Outside Innovation

“Anticipate” Customers’ Questions; Answer Them Completely

No matter how good a job you do in Web site design and navigation, and in trying to anticipate customers’ questions by proactively offering the right Q&A and links in the right places on your Web pages, customers either don’t see those links or they still have questions. Those questions may be specific to that customer’s account (What’s the balance on my credit card? What’s the schedule for my courses for next semester?). The customers’ questions may be semi-generic (How is a credit rating calculated and how can I improve mine?). Or the questions may be very generic. For example, customers ask “What kinds of credit cards do you offer?” over 13,000 different ways in different places on the TD Canada Trust site. TD Canada Trust knows this because they use a SaaS offering from IntelliResponse Systems, a Toronto-based software supplier. IntelliResponse provides tools that let you instrument your Web site to capture all the searches people are doing in context and to help you tailor answers to these questions with a single, comprehensive, and satisfying response, rather than to provide a list of search results or to dump you into an FAQ. I’ve heard FAQs referred to as “Find a Question”—pretty apt! People don’t want to go to a list of questions; they want a single, relevant answer!

Search Marketing Survey

Most of you—our clients—are “best practitioners” in the art of online merchandising and search marketing. You invest in search engine optimization. You constantly refine your Web site search and navigation. We’d like to calibrate how far along you are in integrating your search marketing efforts to provide the optimal findability, navigation, and results for prospects and customers. So please take our Search-Driven Marketing Strategy Survey. And forward this link to your colleagues to take as well. You’ll find Sue Aldrich’s questions provocative. As you respond to her queries, I’m sure you’ll begin to realize that there may be things you should be doing that you hadn’t really thought about yet. We’ll publish the survey results shortly and offer our analysis and recommendations about what you can do to make it easier for customers to find your products and services in order to meet their needs.

FINDING Our Way to Profits in a Recession

The gloomy economic news has everyone on edge. Some pundits were hoping that Oracle’s earnings report would give the stock market a boost yesterday by proving that at least the technology sector is firing on all cylinders. But yesterday Oracle reported lower than expected revenues and lowered its expectations for the year. So it appears that the high-tech sector isn’t immune to the global economic downturn after all.
       
However, after checking in with many of our largest clients, we don’t see people putting a hold on technology spending. We do see clients gravitating towards SaaS suppliers with “pay as you consume” business models and lower perceived IT overhead. We see them taking advantage of the professional services being offered by smaller, boutique firms, rather than large body shops.
       
What are companies spending money on? Here’s a list based on our customer-centric clients’ activity and interests:

Integrated Search Marketing Tools

We're finally on the cusp of having search marketing tools that will give marketers more control over the customers' search experience starting with search engines and quickly getting to the right content on your site. The trick, according to our search maven, Sue Aldrich, is to closely monitor what people search for and find (or don't find) on your site and to use those phrases to optimize what shows up on Internet search engines as well as to ensure that both the landing pages and the content you show on those pages are tuned to yield the specific information and/or products that people are seeking.

The good news is that there are new and better tools now available to search marketers that help integrate these two seeker experiences for you. The other good news is that many of our clients are now merging their SEO experts and their Site Search experts into one integrated team of search marketing experts. You need both integrated information and integrated expertise to excel in search marketing.

On February 14, 2008, Sue reviews SLI Systems' Learning Search. This is a hosted solution that provides an integrated approach and a set of experts to supplement your own team. You'll find that the "learning" approach the SLI uses has some interesting benefits.

SLI Systems Learning Search Ecommerce January 2008
Integrated, Automated Internet and Site Search Marketing
By Susan E. Aldrich, February 14, 2008
http://psgroup.com/research_868.aspx

Evolving Your Online Strategy to Meet Customers'€™ Current Expectations

We'™re starting 2008 with a set of updated frameworks that reflect our most current understanding of best practices in supporting customers'€™ online and cross-channel activities. In the first few weeks, we'€™ve published our most up-to-date thinking around:

1) what capabilities you should have in search, navigation, and findability [See Susan E. Aldrich€'s  €œ"Enterprise Search Planning and Evaluation Framework, Version 3,"€ January 3, 2008, http://psgroup.com/research_859.aspx; and "Enterprise Search Planning and Evaluation Matrix, Version 3,"€ January 17, 2008, http://psgroup.com/research_862.aspx],

2) what capabilities you should be able to support for online customer communities [See Matthew D. Lees'€™ "Framework for Evaluating Online Community Platforms, Version 2,"€ January 10, 2008, http://psgroup.com/research_863.aspx; and "Online Community Platform Evaluation Matrix,"€ January 17, 2008, http://psgroup.com/research_864.aspx], and, on January 17, 2008, we'€™re bringing you another leg of the stool:

3) what capabilities you should have in place to support customers'€™ shopping and buying (e-commerce) activities. We look in detail at the capabilities you should ideally have in place to provide state of the art customer service for customers who are trying to self-serve on line. We call this "€œAssisted-Service"€ for e-commerce. [See Mitchell Kramer's "Framework for Assisted-Service for Ecommerce: Requirements for Evaluation and Comparison of Multi-Channel Ecommerce Applications, " January 24,2008, http://www.customers.com/research_865.aspx.]

Why Microsoft Is Acquiring FAST

On January 3, 2008, we emphasized the strategic importance of focusing on enterprise search in 2008 to improve the customer experience you provide. Microsoft seems to agree. On January 7th, Microsoft offered to buy Norwegian enterprise search provider FAST Search and Transfer for $1.2 billion. Here’s Sue Aldrich’s analysis of this latest move:

This is unquestionably good news for both FAST and for Microsoft. FAST had been a juggernaut of growth: in 2005 it was poised to overtake Autonomy, the other large search-focused ISV. But in 2006 FAST faltered, seemed to lose track of its identity, grasped at a series of strategies, and today is half the size of Autonomy. Microsoft will have no such strategic collywobbles.

Microsoft gains some strategic assets with FAST. Microsoft, until very recently, had only the most basic of search capability incorporated in its products. It’s difficult to comprehend that in so many years of investment Microsoft should have produced so little, but there you have it. In the past month, Microsoft has released its first advanced search engine, a first release that will take some years to catch up to the technology already incorporated in FAST’s Enterprise Search Platform (ESP).¹ With the addition of this technology, Microsoft could actually compete in the search market. Of course, before Microsoft will do that, Microsoft will have to integrate ESP into Microsoft’s software platforms, marketing strategy, and partner programs. This will take some time: Microsoft has leapfrogged its technical sophistication, but perhaps landed in mud to its hips, and there is a great deal of effort to extricate itself and get cleaned up.

Great Tips for Search Optimization and Internet Marketing

Saw a great presentation by Jay Berkowitz on the Ten Golden Rules of Internet marketing at the CRMC CALA Customers Forever conference in Coral Gables, Florida. I've heard lots of these presentations, from a number of marketing gurus. This was the first one that made me feel empowered!

Jay has a lot of useful tips and free tools you can use to do a much better job of optimizing your search-driven marketing and customer engagement.

Jay also blogged during my presentation. Here's a link: Jay's Blog during Patty's Outside Innovation presentation. Thanks, Jay!