Questioning How Companies Answer Queries on Their Web Sites
It’s not uncommon for a Web site visitor to have to poke around for the answer to his particular question--an answer that is probably buried on a page the visitor would never think to check. (Example: A consumer wants to know about mileage credit; so why is it hidden under “Partner Airlines”?
Worse, the answer may be buried deep inside the company--common knowledge to most who work there, but not recorded on the Web site.
How to solve this problem . . . I mean, how to handle this opportunity to serve customers better?
It’s indeed an opportunity, because users’ questions are a valuable guide to what customers really want, as well as an opportunity to satisfy a particular questioner’s curiosity.
But doing this can be complex.
People come to a site with different expectations, different ways of expressing themselves and different contexts. For example, Juan cares about a computer’s price, whereas Alice is concerned about its weight. And Fred just wants to know about return policies.
One company, Broad Daylight Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif., has developed techniques to streamline the process of answering users’ questions effectively.
The software itself is very useful, but it’s also interesting to consider the broader lessons it offers to anyone designing a Web presence.
There are three basic questions to consider: What do people want to know? How can you make it easy for them to find an answer--especially if they’re not even clear on what it is they want to know? And finally, how can you express the answer intelligibly?
BD’s founder, Louise Kirkbride, has been working on these problems for a long time--with a predecessor company that built internal content databases for large companies (now part of Computer Associates International Inc.) and now at Broad Daylight, founded a couple of years ago.
Like any tool, BD cannot do its job automatically. The first step is to collect the questions visitors ask--by sampling actual e-mails, watching their behavior on the site, or soliciting new questions while a site is being built. One unlikely possibility is that any given site provides all the answers--but the visitors may have to go through four or five clicks to get to them.
Why not put that information on the first page or two, where it can be found easily?
A second possibility is that they cannot find the answer, and they send an e-mail query. Those questions can either be answered more clearly upfront, or they can form the core of “Frequently Asked Questions.”
When BD’s consultants begin working with a Web site, they often find a large proportion of the questions are the same--though worded differently.
Those go into a FAQ feature that includes both a list of common topics, and questions ranked dynamically according to their popularity.
A particular question can show up in several topics, according to how people classify it; that is, Broad Daylight can “watch” (without recording individuals’ data) whether people are more likely to select a particular question through, say, “pricing,” or “terms and conditions,” and adjust the lists accordingly.
Then the client’s own development team can concentrate on clear answers to the new questions, which then become routine themselves. In other words, you answer 80% of the questions, and then you answer 80% of the 20% left over, and so on.
Of course, there’s more to it than that.
As a vendor or Web site manager, you can’t just answer customers’ questions, you have to be aware of what bothers--or interests--them.
As a politician, you may be able to answer would-be voters’ questions and even get them to think about the issues. For example, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) used Broad Daylight during his short-lived presidential campaign, and discovered that education was always among the top 10 questions.
Other questions would come and go according to the news of the day or McCain’s own speeches--campaign finance reform, what to do with the budget surplus, free trade and the like.
It relieved the staff of a huge burden, says former McCain 2000 Internet manager Max Fose: “When someone asks a question, you have to give them an answer. The advantage of the Internet is that it supports two-way communication, but that means you have to communicate. This gave people an avenue to get their answers, so they were no longer sending us 10 questions a day.
“We’d answer a question once, post it under the Q&A;, and then point subsequent questions, from either e-mail or snail mail, to the Web site for the answer. . . . We saved valuable staff time since we didn’t have to write thousands of individual responses.”
On the commercial side, a large unnamed company uses BD for internal sales and finds it useful to get new information out into the field.
For example, “When is X product going to be available in my territory?” And later on, “What tier of customers qualifies for extra commissions on X product?”
In theory, salespeople learn the products during sales training, but there are lots of items for which they need information on demand.
But there’s also a non-magic part to all this. The site owners need to be good at answering questions.
Here’s an example of one that answers the question but still sounds as if it were written by a lawyer: “Can I get [X-brand airline] miles credited to my account if I travel using a [special] reduced rate fare?
Answer: Credit will be received on all completed itineraries in which a [special] fare was purchased.”
Why couldn’t this site just say something friendly, such as: “Yes, you will earn mileage on your reduced-fare flights--as long as you complete your trip”? So what can you learn from all this even if you don’t buy BD’s enterprise-oriented software?
Answer: Many Web sites focus too much on appearance and not enough on usefulness. Most people visiting Web sites (other than those looking to be entertained) are searching for some kind of information.
Moreover, information about users’ changing interests can be tremendously valuable--whether it reflects the news of the day or how customers actually use your product, or simply the kinds of things people want to know about your company.
Finally, a Web site is not a static thing, designed according to some immutable principles of information organization. It’s a conversation between the site and the visitors--and the best conversations always include a lot of listening so that you can determine what’s of interest to your partner today--not yesterday, not tomorrow, but right now.
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Esther Dyson edits the technology newsletter Release 1.0 and is the author of the best-selling book “Release 2.0.” Comments should be directed to Esther Dyson at edyson@edventure.com.
