05.01.04
Web Motivations Part 1
A concept that’s been rolling around in my head for a couple of years has been this concept of “Motivation” and how it relates to web design and web site architecture.
Below is a story of Motivation from the perspective of a web site’s owners.
This week I was on a consulting job at an utility board that provides power and water to one of Oregon’s larger cities. They are in the process of upgrading their web site to make it more useful for their customers.
A primary driver of this change is the number of calls they receive in their call center. They told me “20% of the calls on hold are dropped.” This means that the caller is on hold so long that they hang up entirely. 20% is incredibly high. Anything over 5% is considered bad. (Going too far below this means that you have //too many// Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) answering phones.)
A major goal “Motivation” for the site upgrade is to reduce the shear number of calls that come into the call center. This is a smart and very measureable goal which is always nice to have.
The crux of the issue they were strugling with internally? The home page. The home page is *always* a political battleground with every part of every organization trying to stake their claim to a certain amount of the visitor’s attention. (Need I tell you about the company’s site we just completed that has a picture of the husband and wife owners of the company on the front page? It’s all politics.)
The struggle for mind share/real estate on the Utility’s web site comes down to the number one goal (which follows the 2nd part of the REV-C model of saving money through efficencies.) of saving money that would be needed to build out a larger CSR staff.
One of the primary arguements on what to put on the front page basically came down to “how much news should be up there?” Just the most recent month’s? The last year’s?
The arguement bordered on idiocy. As I heard them discuss the front page design they came up with I actually became a bit angry with them. (Not that I would ever show that to a client.) At an appropriate time in the meeting, I requested that we take the 7 people in the room to the call center and check it out.
So we all trundled over to the center and stood around observing a CSR take calls. Once the CSR finished a call I asked him to rank the number of calls that he got. Here was his response: 40% to 50% was for paying a bill, usually by credit card. The other 40% to 50% was for starting or stoping service. Maybe a grand total of 2% covered every other call he got during the day.
When we got back to the meeting room, I drew the (what was obvious to me) straight line between the goals of the site, the volume of customer calls and the amount of space dedicted to any particular function on the home page.
The CSR told them the Answer to the question of how to dedicate space on the front page: “Pay Bills” and “Start/Stop Service”. All other information is auxillary. (Other information should of course be available on the site, and there should be the standard naviagtion on the edges of the page.)
95% of the message given by the home page should be those two items. If the goal is to reduce call volume, when a customer visits the site these two functions should just about slap them up the side of the head. Anything else is just asking customers to use the phone to fulfill these needs.
Motivations in this case are from the web site owner’s point of view. In a follow up entry I’ll discuss visitors’ motivations.