Intelligent web

What does the customer really want from your internet business? Answer that question for once and you can claim a permanent undisputed position in business management text books. As unlikely as answering the question may seem, it might actually be at least slightly more easier than you think. Admitted, all online businesses, great and bad, have tried hard to find an answer. Admitted, there are tomes and tomes written and debated. However, its only recently, in 2009, that all that is really starting to come together in a cohesive and widely available manner. Its a big secret of good online business thats written on the wall. This big secret postulation is that an intelligent website can probably learn more about your customer than most of your offline marketing projects while breaking all speed records. So what's new about that? What is new is that its only now that business managers are starting to actually need the things that engineers have been talking about since google was born. Its only a recent phenomenon that number of Internet connections has started surpassing the typical market share of a leading product of an offline business in a competitive market. It all sounds as though a mini-evolution of sorts is taking place in small pockets of the business world where people have started to answer the question successfully. They are finding out, in hard ways and easy ways, what their customers really want!

This hit home for me when I was contemplating my little web world. I am down with the techno talk and walk at the place I work. I do believe that our setup is fairly modern and capable. However, I had not seen any attempt to really find out what was going on with the website. We had the analytics and the KPIs; every now and then, I would log on to my analytics provider's application and see the green dots and arrows to see that all was well. It was satisfying to see that people were hitting us up. At times, I would see red marks and I would immediately swing into action to fix the problem. Wow! That would really be the time to exchange high fives and pat each other on the back. I really felt that we had it going. However, simultaneously, I had this deep down feeling that the tranquility was just a sign of ignorance. Our bounce rates were acceptable and comparable to competetion, but really high. Our length of visit was acceptable, page views per session were also good. However, we really had no idea what was ticking. It was as though many customers came to our little website, saw things, some left the site, some lingered and some bought stuff. All we could do was watch it unfold. It felt like other than doing what we already did, there was not a whole lot to it. I realized that we had not many concrete ideas on how to pro-actively influence customers or to get them to take favorable action on our site. We had the cool content, we had the humdinger campaigns, but we were simply a production shop with web being another distribution channel. Technology had to better than that! A little research led to ideas about what some people call the intelligent web. If you get the drift, that is what Amazon.com has mastered and is democratically applying it to all marketers who sell products on their website.

The "intelligent web" idea is very simple to build up. Starting at the very beginning, we could state it very simply: as a business, we should adapt to our customers needs. Lets add in a possible outcome namely "satisfaction" to this statement. For this article, lets define satisfaction as an observed positive change in a customer's behavior between successive visits. Thats heavily loaded! Note that we are adding two notions here: 1) the discrete nature of experience as far as visits to the website are concerned. 2) some kind of an outcome of the customer's visit that can be measured for positive or negative changes. For the first point: unlike a product that people consume privately over a long time after the initial purchase, in the majority of the online world, every visit is an experience that occurs in your shop and can potentially be managed with a white gloved hand. For the second point: the online world allows you to measure each and every behavioral minutae that makes sense. In the physcial world, as most of you know, you can only take samples and statistically prove theories. That is a huge opportunity right there! Further, lets talk a little about adaptation now. In a physical world, marketing cycles, store design cycles, product design cycles work really well to provide a satisfying consumer experience that also gets better over time. The beauty of software that powers websites is that it literally provides you the means of adapting to every single click on your website. So, in addition to your tool belt of marketing programs, you can code your website such a way that your store design and almost any other parameter can be changed with every visit to the site. In that light, we could re-state our initial idea to say that "our website should pro-actively adapt to every visit from a customer to provide constantly increasing satisfaction". Its a little complex, but it will do for now.