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Customer-Centric Sites

In Good vs. Bad B2B Websites, I introduced the idea of customer-centric sites: designing your site with your customer in mind instead of your company or organization. Why is customer-centric design important?

Your Customers will go somewhere else. There are plenty of websites and companies out there that do the same thing. If your customers can’t find what they are looking for on your site, they will quickly look elsewhere. According to a 2006 Online Transactions survey conducted for Tealeaf by Harris Interactive,

The top problems that would cause online consumers to immediately and permanently turn to a competitor’s website are:

  • Incorrect information or lack of adequate information on the website (41%);
  • Inability to complete the transaction due to an endless loop (36%);
  • Difficulty navigating the website (37%); and
  • Being automatically kicked off the page (25%).

Your Customers will tell their friends. With the proliferation of blogging, message boards and instant messaging, your customers are talking to each other. If one customer has a bad experience with your website, the others will quickly know. You can benefit from this communication and react instantly to your customers’ needs with a community on your own website.

InformationAge – Action/Reaction: Web 2.0: The fastest-growing websites are those geared towards interaction and community.

If you don’t, your competitors will. As competition on the web grows, companies are forced to improve their websites in order to stay in business. Websites used to be a required for the credibility of a company. Now they are often the only way a company communicates with its customers and potential customers.

Next Steps: The idea of customer-centric sites is tied intimately to the usability of a website. Here are some good sources of more information on website usability:

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Good vs. Bad B2B Websites

I just got back from a B2B trade show in Las Vegas, representing the publishing company where I work, to sell our online products to our B2B customers. As part of my research of each customer, I visited their website to see what their Internet presence looked like. I looked at about a dozen websites, which ran the gambit from pretty good to not very good at all (ok I’m being a little nice – some were pretty bad).

What was the difference between the good sites and the bad sites? Whether they are customer-centric or company-centric. Customer-centric sites recognize that B2B customers come to a website to do research for a buying decision or to find service or support for products they’ve already purchased. These sites provide white papers, in-depth product descriptions, training, service and support. Most importantly, it is easy for a customer to find exactly what they are looking for through good web design (usability) and search functionality.

As shown in our previously discussed research from American Business Media and the Washington Post, and confirmed in research from the Nielson Norman Group, B2B Decision Makers use the web to conduct research for buying decisions. According to the Nielson Norman Group research, B2B websites measured a mere 58% success rate, compared to the 66% for mainstream websites (this is success of the website visitors being able to accomplish their goals in visiting).

How do you become a customer-centric website or improve your customer experience?

Finding What They Need
Think about what your customers may be looking for when they come to your website. Taking a look at your analytics to see what keywords are used to enter the site from search engines and what paths visitors take through your website can give you valuable insight on what information you need to provide or make easier to find. If you have an internal search function, take a look at what visitors are searching for through it as well. Visitors often turn to a search when they cannot find what they’re looking for on the homepage or menus.

Organization
Organize the information on your website in a logical, easy-to-find manner. Place top level menu links on every single page of your website. These top level links should be descriptive and easy to understand (ex. Home, Products, Services, Help). Your homepage can contain a lot of information, but make sure there is enough white space for eyes to easily scan through it for important points. Product or Service pages should include everything needed to make a purchase decision, including a ballpark price and detailed specifications.

Purchasing
Once a visitor has made a decision to purchase (or to get the final information before purchase), it should be easy for them to find your contact information. Placing information on every Product and Service page (or even on every page of the website) and having a Contact page puts the information right in front of their fingers. Provide both a phone number and an email address since some customers are very busy and email is easier for them. If you do have products with fixed prices, consider an eCommerce solution with a shopping cart to allow your customers to make a purchase as easily as possible.

Support and Loyalty
Make your website a place your existing customers can use by providing information and training about your products, including white papers, spec sheets, webinars, podcasts and training videos. Adding community to your website through forums, comments and blogs can help you connect with your customers and provide valuable feedback through direct communication. Embrace any customers who post about problems by addressing their concerns in a fair manner. Use their insight to improve your product and your customers will feel more loyalty to your brand.

Good B2B websites focus on customer-centric designs to fulfill the needs of their customers who in turn will be more satisfied and loyal.

Need Help with Your B2B Website? Get started with a free website analysis or contact us for a quote.

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B2B Website Design

Now that we know that the Business to Business (B2B) audience is different than the Business to Consumer (B2C) audience, how do we design our website to cater to their needs?

The most important part of any design is to put yourself into the shoes of those who will be using your design. When you are at work and using the web (for work purposes), what are you doing? What sites do you visit? You are probably doing one of two things: browsing or searching. When you browse, you look at a handful of sites for updates on what is going on in your industry. Since your time is valuable, you expect to visit each site and be able to see if there is any important information just by looking at the homepage. If you are looking for something specific, you will probably start out at your favorite search engine (google, yahoo, msn, etc.). There may be a industry-specific search engine that works much better. On the search results page you click on links, click back to the search, try to refine your search by adding, removing or changing keywords, and hope you find the information you are looking for.

How do we incorporate these behaviors into our website design? There are few points worth highlighting:

  1. Expect to see any important information just by looking at the homepage.
  2. Browse to only a handful of favorite sites.
  3. Industry-specific search engines.
  4. Refining search keywords.

Let’s take these one at a time…

1. Expect to see any important information just by looking at the homepage. In both browsing and searching, you expect to find what you’re looking for either on the homepage or linked to from the homepage. The number of clicks to get to important information should be as small as possible. Scrolling down a long page is not as annoying as having to click through multiple pages, usually due to the time to load a webpage (even if small). Still, important information should be at the top of the page, arranged left to right, just as you read.

2. Browse to only a handful of favorite sites. Becoming one of these favorite sites is not easy. You need to have information that is of value, a lot of it, and it needs to be frequently updated. The type of information that busy business people find valuable and worth spending a few minutes on. It should be organized and preferably searchable. This takes a bit of a time commitment but doesn’t have to be difficult. The same types of things that help you gain rank in search engines, are also what are important to your visitors.

3. Industry-specific search engines. Being at the top of search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN can be difficult for B2B companies. These search engines are usually used by consumers for consumer purposes and so their results are tuned to that type of search. B2B sites may be trumped by much larger and more popular consumer websites. Frequency of keywords, frequency of updating, number and importance of sites linking into the website all impact ranking in search engines. Take a look at any industry-specific search engines to see if you can submit your site to them and if they have any tips on how they formulate their search results. Trade links with other sites in your industry (preferably those favorites from #2). Encourage people to link to and share the content on your site by adding the ability to email your content, link to your content, and add your content to various social networks (digg, technorati, del.icio.us, etc).

4. Refining search keywords. B2B sites may have keywords which are used in the consumer industry by much larger and more popular websites. Using industry specific keywords in the content on your site will help make that content more findable. B2B sites can also stand out by purchasing sponsored links or ads in search results (usually at a fairly reasonable cost). Content you believe people are looking for, which you can tell from your web stats, should be easy to find – either on the home page or linked directly from in descriptive link text (not just click here).

Web design is not an easy process, but these tips should get you started in the right direction. Feel free to leave a comment or contact me with any questions.

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