Disrupting The Game

Category: Value

  • Your website almost certainly sucks: Forrester Research

    Your website almost certainly sucks: Forrester Research

    Despite the dollars invested, resources allocated, technologies deployed, agencies engaged, collective ambition and ego, it is highly unlikely that your website is delivering value for your customers, company and its stakeholders.

    Since 1999 Forrester Research has used its Website User Experience Review methodology to evaluate user experience across more than 1500 web sites, spanning geographies in both the B2C and B2B worlds.

    The vast majority of sites have failed and continue to fail to score passing grades. Check out this chart:

    Earlier this year, when the chart was assembled, only 45 sites had recorded passing scores of 25+, that’s 3 per cent of the 1500 total.

    Unfortunately basic design flaws are costing companies millions of dollars and damaging their brands.

    Here are the current top five problem issues:

    • Is text legible?
    • Are task flows for the specified user goals efficient?
    • Does the site present privacy and security policies in context?
    • Do layouts use space effectively?
    • Is the content that’s required to support the specified user goals available where needed?

    Now in its 8th iteration, the methodology is an expert or heuristic review that involves three steps.

    • Identify target users and describe typical scenarios or use cases
    • Attempt to accomplish their goals (e.g. buy a specific product, download relevant content or research and apply for an account, etc).
    • Highlight user experience flaws based on compliance with 25 criteria across four categories: value, navigation, presentation and trust. A score of -2 (severe failure), -1 (fail), +1 (pass) or +2 (best practice) is assigned to each criterion.

    Forrester’s advice is not rocket science:

    “Fix the problems on your site that prevent users from accomplishing their goals and reap the business rewards.”

    Forester analyst Adele Sage says there is “no good reason for a bad user experience”.

    “We see the same problems repeated over and over again, year after year, across the sites that we review,” Adele says. “Site owners don’t need any new advice because many of you are still making the same web design mistakes you’ve been making for years.”

    Adele says that “the recurring problems that we find in Website User Experience Reviews can be categorized into three distinct varieties of design challenges:”

    • Problems for which solutions are readily available. Most common design flaws are well understood foundational elements, such as text legibility issues.
    • Problems that can be consistently solved with the right methodologies. The right information architecture depends on what information is being architected and for whom, but even those specific problems may be site unique, human-factors specialist have developed standard methods for resolving them with a high degree of certainty. Design Personas, based on ethnographic research with target users, can guide design decision making to make sure that the content and functionality users need is available where they need it.
    • Problems that require innovation. Guidelines and methodologies can help fix most design flaws, but  Forrester recommends that you need to differentiate your web experience by following the three principles of what the company calls “emotional experience design. Address customers’ real goals, develop a coherent personality, and engage a mix of senses.

    Forrester recommends four steps:

    • Step 1: Describe three explicit user descriptions and goals for your site.
    • Step 2: Attempt to accomplish those goals (e.g. find the right product and information).
    • Step 3: Grade your outcomes against the 25 criteria points that comprise Forrester’s Website User Experience Review
    • Step 4: Armed with your hit list of flaws that need addressing, fix them

    If not Forrester’s methodology, find one that works for your environment (a variety of agencies focus on this space) and deploy it. If you have the budget, you should also invest in usability lab testing, focus groups, surveys and, of course, be consistently acting on the insight your analytics tool is serving up.

    If you’re confident your site is one of Forrester’s three percent that doesn’t “suck” (or perhaps you don’t agree that most sites perform poorly), then you definitely need to be stress testing your faith by committing to a user-centric quality assurance process that goes beyond conventional website analytics that tell you where you have problems but not why.

    So, stop making excuses for usability problems. Indeed, what’s holding you back from taking commonsense, practical measures? Could it be that in-house dysfunction is the root cause, inhibiting companies and their brands from engineering and maintaining sites that deliver value?

    Nothing advertises internal adhocracy better than a company’s digital presence (not only the web site, but the mobile edition, social capabilities and the cross-channel baton changes, etc). Just look at how many big brand Australian sites failed to deliver during the Click Frenzy campaign (Australia’s equivalent to Cyber Monday) last month.

    As Rackspace’s Mark Randall has correctly asserted, those sites did not have the capacity to handle the predictable traffic spike. The ones with “home-made” inhouse solutions were doomed from the get go; as were those who were not monitoring what was happening to their infrastructure. Even many of those that were monitoring were unable to automatically scale up. Again, none of this is rocket science.

    Challenge any dysfunction and get your site right.

  • The sales funnel is no longer, and probably never was, linear

    I enjoyed presenting at the Funnel event in Sydney on November 19.

    Organiser Brad Langton and the eConsultancy team assembled a quality B2B agenda, featuring keynotes and four streams of workshop content titled Plan, Attact, Align and Engage.

    In a crowded landscape of marketing conferences, the Funnel was one of the better events this year in Australia.

    My presentation addressed a pivotal theme that Business Technology (B.T.) fluency is not optional for business executives.

    A common threat of the sessions was the changing nature of the sales funnel itself:

    • Today’s funnel does not follow a linear path from awareness through to either closed-won or closed-lost status.Every sales cycle is different and the path taken most often represents a maze.
    • Critically, around 70 per cent of buyer journeys are conducted independantly of any direct contact with Sales teams and Marketing’s traditional influence is limited.
    • People are increasingly relying on their own digital research and peer exchanges (both online and offline) to identify their preferred products and services.
    • In this climate Sales needs to be engaging further up the funnel and Marketing must be generating, recycling and nurturing quality leads that convert.

    As the folks at Corporate Executive Board are saying, “early is no longer early”.

    The best sales and marketing people are now found at the top end of the funnel and are focused on disrupting and challenging customers.

    The dated solutions opening pitch from Sales to prospects is no longer “what keeps you up at night”, but “here’s some critical industry information that you didn’t know and this is why you need to engage with us”.

    Obviously, this is a challenging gambit  but it differentiates in a way old-school solution selling doesn’t.

    Enabled by an integrated customer-facing front end, built on an Internet-native Business Technology backbone, marketing, sales and service, in fact the entire company, must operate as one coherent team, obsessing about every Zero Moment of Truth or customer interaction.

    Here’s my slideware from the Funnel event :

     

  • SFDC’s “social productivity” app Do.com

    Project and issue management is a vexed issue for most of us in matrix environments.

    Do.com is one of many solutions in the space. They’re attempting to differentiate with social features. And I’m giving the tool a trial.

    Part of the Salesforce.com empire, they’ve got a nifty video on YouTube:

    http://youtu.be/7myUgmtFPkc

  • Point solutions are pointless

    Point solutions are pointless

    If we accept that the customer experience is the decisive differentiator in our commoditized world, then we need to move rapidly to an integrated business technology landscape and away from point solutions and isolated systems.

    Today the typical enterprise IT world is a melange of loosely linked, unplanned, customized technologies, operations and interfaces that have grown and adapted over time.

    Too much time and too many resources are wasted in manual approaches where data is transitioned inconsistently and incorrectly.

    This heterogeneous environment isn’t up to enabling a friction-free, flow of customer experience in a world where the distinctions between consumer and enterprise environments are melting away.

    The consumer world is already inter-connected, but at work those same consumers typically cannot collaborate efficiently because sharing is not native to established IT systems, therefore it is absent from most enterprise workflows in traditional IT and business areas, where transactions and databases rule, where processes and the “money apps” (e.g., accounting and finance) have been kept separate because solutions and systems are kept separate.

    Today, however, you need a synchronised customer-facing front end, embracing sales, marketing and service automation and eBusiness, which connects with the transactional back office, and enables genuine engagement and bi-directional conversations amidst a sea of unstructured data.

    Your brand must be consistently experienced over multiple devices and in multiple contexts using an integrated framework that ties together cloud and on-premise tools.

    If your organisation doesn’t have a strategy for bringing together people, processes and data across lines of business then it should get one in a hurry.

    After all, disconnected point solutions are pointless.

    Source: Salesforce.com’s Marketing Cloud presentation 2012

  • Radical transparency: open beats closed

    What’s your personal communication style? When, what and how do you share?

    In today’s radically transparent, digitally-enabled world you need to get used to openness. It beats closed.

    Since the industrial revolution, hierarchical management structures in various shapes and sizes have prevailed. Relatively few people, mostly males, made the decisions that counted.

    Now, however, there is a strong case for radical transparency.

    Our world is the way it is today because the founders of the Internet, perople such as Tim Berners-Lee and Vinton Cerf, understood that an open system of networked computers was better than a closed one, that there is wisdom in crowds; that the sum is greater than than the parts: 1 + 1 = 3.

    In this environment customer strategy guru Don Peters makes the case for what he calls “extreme trust”.

    Honesty, Don says, should be a competitive advantage.

    He predicts that rising levels of transparency will require companies to protect the interest of their customers and employees proactively, even when it costs money in the short term.

    He claims the importance of “trustability” will transform every industry.

    “Success won’t come from top-down rules and processes, but from bottom-up solutions on the part of employees and customers themselves,” Don says.

    I recommend that you find the time to devote a few minutes to Don’s “trustability” quiz.

    Companies such as the software research firm Qualtrics make all employee performance data available to everyone in the company, in the belief such openness removes distractions and unwarranted fears.

    The entire workforce has access to a host of information about the performance and practice of each employee.

    Qualtrics says the results is superior focus, engagement and talent development.

    Finally, check out leadership consultant Susan Scott’s excellent Ted Talk from 2011, in which she makes the case for radically-transparent leadership.

    Susan’s mantra is “always tell the truth, even when it hurts; especially when it hurts”.

    Here are several good quotes:

    • “What gets talked about in an organisation and how it gets talked about determines what will happen.
    • “If a problem exists, it exists whether we cop to it or not.
    • “Businesses’ worst ‘best practice’ is legislated optimism, the purview of the one-way leader, where communication is primarily one way and the reverse is not valued or welcomed.
    • “The alternative is radical transparency.
    • “It’s not lonely at the top. If it is, that tells us a lot more about the CEOs making that statement than anything else. The answers are in the room.
    • “We can handle the truth
    • “Leadership is not a title, its a behaviour.
    • “You are the culture. Everytime we show up we are modelling courage or cowardice.”

    Start getting into shape. If you are going to be naked in our radically-transparent, high-trust digital age, you’d better look good.

  • Is email constipating your company?

    Is email constipating your company?

    If your answer is yes, and for most of us it is yes, you need to consider banning internal email and embracing a new generation collaboration platform such as Microsoft’s Yammer or Salesforce.com’s Chatter.

    Two excellent posts discuss the problem email is causing and the solution.

    In a Forbes article by Shayne Hughes, the chief executive of Learning as Leadership, he explains why he decided to ban email in his organisation for a week. Shayne correctly observes that: “we clog one another’s e-mail systems and to-do lists with a mishmash of crucial topics and trivial information and then waste hours of every day slogging through a hundred useless e-mails to ensure we don’t look irresponsible by missing the two or three important ones”.

    Shayne says, “culture change begins with you. You and your team can choose to be buried by e-mail or empower yourselves to put boundaries around it.”

    Cloud computing advocate Andy Pattinson agrees with Shayne in his latest blog post and goes one step further to recommend that email be banned.

    He says Chatter adoption has cut his internal email traffic by 90 per cent.

    Andy claims that his “default position for all internal comms is now Chatter”.

    If you want to know what that world is like, here’s Andy’s description: “all communication is now contextually relevant, if it’s about a client its against their account or contact record, if it’s about an opportunity we’re working on, it’s on the opportunity record. If it’s about a project, it’s on a project record, if it’s about development or any number of different topics it’s in the relevant group in Chatter.

    “All communication is now searchable, it’s located where it’s needed and anyone can help when a question is asked, business is significantly faster as a result.

    “I can’t recommend the transition to Chatter enough, you’ll wonder why you stuck with email for so long.”

    As I said back in June 2012, enterprise-wide social collaboration simply makes good business sense.

    How your enterprise needs to be architected for collaboration

    Social technologies, especially mobile-enabled technologies, are changing the way we all communicate, internally and externally, transforming how brands engage, harvest actionable insights and generate revenue.

    If a company’s bureaucratic culture gets in the way and the leadership fails to wake up, marginalization and irrelevance is around the corner.

  • Both confident and anxious, “Generation Flux” embraces chaos

    Chaos is the defining feature of modern business, driven by “dizzying velocity” of our changing environment.

    That’s the claim made by Fast Company’s editor Robert Safian in his lead story, which cites Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie as a “Generation Flux” executive who is both “totally confident” and “deeply anxious”.Here are a several good Levie quotes:

    “The three-month road map is about the best horizon you can think about coherently.

    “You have to build an organization that is capable of acting like a startup but can operate at large scale simultaneously.

    “The advantages of long-standing brands, of distribution, of reach _ these don’t offer the same leverage thanks to technology, the newcomer may be as well or even better equipped.”

    Levie’s Box is an online storage company, with a $US 1.2 billion valuation and 600 employees.

    Editor Safian’s central message is that business must have a cultural DNA that drives a rhythm of constant reinvention.

    “We have grown up with assumptions about what works in an enterprise, what the metrics for success are, how we organize and deploy resources,” Safian says.

    “Those assumptions no longer hold true.

    “The challenge is to encourage creativity and agility while retaining the advantages of hierarchy.

    “Organizational systems based on the Newtonian model are not equipped for these dualities.

    “Leadership is about ambiguity. You need a balance between command-and-control and bottom-up. It’s not one or the other.”

    Here are a good collection of quotes from the Safian’s article:

    • “Sometimes it’s good to see raw ideas at a basic level.” –Mark Parker, CEO of Nike, which employs 44,000 staffers around the globe
    • “Today, we need to listen more carefully. I read what people say on Twitter, my friends on Path, in addition to formal media. I look for patterns, and then I post questions back to my network.” –Padmasree Warrior, chief strategy and technology officer at 67,000-employee Cisco Systems
    • “If you don’t go to every level of your company, you distance yourself from the marketplace and from your people.” –Aaron Levie, CEO of 600-person Box
    • “You can’t have people siloed in their particular areas of strength. You have to value all styles, because you will never know which type will solve a problem … we need everyone contributing. The wisest decisions are made by those closest to the problem– regardless of their seniority,” retired Four-Star US Army General Stanley McChrystal,
    • “We’re in a new era. For us, that’s very exciting. If I’m at a multibillion-dollar conglomerate, I’m very scared,” Troy Carter founder and CEO of Atom Factory

    Interestingly Nike’s Parker holds out hope for the established players.

    He says companies, regardless of their size, need to foster a “cadence of change”.

    “I don’t think it’s true that size by definition limits adaptability,” Parker argues. What does is “the notion that the way we’ve done things is a formula for success. That can be death”.

    Safian says the “Generation Flux” leaders he spoke to valued “hard experiences” over “codified learning”, which they saw as “insulating business people” from today’s realities.

    He quotes the CEO of a large not-for-profit Neigorhood Centres, Angela Blanchard, saying she tells her people that they cannot expected to be coddled.

    When she meets promising job candidates, they are often forthright about their limitations. “They’ll say, ‘I’m not trained for this,’” Blanchard notes.

    Her response to them: “Well, no one is.” Increasingly, she says, the most important jobs are what she calls “FIO jobs”: “Figure it out. That is the job,” she tells them.

    Finally, Safian says “Generation Flux” leaders must take time out to reflect.

    For Blanchard, “Some of the things that matter most unfold in the same rhythm they always have. If the goal is to connect with all opportunities, we will be burned-out shells,” she says. “The pace of life hasn’t changed, even if the pace of communication has. Do people fall in love more quickly? Do people trust each other more quickly? I work in my garden: You cannot make flowers bloom faster.”

    Check out Safian’s article in the November 2012 issue of Fast Company and these Generation Flux tagged stories.

  • Burberry’s business-technology literate CEO Angela Ahrendts gets it

    Apple has long attracted plaudits for its omni-channel mastery of the customer experience, but there is another brand which should also be regarded as a genuine benchmark.

    And that’s Burberry.

    Impressive CEO Angela Ahrendts is leading a digital transformation of the iconic British luxury brand.

    Burberry’s new London flagship store integrates a compelling digital dimension to the physical retail environment.

    In simple terms, Angela and her team get it:

    Among her objectives, Angela wants to leverage social tools to revitalise the company’s aging supply chain, energise sales and build the brand.

    Check out earlier Burberry posts here and here and spend some time at the artofthetrench.com social site..

     

  • Change your world, change your words

    14 million YouTube views and counting …

  • “Digital disruption, when properly understood, should terrify you”

    In an excellent post on Forrester Research’s blog analyst James McQuivey says there are three sources of digital power changing our game:

    • The prevalence of free tools and services that enable disruptors to rapidly build products and services
    • The rise of digital platforms that are easily exploited by aspiring competitors from all directions
    • The burgeoning class of digital consumers ready to accept new services

    This trio has combined to unleash disruptive forces that will alter every business on the planet.

    “Digital disruption isn’t disruption squared. It’s the disruption of disruption itself.”

    McQuivey says executives recognise that digital is a disruptive force, however “ they don’t realize just how big a deal disruption will be when it finally hits them”.

    Read the full post here: