Is your website a needy child?

Building a website customers love starts with avoiding what they hate - and not using it to feed childish internal 'ego' needs, writes Gerry McGovern...

The public website or intranet that keeps screaming for attention with useless images and vain content will get little from the impatient and sceptical customer.

The needs of the organisation are great, and the larger and older the organisation gets, the greater those needs become. The problem is that the internal needs of the organisation rarely match the needs of customers.

Organisations grow strong because they've done something right. Dell is a good example. It grew as a customercentric organisation, but as it got bigger it began to lose that true customer focus.

Around 2001, you had two options on the Dell homepage:

Navigate by product (laptop, desktop, etc) or navigate by audience (home, business, etc). Every test I have done indicates that about 90 percent of people prefer to navigate by product when buying computer stuff. In fact, audience navigation makes many people cynical.

"Do businesses get better deals than me?" "I just want to buy a laptop, why do I have to select what group I belong to?" "I'm a home business, which should I select?"

By about 2003, Dell had got rid of the product navigation, forcing the customer to choose an audience. I am told Dell did this because the audience types mirror the powerful business units within Dell. These business units could not agree how to share revenue if someone simply selected ‘laptop’.

Dell was once young and customer-centric, but like nearly all organisations, it grew old and organisation-centric.

It began to suffer from organaritis. Similar to arthritis in humans, organaritis afflicts mainly older organisations. A stiffening of the joints makes it hard for the organisation to change and move quickly.

There are signs that Dell is trying to recover from organaritis. Recently, I noticed that it is publishing reviews of its products on its website. Yes, it allows negative reviews. That to me is impressive and makes it more likely I will buy a Dell again. (After what Lenovo has done to the ThinkPad, the choices have become more limited.)

Does your organisation have organaritis? If you answer yes to one or more of the following questions you probably need to seek medical help:

• Do you have pictures of very important people within your organisation (your needy children) on your web pages?

• Do these needy children require messages from them to be published prominently on the site?

• Do you have big pictures of smiling actors pretending to be customers? (Shiny, happy people.)

• Do you have needy departments whose stated objective in life is to get some real estate on the home page?

• Do you have needy, powerful managers who demand that their latest programs and initiatives get prominence on the home page?

• Is your culture one that believes that the primary purpose of the website is to get customers to do what you want them to do, rather than help them quickly and easily do what they came to do?

• Does your organisation embrace verbosity atrocities? Headings such as: "Start your way to a clear new world".

Sentences such as: "We are delighted to announce that our holistic approach embraces 50,000 ft thinking which is unparalleled in its reach and depth of understanding of the globalisation challenges that must be embraced holistically if we are to thrive in ever-changing, shifting, hazy, somewhat unclear, cloudy, and sometimes downright quite difficult to see through clearly into the must be embraced holistic future scenarios."

9/11/18_ex_m_h