Corporate websites seem handicapped in the digital era.
They have traditionally been underused, as a corporate front or shopfront
with a product catalogue. That’s 20% of
its potential; tech firms edge towards 100%.
By adding the capability to engage consumers, a wider market can be
developed. By adding specific business processes, they could carry out market studies,
product or sales development whilst lowering costs. And by improving the
overall user experience, revenue would increase.
Many websites of
Asian businesses are a facsimile of the cover page of annual reports, some in
the care of IT departments. But today
they should be all about business.
Pre-dot.com (2000) it wasn’t. The mentality was that it must be a thing
of beauty.
That’s because websites then were merely a presence, an address on the
internet. You’ll want your shopfront to
look good, won’t you?
Corporate
website 1.0 provided company information.
Business oriented ones added product listings, with contact information
but sales continued as they normally do - offline. Use the telephone if you want a response! It has improved, adding more responsive
customer service, better selling but except for the hits counter which barely
moved, they are mostly static. By static I mean the
website is not actively engaging the consumers but waiting for potential buyers. With revenue increasingly moving online, more
can be done. Turning it into an active
shopfront with revenue-generating activities, both direct and indirect is a way
forward.
This post suggests how firms can align
their websites to their business operations, rather than simply sales. And since
online, businesses play by different rules, it further suggests incorporating digital
mechanisms to improve customer experiences.
What can be done
depends on size. Small firms will continue focusing on sales while the large may
execute a gamut of initiatives from business development, R&D, branding to long
term real-time trend harvesting.
Lost in translation
Web 1.0 was
during the period companies first recognised the internet as a place for
business. It was without
precedence. In designing their websites,
they took inspiration from the early dot.com’ers who in turn took it from media. That phase was all about portals. They saw
themselves as the new media, thus the newspaper-look. This has now changed as other digital business
models emerge.
Three factors
that drove website 1.0 now look out of place.
It is a lesson we can take from.
1. Treating websites as real estate - every open space must be filled
By aping
newspapers, Website 1.0 acquired the complex look. Companies even thought they could sell ads on
their websites like newspapers!
Today, witness
the new digital firms where the bland look is common. And that’s not because
it’s fashionable.
As the new and
the old entered their turf, ‘their competitors are only a click away’. This changed everything. Looking pretty gave way to making the site
impactful. User experience became design
rule number one.
This means the site got to be fast. The days of loading a beautifully made video
on the corporate homepage is over.
Amazon has data to show that delays of microseconds manoeuvring their
site costs them millions in lost revenue.
A site needs to serve up content quickly and as directly as possible. And so distractions, whence once was thought
of as a scheme to keep eyeballs on the page became passé. Now the aim is for a customer to ‘get in, get
out quickly’. The.simple
model was born.
2. Treating the internet as an IT tool
Traditionally,
IT is perceived as a tool for back-end operations such as accounting. The internet was lost in this
translation. Most firms do not regard internet
tech as a tool for business, associating it with IT. In fact media treats AirBnB as a tech firm
but really it is in hospitality using internet technology immersively and at
the front to drive business. Similarly
Uber would be classified in the transportation sector, not tech in time. Conventional firms could adopt tech as they
have, deliberately, systemically to run their business, at the front and back.
I associate the term ‘tech’ with technology used to drive front-end revenue
while IT automates back-end operations.
The next post
continues with the third factor, ‘misguided use of websites’ and how to move
forward.
@tommichen7
©Thet Ngian Chen,
internetbusinessmodelasia.blogspot.com (2012, 2013, 2014, 2015). Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this
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