Seven Steps to Better Enterprise Web Site Value

By Steven L. Telleen, Ph.D

The 7 Steps

1. Adopt a Federated Governance Model
2. Make Business Objectives Explicit and Update them Regularly
3. Describe and Audit Conformance to Web Site Practices
4. Document and Test Assumptions
5. Set and Track Metrics
6. Make Continuous Improvement Part of Your Culture
7. Start Today

Introduction

Even after the “dot.com” bust, the use of web sites by established businesses has continued to grow rapidly. In fact, the $1.3 trillion forecast for 2003 business-to-business e-commerce revenue in 1999 will actually be $1.4 trillion, and the $108 billion forecast for business-to-consumer revenue in that same period will be quite close at $95 billion. [1] The revenues for both of these segments have grown more than one order of magnitude in just four years.

Even more surprising, much of this growth took place during two years of recession, when few companies spent significant money to upgrade or improve their web sites. Established enterprises in all industries are showing renewed awareness of the potential business value of web sites, along with a more rational desire to understand how investments in a web site tie back to and improve the business return on investment.  

The web sites of large and mid-sized enterprises serve many constituents, and thus face special challenges in achieving maximum business value and maintaining continuous improvement.    The following seven steps comprise a proven set of methods and processes that will increase the value your web site contributes to the enterprise.  

1: Adopt a Federated Management Model

Who in your organization owns your web site, and which aspects of it do they own? These seemingly simple questions have not so simple answers. Some aspects of web sites need to be set and enforced enterprise-wide, but other aspects are best handled within organizations responsible for a business function that makes up only a part of the site. Only by addressing both levels can a web site effectively support multiple business objectives.

This means most web sites require a federated management model, one that supports multiple owners at more than one organizational level. Either a strong centralized culture or a hands-off decentralized culture can be a barrier to web site effectiveness.

Because there are multiple stakeholders, a federated management model has two requirements:

• An explicit management structure that defines individual responsibilities and limits
• Explicit policies and standards that define the required behavior of the web site.

Without these elements, “everyone” is responsible for all aspects of the web site, even if an individual is “officially” the owner. That effectively means no one is responsible, because everyone either thinks someone else will do it or multiple people do it in conflicting ways.

At the enterprise level the governance structure generally consists of two entities: a person accountable for the overall site, and a governing council (Web Council) made up of representatives of key stakeholders of the site. Stakeholders may include:

Marketing

Product management

Service and Support

Sales

Investor Relations.

Often the person accountable for the site does not have the ability to force compliance. Instead, that person chairs the Web Council, which makes the decisions, sets the policies and adds community pressure to conform to common interests.

Enterprise-wide policies and processes need to address many potential issues. In this article we will discuss only two such policies, both of which directly affect continuous web site improvement: stated business objectives and adherence to enterprise-wide practices and principles that define the common behavior of the site.

2: Make Business Objectives Explicit and Update them Regularly

Whether it is an Intranet, Extranet or public site, a web site is a business resource. To understand and improve its value, explicit business objectives need to be set. The overall business value of a web site is derived from the collection of destinations to which it provides visitors access.

A destination is an area of the site providing content or functionality that satisfies a visitor's reason for coming to the site. Think of destinations as what visitors are searching for or come to do on the site.

These are things like finding:

• Product information
• Contact or location information,
• Account status  

Or, they may be actions like:

• Updating 401K deductions
• Moving money between accounts
• Downloading updates
• Purchasing goods or services

In contrast, site search is not a destination because no visitor comes to the site to search. They come to search for something.

The web site of a large enterprise might have hundreds of destinations.   Since the destinations are owned and often developed in a distributed manner, the Web Council needs to set policies to ensure that all destination owners set explicit objectives for their portion of the site. Objectives are not created to be an end in themselves. They are created to give everyone on the team and in the organization an expected target. Therefore, an objective needs to be measurable. A statement like: “offer online customer service” is not an adequate business objective. It does not give any indication of how this will impact the business or how success can be measured. A statement like: “reduce calls handled by the call center by 5%” is a better business objective.

To effectively direct organizational behavior, the policy needs to:

• Require all destination owners to set business objectives for their destinations
• Specify how often the objectives should be reviewed or updated (e.g. every six months, once a year, when they are reached, etc.).
• Specify who needs to sign off on the objectives
• Require each objective to have metrics for how progress and success will be measured
• Define the timing and format for reporting of baseline and progress data

The Web Council should be the official repository for all the web site destination business objectives, maintaining the corporate copies of current and past objectives. The Council also needs to track compliance with the policy by setting and conducting regular reviews. When this policy and tracking process is in operation, the Web Council will have the data to combine the individual destination objectives and progress metrics to provide the company with regular updates on the collective value of the web site.

3: Describe and Audit Conformance to Web Site Practices

If a web site supports only one objective, one action, one reason for coming, visitors can easily find their destinations.   But for enterprise web sites, with potentially hundreds of destinations, both determining whether visitors can meet their objectives on your site, and if so, how they get there, can be a major challenge. This is not a trivial issue. Numerous tests conducted by multiple usability testing organizations have consistently shown that for most sites 50% to 75% of the visitors new to the site, or who visit with new objectives in mind, leave without finding what they came for – even when it is on the site!

Why does this happen? Because many web site owners think about the web site strictly in terms of the destination functionality rather than as a medium that provides access to many destinations. And, to make matters worse, most destination owners think of the web site as being their destination, without regard to the other destinations that are part of the site.   Neither the site owners nor the destination owners focus on the first challenge facing web site visitors, understanding the choices and navigating to the ones that meet the needs of this visit.

Like navigating and orienting in physical space, web-site navigation requires consistent landmarks, signs, and behavior. On a web site these consistencies are not naturally occurring physical features, but are defined solely through the practices and principles the site employs. Therefore, it is important that key, enterprise-level, practices and principles be defined and followed consistently.

Providing for consistent navigation is just one aspect of enterprise-wide practices and principles that define the common behavior of the site. Others are:

• Reducing legal risks
• Adhering to ethical and politeness standards
• Protecting the brand experience

Conformance policies need to:

• Document current practices and principles
• Define who must follow them
• Define exceptions for deviation from them
• Specify who is responsible for creating and maintaining them.

The Web Council should see that the site is audited on a regular basis for conformance to the practices and principles.

4: Document and Test Assumptions

Once the policies described in steps 2 and 3 above are operational, the stage is set for a more scientific approach to improving the business value of the web site. The business objectives provide the target for improvement, and the practices and principles provide the description of the web site. Achieving improvement involves making and testing assumptions.

As Kerry Patterson, et al. point out in their book Crucial Conversations [2] , we all move from awareness to action based on implicit assumptions. Often this happens so quickly, we do not even notice that we have told ourselves a “story” about what we believe to be the causes. Often web site changes are proposed, and argued, without ever making the underlying “story” explicit. By making our stories explicit, we often can come up with better solutions. And, if we continue to disagree about what should be done, the assumptions are explicit, so we can test them.

  Turning the unspoken story into an explicit assumption involves documenting three elements:

• The measurable business change we want to see
• The web site practice we believe is affecting the current customer behavior
• The specific way we believe the practice needs to change to get the desired behavior

Returning to customer support as an example of this process, imagine a situation where the business objective is to have 25% of all product support questions handled through self-service on the web site. Currently that number is only 10%. Let us further imagine that we believe that most customers are either not aware of the online customer support, or cannot find it, and that customer support is not a link on the global navigation bar.

1. The measurable business change we want to see is the percentage of product support questions handled through self-service on the web site increase from 10% to 25%.
2. The practice we believe is affecting current behavior is the lack of a specific link to customer service on the global navigation bar.
3. The way we believe the practice needs to change is to add a customer support link to the global navigation bar.

We can test this assumption by adding the link to the global navigation bar and monitoring changes in the business metric.

Whenever a site or destination owner wants to change a practice or principle, it should be in the context of an explicit assumption that is formally documented. The assumption then needs to be tested and accepted or rejected based on the results.

5: Set and Track Metrics

Two types of metrics are key to continuous web site improvement, business metrics and management metrics.

Business Metrics

Business metrics measure the success of meeting the business objectives, as defined in step 2. Business metrics are used to track and manage progress, for example:

• Reducing calls to the call center by a target percentage
• Increasing online purchases by a certain dollar amount,
• Increasing visits to physical stores by a target percentage.

In many cases measurements may be required that do not involve the web site at all. For example, if the business objective is to use web site self-service to reduce calls to the call center, then the evaluation must include tracking changes in the number of calls to the call center.

Direct increases in revenue and sales are relatively easy to measure. However, even in this case, additional metrics are advisable to track more detailed parameters that lead to that objective and to track early indicators of future changes. For example, even if your site is reaching its current revenue goals, it is important to know how many visitors are leaving the site without a purchase and where they are when they leave. Using this information, assumptions as to why can be made and responsive actions tested, leading to even higher online revenues.

When developing metrics for harder-to-measure business objectives, the following questions can help guide the process:

• How will we know if we succeeded?
• What do we want to be different after we implement this?
• What will that difference look like?
• How can we measure that difference?
• Can we translate the difference into monetary value?
• Is there direct revenue or savings?
• Can we put a value on satisfaction (the value of each percentage increase/decrease in retention, turnover, etc.)?
• Can we put a value on time to market/completion (per hour, day, month)?

Business metrics also will involve measurements on the use of the web site. The two most-common metrics are visitor success and visitor satisfaction .

Measuring visitor success

Common metrics for visitor success include:

• Completed tasks (absolute number or as a percentage of started tasks)
• Time on the site or a page (increased or decreased depending on the objective)
• Reported value (asking the visitor: “Did this satisfy your need?”)

The first two, completed tasks and time on the site or page, generally are captured with traffic analysis tools. Reported value generally is captured using a simple survey tool. The most common use of reported value is where the success cannot be determined from reaching the destination alone. For example, if the end result is a page containing advice or information, the only way to tell if the content actually satisfied the visitor's requirement is to ask.

Measuring visitor satisfaction

A visitor may reach their goal on the web site, but that does not mean they found the experience easy or enjoyable. Or, there may have been other factors in the experience that frustrated them or made them uneasy. The two most common ways to measure satisfaction are indirectly, by looking at an effect like the number of repeat visits, and directly, by asking the visitor. Good sites generally track both. Increasing or maintaining a certain level of repeat visits often is a specific business objective. Therefore, tracking it gives the most direct evidence of the desired outcome. However, satisfaction has many other facets and benefits and may be an early warning of problems, so survey solutions such as those provided by CustomerSat are of immense value. And, some companies do track customer satisfaction as a business objective.

Management Metrics

Management metrics are about managing the behavior of the people and politics that affect the web site rather than the behavior of web site directly. The management metrics described here address tracking conformance to policies and the status of projects.

A process is required for tracking the existence, completeness and currency of the destination business objectives. The Web Council should set management objectives for percentage conformance, and develop and carry out improvement activities if the conformance is below 100%.

A process also is required to track conformance to the current practices and principles. Generally the Web Council should have the site audited and review the results on a periodic basis. The period will depend on the frequency of changes to the site, but it should be formally set and adhered to. In this case 100% conformance may not be the goal, however formal goals and improvement activities should be explicitly defined.

In addition to tracking conformance to policies, the Web Council also needs a process for capturing the progress each destination is making toward its business objectives. This should be a natural outcome of the reporting process defined in the policy on setting business objectives. A main management requirement is that the Web Council establish a process that captures and integrates these reports so overall progress can be tracked and the status and history of individual objectives identified.

Finally, the overall value of the site should be available as a summary of all the reports.   The report might include current and historical trend data on:

• Direct revenue (sum of direct revenue from all destinations)
• Indirect revenue (sum of revenue in another channel where the sale was supported or referred from the web site)
• Direct savings (sum of cost difference relative to support from a different channel)
• Satisfaction levels
• Other metrics not included above, for example:
• Number of unique visitors to product pages where conversion to a sale in another channel is unknown
• Number of visitors accessing support information (e.g. online instruction manuals for household appliances) where they probably would not have called support, but the availability has a positive affect on overall brand experience.

A regular summary is important for the site owners to maintain and communicate as it documents the value of the web site as a business tool in the terms business executives relate to. Without it the site owner and the Web Council cannot communicate effectively the current value of the site or its improvement.

6: Make Continuous Improvement Part of the Culture

Keep in mind that the purpose of the policies, processes and metrics described here is to achieve consistent behaviors in site and destination owners; behaviors that lead to a high value web site. The only way behaviors like this become consistent is by making them part of the organizational culture. This is a responsibility of the web site owner and the Web Council. Establishing new behaviors as part of an organization's culture is not a simple process. However, it is not impossible either.

Create rituals.   Behaviors become part of the culture by turning them into rituals. Rituals are created through the use of triggers and structure. The trigger may be a regular time and place, or it may be an event. In either case the trigger needs to always invoke the same behavior and structure.

Creating rituals should always be kept in mind when considering any of the tools discussed below.

Documentation is a key tool for creating new behaviors in an organizational culture. Examples we have already discussed are: the policies, the practice standards, the formal business objectives, the formal hypotheses, and the reports. They become rituals by giving each document a formal structure and by clearly defining the trigger that requires the document to be created or updated.

Communication is the second tool. Specific types of communication events should be defined, and where possible, given a structure in terms of what is covered and the order in which things occur. Communication events often use time-based triggers (e.g. the report on the monthly contribution of the web site to the business goals is published to the company on the second Tuesday of each month). This is because communication is a highly effective, often used, way to reinforce messages, perceptions, and behaviors.

Education generally is not a process that companies ritualize, which may explain why it also is often underutilized in the rollout and attempt to establish new processes. While education in this context may be difficult to ritualize, it is valuable in teaching ritualized behavior and providing a context for the rituals. Look for existing education events that do recur, like new employee training or role or function training, and build modules there. Do not underestimate the value of a structured education program to teach the web site owners the processes, requirements, and the structure of the required documents or events.

Tracking systems allow those who are trying to establish the rituals to catch and quickly reinforce or correct desired behavior. Examples discussed above are the tracking of the existence and currency of business objectives, the progress toward meeting business objectives, and conformance to web site practices. Ritualize the reliance on the tracking systems through the structure and timing of their input processes and output reports.

Reviews are a ritual that can reinforce other ritualized behaviors. The objective should be to create rational, repeating deadlines, making the formal review itself as short and to the point as possible. Defining reviews with a regular cycle and a well-defined structure will ritualize this process.

7.   Start Today

The most common catalyst for getting started is a site initial launch or re-design. However, it takes time to get the processes in place. If you wait for the next redesign to start, you will not have the processes sufficiently established to derive the full value of this approach on your next design cycle.  

The clean slate provided by initial launch offers the opportunity to do it right the first time. For re-design, we recommend first auditing the exiting site against a set of "best practice" principles. This provides a tangible way to engage stakeholders, and it can be done without absolute authority or complete buy-in. Most web site stakeholders are interested in voluntarily attending a session where they can see the results of an audit of their web site against “best practices.” Presented correctly, the results generally raise the important issues that lead naturally to the need for creating the next steps.

If the stakeholders are receptive, presentation of the audit results should be incorporated into a daylong workshop that also includes developing priorities for practice changes. The "best practice" audit results pragmatically ground the discussions that invariably follow, keeping them from becoming pure philosophy. The prioritization process provides a platform for generating awareness of the need for the other pieces.

The need to prioritize potential changes and improvements leads to the need for explicit business objectives, which leads to the need to identify audiences and goals, which leads to recognition of multiple web site destinations. Disagreements about the validity or importance of specific practices and principles become opportunities to teach and model the experimental approach. Define the business objective at issue, make explicit the underlying, competing hypotheses, and if necessary, encourage testing of contested principles in the context of documented business objectives, hypotheses and metrics.

Some organizations do have other catalysts, such as the need to defend existing web resources or serious governance conflicts.   For these situations, starting with a workshop that facilitates the development of business objectives and metrics, or the development of a governance model, will resonate better. Regardless of the starting point, the objective is the same, to improve the business value of the web site. And, that will ultimately lead to the need for explicit roles, business objectives, practice descriptions, hypotheses, metrics, and habitual behavior.

Conclusion

Your web sites are an investment in your business. Like any other investment, they need to be managed for optimum return. Because of their complex nature, enterprise web sites require a federated management model. A federated management model, in turn, requires explicit roles, policies, objectives, practices and metrics to operate efficiently.

The seven steps covered above provide a solid foundation for meeting these requirements and better managing your enterprise web sites to meet business objectives. Because the behaviors these steps define and encourage take time to develop, you should not wait until your next major redesign to get started on building this foundation.

Steven L. Telleen, Ph.D., iorg.com

iorg.com helps clients improve the business value of their web sites by providing expertise, processes, and tools to identify, measure, and manage the attributes that affect successful attainment of business objectives.

For more information:

• Visit our web site: www.iorg.com
• Email: stevet@iorg.com
• Telephone: (925) 484-9425

[1] “The E-Biz Surprise,” BusinessWeek Online , May 12, 2003.

http://www.businessweek.com/@@3MyN@IQQXre5*xIA/magazine/content/03_19/b3832601.htm

[2] Kerry Patterson, et al., Crucial Conversations (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002), 93-101.