How To Do CRM Online: Three Big Ideas for 2008
Just as all politics is local, all business is now online. Even if you don't offer e-commerce, customers and critics will be talking about you online anyway. Heres how to cope.
Understand trade-offs
A home page laden with promotions tailored to returning registered customers will be slower to download than a sleek one light on advertising. If internal metrics show that visitors respond to such in-your-face marketing -- buying right off the home page, for example -- then a potentially frustrating slow download might be worth it.
Amazon, for example, thinks that the math works, says Matt Poepsel[cq'd.ksn], vice president of performance strategies at Gomez, an online consulting company. Poepsel monitored Amazon's performance during the holiday shopping season and watched while ShopNBC, which is a smaller, less cluttered e-commerce site, consistently beat Amazon in download time. "Amazon made a conscious decision to develop a rich landing page," Poepsel says, "because there's a lot of value they derive through the home page."
Blockbuster and Overstock, on the other hand, offer simple home pages that allow for quick and consistent downloads, he says.
CIOs should watch out. Web designers have high-powered workstations and spiffy tools like Ajax and Javascript. But customers may not be able to deal with such features. "Some companies don't understand bringing performance to the last mile," he says. "Design looks good in a data center but not to users on other end of a cable modem [who might not be] getting a good experience."
