For the operational side of Web governance, the following three models are compared side by side in chart format. Some of the details are generalizations, but nonetheless help illustrate the differences between fully Centralized, Decentralized and Federated (Distributed) models for larger organizations.

Download: Comparison Chart of Web Governance Models

An ocean is never the same body of water because it’s always moving changing, evaporating and being replenished by new rainwater and runoff. Likewise, Internet content is an ocean of information that with content that is evaporating almost as quickly as new content flows into it.

We’ve heard of the deep Web and the invisible Web, private or subscriber-based databases that are not accessible to indexing by public search engines (intentionally or unintentionally), but what about millions of links that are broken when content types or entire Web sites are removed from production? Or domain names that expire?

While we might not miss “Kyle’s Frat Party” site, what about information of value to journalists, researchers and academics? For online journal publishers and academic researchers who cite Internet content in the form of URLs, this is an especially troublesome issue. In 2003, the San Francisco Chronicle reports:

…a growing number of scientists and scholars who are nervous about their increasing reliance on a medium that is proving far more ephemeral than archival. In one recent study, one-fifth of the Internet addresses used in a Web-based high school science curriculum disappeared over 12 months. Another study, published in January, found that 40 percent to 50 percent of the URLs referenced in articles in two computing journals were inaccessible within four years.

ArchiveIt 2.0

One solution offered recently in a July 26, 2006 news release from The Internet Archive, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving the Web and other digital archives, is the Archive-It 2.0 service, which allows the permanent capture of Web-based information for reference and archival purposes. Existing partners in this effort include the featured collections of the University of Toronto, Indiana University and North Carolina State Archives.

Archive-It 2.0 enables digital archivists, library and museum professionals to create more tailored, relevant and search-friendly collections of up to 10 million URLs based on regular Web crawls across selected websites. Through test crawls, subscribers may see what kind of web material would populate a certain collection before actually archiving them permanently. An optional paid feature within Archive-It 2.0, Archive-It Pro, allows subscribers to not only set caps on how many web documents are collected from a website over time, but also block the collection of materials from specific websites altogether. The digital collections, as a result, are focused and more easily managed, because irrelevant materials do not find their way into an institution’s archives.

Another issue is Web 2.0 sites, Ajax, Flash, and the increasing number of sites publishing information dynamically. Unlike static pages that can be archived as a hard document, dynamic pages feature content on demand that changes based on what information is requested from a database. Most blog sites offer Permalinks so search engines can index a permanent (or semi-permanent) record of journal entries, but as the Goddard Library Web Project discovered in a D-Lib Magazine article published in Nov 2004, the Web is becoming increasingly inaccessible for archival purposes:

We encountered several problems when performing the crawl on the increasingly complex scientific web sites. The most common problem resulted from the increasingly dynamic nature of those web sites. This includes content that is controlled by Javascript and Flash technologies, and dynamic content driven from database queries or content management systems. The crawling tool is unable to crawl a web page containing a search form that queries a database.

ISO Standards for publications

While librarians and Internet archivists try to address the issue of vanishing or inaccessible Internet content, Web site owners and content developers can play a part in helping libraries and archives document and preserve the Web. On Canada’s national Library and Archives site, there’s an excellent paper on Electronic Publishing published in 2001. While this was intended for Canadian publishers, the principles can be broadly applied to any electronic publishers on the Web. This matrix explains the scope of what the document means by electronic publishers.

Serial publications

If you publish an online journal, ezine or other serial publication online, applying for an ISSN (International Standard Serial Number) is a way to assign “a unique code for identifying serial publications, such as periodicals, newspapers, annuals, journals and monographic series” (Canada’s ISSN) and “magazines, newspapers, annuals (such as reports, yearbooks, and directories), journals, memoirs, proceedings, transactions of societies, and monographic series” (the United States ISSN). For serials distributed on the Internet and World Wide Web, the ISSN should appear on the first screen of the item.

While publishers are not legally obliged to use an ISSN, the U.S. site lists the benefits of applying for an ISSN:

The ISSN should be as basic a part of a serial as the title. The advantages of using it are abundant and the more the number is used the more benefits will accrue.

• ISSN provides a useful and economical method of communication between publishers and suppliers, making trade distribution systems faster and more efficient.

• The ISSN results in accurate citing of serials by scholars, researchers, abstracters, and librarians.

• As a standard numeric identification code, the ISSN is eminently suitable for computer use in fulfilling the need for file update and linkage, retrieval, and transmittal of data.

• ISSN is used in libraries for identifying titles, ordering and checking in, and claiming serials.
  ISSN simplifies interlibrary loan systems and union catalog reporting and listing.

• The U.S. Postal Service uses the ISSN to regulate certain publications mailed at second-class and controlled circulation rates.

• The ISSN is an integral component of the journal article citation used to monitor payments to the Copyright Clearance Center Inc.

• All ISSN registrations are maintained in an international data base and are made available in the ISDS Register, a microfiche publication which is scheduled to cease in the near future, or in “ISSN Compact,” a CD-ROM. These products are described in a document maintained by the ISSN International Centre: ISSN products

Individual publications

For individual publications, publishers should apply for an ISBN number. International Standard Book Numbers (ISBN) are 10-digit standard numbers for the unique identification of each edition of a book or other monographic publication (e.g. pamphlets, educational kits, etc.), as per this information on the Canadian ISBN site:

The International Standard Book Number (ISBN) is a system of numerical identification for books, pamphlets, educational kits, microforms, CD-ROM and other digital and electronic publications. Assigning a unique number to each published title, provides that title with its own, unduplicated, internationally recognized identifier.

As content publishers, our sites become part of the ocean of content online. We have a moral obligation to our current and future users to ensure the content we create becomes part of the Internet’s official historical record, good and bad, of humankind.

Get archived! 7 Ways to Keep Your Content from Vanishing

Most Web publishers, including me, are guilty of breaking links or removing content and having readers email you to ask “What happened to that (article/news item/link/download) on your site?”, but here are some steps you can take to help keep your content online and accessible (assuming you want it to be so!)

1. Check your links! This is a no-brainer, but with all the content management, link verification software and other tools available to Web publishers, it’s still a stinky issue. You or your Web development staff should establish link-naming conventions (e.g. Wikipedia’s) to govern the rules of how links are named, which can be followed consistently whether they are being named manually or dynamically.

2. Archive your links. If you really need to remove a link that is still valid, but isn’t relevant/essential to your site anymore, consider creating a Link Archive page where you can move the links so they can still be indexed by search engines and found by your users. Otherwise, create a redirect for old links so they point to a message indicating they are no longer available, or to new pages/content.

3. Archive your old site(s). Redesigning your site? Replacing it with a new version that has new content. Consider leaving the old site on your server in a Historical Site Archive area. If you don’t want search engines to index it and return pages of outdated results to your users, try using a robots.txt file that will exclude the historical pages from spidering.

4. Let the Internet Archive do the work. Read How can I get my site included in the Archive on the Internet Archive’s site. It’s a blast from the past to see older versions of sites going back to the mid-90s on the Internet Archive, and users can link to these pages, too.

5. Let search engines archive your pages. Find out how to ensure that your site is search engine optimized and that pages are not being published in a way that will cause search engine spiders to exclude them from indexing. Search Engine Watch is an excellent resource for SEO, SearchTools.com has some useful information on indexing robots and spiders, and the all-important Google provides guidelines for Webmasters on how to make your site Google-friendly.

6. Open up your content. Mirroring your content on other sites is another strategy for keeping your content alive and accessible. By licencing your content through a Creative Commons licence and/or offering it for republication or repurposing on the Internet, you can help ensure that your content stays alive and accessible. For more information, visit the Open Content Alliance, Connexions, or the University of British Columbia’s innovative Public Knowledge Project.

7. Use Universal Design principles. Last but not least, using Universal Design principles to ensure accessibility to the broadest range of users. It’s not only good from a usability perspective, but also from an archiving perspective.

Garth A. Buchholz, BA, CUA, is a certified Internet business strategist, usability analyst, researcher and publisher at DigitalPractices.

For every rule of thumb about the Internet, there’s one “on the other hand.” In this case, creating a new site using a new domain name may be a good strategy for attracting new users to your parent site and for giving your stodgy corporate page a bit of edginess by way of association.

For example, Burger King’s highly effective viral marketing campaign had its own spinoff site at http://www.subservientchicken.com — a hilarious, interactive gimmick that was silly, but also linked to the Burger King corporate site. After seeing their Subservient Chicken site, it’s hard not to think of Burger King a little differently than you did before.

And of course, the campaign not only reached many users who might have never bothered to visit the BK.com corporate site, but it also gave them a way to tell their friends, family and colleagues about Burger King’s funny new promotion.

A spinoff site is not only a good marketing tool, but it can have a limited lifespan, too, after which you can just redirect users to your parent site. Think of these spinoff sites as W3 “special agents” that can be given a special mission and sent off into unknown Web territory to scout for new site visitors, bring back former site visitors, carry out specific assignments, convey information or other content, and then be recalled after their mission is completed successfully.

Home base is always your homepage, but these “special agent” spinoff sites can help you attain your Web objectives. They help you leverage the power of the Internet by using a new metaphor for your Web activities. Instead of being a virtual real-estate owner in a worldwide neighborhood where you wait for people to visit you, you can start deploying a virtual salesforce that visits other neighborhoods and knocks on new doors.

However, most people use more than one navigation choice during a single session search for content, and each choice during that session is determined, more often than not, by a specific task flow. For example, if you know what you’re looking for on a retail site, you’ll want to navigate by the product or service categories, but if you encounter problems, you’ll want to navigate by organizational structure (e.g. finding which part of the organization is responsible for a product or service) to seek help.

So in the first case, your navigation is driven by a scenario where you are purchasing something, and in the second case it is driven by a scenario where you are wanting to contact someone or some area of responsibility.  

The chart below outlines some general reasons users make navigation choices, although a more refined analysis can be done when one is looking at specific case studies or organizations. Keep in mind that at any stage of the search, depending on the user’ previous experiences, they may give up and abandon their navigation efforts altogether.

Rather than feeling that their own search/navigation methods failed, or are lacking the necessary skills, most people will instead feel frustration, resentment and even anger, and blame the site design or site administrators for their lack of success.

Granted, in a secured network environment, there are less unknown variables for Web metrics analysis than for Internet sites that can be accessed by anyone, from any browser in the world. Yet because of these assumptions, many corporate cultures still do not analyze Web metrics to help their intranets succeed. When organizations develop and support a metrics-driven intranet, they can understand better how their employees use the intranet, align it with corporate goals more effectively, and plan future content and services using metrics as part of the business case.

Corporate cultures may often resist gathering intranet metrics because of additional costs, lack of understanding or lack of expertise. Yet Web analytics can help organizations determine return on investment for each employee who uses an intranet site by providing figures on improved customer service, increased conversion rates (sales), reduction of paper costs, and improved productivity. To help promote a culture of intranet metrics within private and public sector organizations, the following scenarios illustrate how Web analytics can benefit intranet operations and planning.

Intranet Redesign Projects

Intranet redesigns are, by necessity, a collaborative multi-departmental effort that spans various internal interests within the organization. Competing objectives can lead to complex governance, strategy and content management issues for an organization, e.g. Who makes the final decisions about what kind of intranet we should have? Who owns the intranet and its content? Who is responsible for managing and updating content? Intranet analytics can help business decision makers prior to an intranet redesign as well as afterward, when steady state governance guidelines are in place to help the organization oversee the daily management of the site.

If an intranet is being redesigned, an intranet metrics analysis can inform business executives and stakeholders about how the intranet was being used in the past, such as what its most popular and well-visited pages and downloads were, and what were the peak business hours when employees were using the intranet the most. (This can be especially useful if the intranet supports customer service or client-related applications, and a spike in usage might indicate a staff reliance on the intranet to help them perform business functions.) When an intranet site is redesigned to improve its usability, Web sites can increase their desired metrics by up to 100% (Source: Jakob Nielsen, Return on Investment for Usability, 2003).

After the launch of a new intranet site, or after a major intranet redesign is implemented, it’s critical to the success of the project to be able to gather hard measurements to provide a counterweight or reality check against the subjective responses. A new intranet or redesigned intranet almost always attracts a lot of attention within an organization right after its go-live date, and often a fresh new site also garners praise from internal users who are excited about it and eager to use it. Thus, initial feedback gathered from surveys, polls, focus groups or other subjective evaluations may mislead the owners of the intranet into thinking that their project was an unqualified success. However, checking metrics such as usage patterns, clickthroughs, bail-out rates, length of sessions, top pages/documents and other criteria can provide a more balanced view and help stakeholders analyze what’s right – and even what’s wrong – about the new site.

The Online HR Office

The Human Resources department in any organization often owns the intranet or at least is one of its primary stakeholders. Many intranets also have an HR site for managers as well as an HR site for employees. Intranet analytics for these online HR “offices” are not only important to determine how many employees are using the HR site(s) and how often, but also to link key intranet metrics with training, retention and recruitment initiatives, to name a few.

For example, any online registration for courses or eLearning modules can be tracked through site metrics, and intranet analytics can tell HR management and training leaders whether there are corresponding numbers between the number page views and the number of actual registrations for courses. If page views are high but registrations are lower than expected, management will know that the site is doing its job but the courses themselves may not be drawing interest, for any variety of reasons. HR leaders can also survey employees in advance of curriculum planning efforts to determine which courses would receive the most uptake, and which courses should be dropped from the course calendar.

Employee retention and recruitment efforts can also be determined and reinforced through Intranet analytics. While employee retention or employee job satisfaction is often considered a “soft benefit” because it can’t be measured, intranet analytics provide a way to measure its impacts. An analysis of employee usage for the IBM intranet site showed that 80% of IBM employees access the intranet daily, 68% view it as crucial to their jobs, and 52% are more satisfied to be an IBM employee because of information available on the intranet (Source: Liam Cleaver, IBM, From Intranet to the On Demand Workplace, 2005).

Recruitment initiatives can also be analyzed. Providing new and younger employees with current technology, including a best practice intranet site, has been found to be an important incentive when recruiting. Intranet analytics can demonstrate the value of such incentives by tracking new hires by login ID and analyzing their intranet usage patterns. As well, activity on new content and applications can be reviewed to determine different usage patterns between veteran employees and new hires. New employees may themselves be interested in seeing overall site stats to give them an understanding of how the online community is using the site.

The Employee Community

The impact of the “Web 2.0″ movement on Web sites has run deep and wide through the Internet. While the concept of an intranet community has been promoted since the 1990s (e.g. Amy Jo Kim’s book, Community Building on the Web), the last few years have seen an increasing expectation on the part of users that sites should be built by an online community, for an online community.

Yet intranets cannot simply pay lip service to community-building. Organizations with intranets may want to build not only an overall sense of community for the site, but also use Web 2.0 functionality to create and measure sub-communities within each division, department or business unit. Blogs, message boards, forums, chat rooms, shared space for virtual project management, event calendars, classified ads and other community-builders not only generate content but valuable Web metrics. A survey of intranets found that the most important metrics they tracked were not just page views (71%) and unique users (79%), but also community posts (67%) and registrations (63%) (Source: Forum One Communications, Online Community Metrics, 2006).

Intranet analytics are especially important for building a model of community activity patterns. Ultimately, the purpose of community-building on an intranet is to advance specific business objectives, such as enhancing information sharing and knowledge management. By tracking patterns for topics, streams or threads on a blog or forum, for example, senior management can obtain valuable data on the nature of internal business discussions and employee activity relating to specific business issues and changes.

As well, some content management systems use intranet metrics to push the most frequently accessed content and/or the newest content to top level pages so users are always aware of which content has just been posted and which content pages are most popular. This can be especially useful on forums where topical discussions drive user-generated activity and content.

The Customer Service Toolkit

On the Internet, the most important metrics are related to conversion rates – sales, transactions processed, clickthroughs, customer service support requests and customer satisfaction analyses. On an intranet, however, customer service success can be measured by intranet metrics in terms of how effectively it can be used to support the business activities, such as the ones above, for the organization. Customer service support on the intranet can be achieved through knowledge management tools, decision-making support tools, user forums for customer service staff to share information and post solutions to problems, and customer relationship management systems, to name a few. All of these can generate hard numbers that can be interpreted through intranet analytics.

Existing or new systems can be measured to help determine staff efficiency gains and diagnose minor customer service issues before they escalate into serious problems. As well, intranet metrics can help determine softer benefits such as employee morale, consistency of information and communications and customer perception of internal processes, i.e. it seemed to be easy for the company’s customer service staff to answer questions/process a purchase/resolve an issue, therefore the company must be well-managed. A research report on employee portals states: “The Employee Portal may help your sales team respond quicker to customer queries. The customer perception of quick and reliable service may lead to increased sales. However, it may not be possible to attribute the exact increase in sales as a result of this initiative.” (Source: Tan Shong Ye and Thyag Venkatesan, Going Beyond ROI, CIO Asia, 2006).

Intranet metrics for customer service pages and applications can also be shared with staff, not as a way to focus on shortcomings or dismal numbers, but to help find solutions and identify successes.

Conclusions

Intranet metrics should be linked to business drivers as well as to targeted performance figures for the site. On intranets, organizations know specific variables that may not be as easily available to Internet sites – who the users are, the maximum number of users who will visit the site, the type of browser they will be using, and when usage rates will drop off entirely (after office hours). Given that some of these variables are fixed, it is reasonable for organizations to set targets for their intranet metrics based on business objectives. Intranets are a substantial internal investment.

The methodology for intranet analytics should be revisited and audited regularly to ensure that the metrics are not being misinterpreted, but overall most organizations can benefit from sound analytics practices for their intranet metrics. Increased automation and customization offered by Web metrics tools and intranet applications provide greater control and accuracy to the figures they generate. As well, intranet metrics should be strategically shared with all members of the organization, including management and staff, rather than just the Web team or I.T. department. An analytical understanding of how people use their intranet is the most important way business leaders can learn how to improve their intranet and its return on investment.

Originally article by Garth A. Buchholz published by the Web Analytics Association.

When Web customers click on a link, that’s an interaction, but when they submit a contact request, that’s a transaction of information – they’re send you their personal “content” and expecting the site to respond accordingly. They’re sharing their personal information and inquiries, and the Web site administrator is providing customer service in return.

Back in the day when the Web was young, most commercial Web sites had very little content, yet never failed to include someone’s name and email address on the homepage. Google forward 10 years later and the “Contact” or “Contact Us” content is most often tucked into the header nav or footer nav. Click on it and you might get a mailform, a simple “Contact our Webmaster” link or, with some serendipity, you may find an actual phone number and mailing address.

A December 2005 Jupiter Research report found that since 2000, the number of sites that responded to email inquiries within 24 hours continued to decrease. Only 45% of sites surveyed responded to email inquiries within 24 hours, and 39% of sites took three days or longer to reply, or did not respond at all.

Last year when I was on the judging panel for the WebAward it struck me that of all the dozens of Web sites I was reviewing – and many of which were award winners in one category or another – it was rare to find a site that had extensive contact and customer service information. Most commercial Web sites, including public sector and NGOs, simply do not provide excellence in “customer service experience” when it comes to their customer contact transactions:

1. CONTACT INFORMATION IS HARD TO FIND.

Contact info is hidden, obscured or limited to a simple “Contact the Webmaster” email link. To improve your site’s usability, make sure visitors can easily find contact information by displaying prominently on the homepage and in all headers/footers. Contact-related content should be transparent, comprehensive and responsive.

2. NOT ENOUGH CONTACT INFORMATION.

If an organization wants to hide, why is it on the Internet? All Web sites should provide at least the names of the key people responsible for the organization and the site, as well as their contact phone numbers and email links. For larger organizations with publicly accessible offices, mailing addresses and street addresses should be provided as well.

3. WEB SITES DON’T RESPOND OR TAKE TOO LONG TO RESPOND.

When a visitor contacts a Web site, the assumption is that a person responsible for the site within the organization will respond to their email at least by the next business day. Getting swamped with emails through your Web site? That’s your problem, not the customer’s. Don’t make your Web customers stand in a virtual lineup all the time just to get a simple email response.

4. WEB CONTACT IS TOO IMPERSONAL AND INTANGIBLE.

After a customer clicks to submit their email, what evidence do they have of their transaction? The Jupiter Research report found that, of 92% of Web sites offering email as a customer support option, only 41% acknowledged receipt of customers’ messages with automated email responses. Also, in autoresponse emails and tracking emails, more sites should include a unique customer service number for tracking as well as an email address and/or telephone number as well as a customer service manager’s name that they can contact if they are not satisfied with the service they are receiving.

5. CUSTOMER SERVICE EXPERIENCE IS POOR WHEN SITES RESPOND TO WEB CONTACT TRANSACTIONS.

Make sure the follow-up to Web site contact transactions is friendly, personal (include a service agent’s first name and contact information) and effective. If it seems a request cannot be resolved by email, provide the customer with a way to elevate the request so that the issue/request can be resolved.

Garth A. Buchholz, BA, CUA, is an author, educator and Web strategist at DigitalPractices. Contact Garth at [250] 589.5898 or email Garth@DigitalPractices.com.

Down with the Times New Roman empire! 

Who the hell uses Time New Roman anymore? Not for Web sites, anyway. Ol’ TNR serif may be popular with the digitally challenged who don’t know how to change the default font on their Microsoft Word, but it’s such a dated, hokey-looking font that it doesn’t belong anywhere on the Web. There’s a guy who publishes a site called Ban Comic Sans, but I hate TNR even more than I hate Comic Sans.  

The Page Title tag is for, um, a page title.

How many professionally designed sites do I still see with a meaningless page title such as “default” or even something embarrassing like “insert title here.” Uh, last count was 5, 186, 327. Search engines like page titles. And when people bookmark sites, they like to see something in their Favorites other than “default” or “homepage.” 

Stop using splash pages. 

You heard me. Stop it. Stop it right now! Splash pages were indeed invented by a man named A. Bored Webdesigner in the 1990s so that Web designers could slap an attractive-looking graphic at the front end of the site. You know, that place where everyone is looking for information, links, functionality, etc. Not that users don’t want to  

• Stare at a pre-load animation that says “Page Loading!” for 15 seconds for their lives;
• Gaze in admiration as your Flash splash rolls out its animated images and other bragware about your company for 2 minutes, and
• Find the tiny link that says “Click here to go to homepage” when they thought they already were going to the homepage, and now have to click one more time to get where they wanted to go to begin with.

Some splash pages offer a helpful link that says “skip”, which should actually say “click here to skip this self-indulgent crap that you didn’t want to see in the first place and make that extra effort to visit our site even though we are trying to frustrate your attempts to do so.” 

Rant over and out. 

(more to come!)         

Email Garth @ Digital Practices

If Web development isn’t driven by an alignment of sustainable technology, user-driven content and business-driven goals, the corporate Web presence will either fail to meet your business goals, be troubled by expensive technology challenges or simply alienate your core users.

The strategic objectives of a solid Corporate Web Strategy are found at the confluence of:

1. Business and strategic goals: Does the Web site support and/or advance your core business objectives or the objectives of one of your strategic initiatives?

2. Targeted core users: Does your Web site attract, engage and retain the kind of users you want to attract? (e.g. for client support, conversion, marketing, etc). Is it providing the level of customer service they expect?  Do your Web analytics support these assumptions?

3. Enabling technology that is integrated, sustainable and scalable:  Are your technology infrastructure and IT support staff capable of delivering what you want to deliver online? Can the costs of IT development and maintenance be justified by what you’re achieving in objectives #1 and #2 above?

If all your Web objectives fall within the overlap of the three objectives above, your Corporate Web Strategy is sound because it’s meeting your technology requirements, satisfying your online clients, and above all, working in sync with your short-term and long-term business goals. 

Copyright 2007-2009 Garth A. Buchholz All Rights Reserved
For free reprint permission contact Garth@DigitalPractices.com

When Web customers click on a link, that’s an interaction, but when they submit a contact request, that’s a transaction of information – they’re send you their personal “content” and expecting the site to respond accordingly. They’re sharing their personal information and inquiries, and the Web site administrator is providing customer service in return. 

Back in the day when the Web was young, most commercial Web sites had very little content, yet never failed to include someone’s name and email address on the homepage. Google forward 10 years later and the “Contact” or “Contact Us” content is most often tucked into the header nav or footer nav. Click on it and you might get a mailform, a simple “Contact our Webmaster” link or, with some serendipity, you may find an actual phone number and mailing address. 

A December 2005 Jupiter Research report found that since 2000, the number of sites that responded to email inquiries within 24 hours continued to decrease. Only 45% of sites surveyed responded to email inquiries within 24 hours, and 39% of sites took three days or longer to reply, or did not respond at all. 

Last year when I was on the judging panel for the 2005 WebAward it struck me that of all the dozens of Web sites I was reviewing – and many of which were award winners in one category or another – it was rare to find a site that had extensive contact and customer service information. Most commercial Web sites, including public sector and NGOs, simply do not provide excellence in “customer service experience” when it comes to their customer contact transactions: 

1. CONTACT INFORMATION IS HARD TO FIND.

Contact info is hidden, obscured or limited to a simple “Contact the Webmaster” email link. To improve your site’s usability, make sure visitors can easily find contact information by displaying prominently on the homepage and in all headers/footers. Contact-related content should be transparent, comprehensive and responsive. 

2. NOT ENOUGH CONTACT INFORMATION.

If an organization wants to hide, why is it on the Internet? All Web sites should provide at least the names of the key people responsible for the organization and the site, as well as their contact phone numbers and email links. For larger organizations with publicly accessible offices, mailing addresses and street addresses should be provided as well. 

3. WEB SITES DON’T RESPOND OR TAKE TOO LONG TO RESPOND.

When a visitor contacts a Web site, the assumption is that a person responsible for the site within the organization will respond to their email at least by the next business day. Getting swamped with emails through your Web site? That’s your problem, not the customer’s. Don’t make your Web customers stand in a virtual lineup all the time just to get a simple email response. 

4. WEB CONTACT IS TOO IMPERSONAL AND INTANGIBLE.

After a customer clicks to submit their email, what evidence do they have of their transaction? The Jupiter Research report found that, of 92% of Web sites offering email as a customer support option, only 41% acknowledged receipt of customers’ messages with automated email responses. Also, in autoresponse emails and tracking emails, more sites should include a unique customer service number for tracking as well as an email address and/or telephone number as well as a customer service manager’s name that they can contact if they are not satisfied with the service they are receiving. 

5. CUSTOMER SERVICE EXPERIENCE IS POOR WHEN SITES RESPOND TO WEB CONTACT TRANSACTIONS.

Make sure the follow-up to Web site contact transactions is friendly, personal (include a service agent’s first name and contact information) and effective. If it seems a request cannot be resolved by email, provide the customer with a way to elevate the request so that the issue/request can be resolved.