests were valid and could be honored by the offerings of the organization. Conversion improved with the advent of this feature.

One of the most notable examples of a website being active in the upkeep of a customer's motivation is Amazon.com. Customers may arrive at the site with a specific market need. Their initial search may not reveal a product that meets the need, but shortly they will see recommend for them other products that might serve the purpose. I would argue that this approach, though strategic, really lands firmly in the execution since in real time it keeps the customer motivated and directed. Their sense of purpose is maintained.