Case study survey feedback

Written by: Jonathan Briggs

November 23, 2004 [2998 views]

A big thanks to all those who eventually completed the last survey. A total of over 80% which is excellent at this stage in the semester. I hope the feedback below is useful in helping you prepare your case studies. It will certainly help me target the last few lectures. As last time I will break up the feedback into a number of separate posts.

Breadth of companies chosen
Almost all the approved companies are being studied by at least one student with Lush, Primark and Brindisa being the most popular. There are no advantages in selecting a more obscure company; the most important factor is that you can see plenty of room for improvement.

Here are some of the improvements you have suggested plus some brief comments. Many of them are sensible but which would be the most effective?

1. 'Improving the buying process.' Tell me how.
2. 'Add ecommerce.' Help me understand how it would be integrated. Don’t just add a shop on the side.
3. 'Change the way products are displayed.' Are you adding more information or changing the images?
4. 'Improve visual presentation and layout of the site and use multimedia to engage and attract a user to the site.' Why do you think most of the successful stores avoid using multimedia? I’m not against multimedia but you will need to be very careful in explaining how it will help improve revenues or customer service.
5. 'Better design.' Don’t be vague
6. 'I found purchasing a product to be difficult, time consuming and generally not a great experience.' What would you change to make it less difficult?
7. 'The introduction of a back end database for all products.' How would the existence of this database be reflected in the experience for the customer?
8. 'Demonstrate a clear business objective! Creating a site that is 'cool' is not good enough.' I agree.
9. 'Improve the navigation.' Give more detail on what “good navigation” would be like.
10. Change the layout of the items sold. Show me (even sketch out the layout)
11. 'Create a decent way to place order and add items to the shopping basket and view them.' Again sketch this out to help me understand what you are proposing.
12. 'Make the site look more professional by changing the color scheme and layout.' You will need to argue the issue of improving trust. Understand what the best competitors in their area are doing.
13. 'Search engine optimisation or some sort of ad campaign is needed to let people know about the site.' Is it the most important thing to bring people to a site with a poor customer experience when they get there?
14. 'The site doesn’t feel very secure I’m not sure I could trust it with my details.' Again this is about trust. You need to make specific recommendations on improving the security. It is about the secure messages that the site conveys in its text, technology and design.
15. 'Discounts for online purchases.' Should online always be cheaper? Where are the savings for the company?
16. 'Instead of having to register it would be much better if you were provided with a quote number and went to a store to buy the product.' Complex on-line/off-line transactions are made more difficult if the site is run as a separate business. This is often true in the world of mobile phones.
17. 'Implement the site in different languages.' Is this really the most important improvement? It could be but you would need to justify the extra expense of reaching out to a bigger audience.
18. 'Improve the speed of the website.' How would you achieve this; by lightening the graphics, simplifying the code or increasing server power? You need to consider the relative benefits and costs.
19. 'Have fewer things on each page.' Take another look at Amazon or the BBC. You may personally hate the density of information and links but this strategy has proved to be very successful.
20. 'Reduce the amount of clicks and screens you have to go through to the shopping basket.' Draw a diagram to work out the optimum shopping process for the particular site to show what you mean.

Your explanations varied in quality. The best set out a correct argument for what you were suggesting. The weakest simply restated your idea – it’s a good idea because it is a good idea. You need to think carefully about your reasons. A short clear answer is needed but quite a lot of thinking. Remember that the explanation will always be harder than the idea.

Recommendations in each area
I asked you to reflect on the changes you would make in each of the following areas: look & feel, customer service, technical and content. I could have added navigation and promotion. Most of the answers were sensible but once again it is worth really selecting the most important few changes in each area. I would recommend that you have 3-4 of each up your sleeve. Be as clear as you can be.

Look & Feel:
Have a much more interesting home page, improve the colours, use more Flash, use more buttons, change ways products are display – these are all far too vague. You need to explain what would make the page more interesting, what you would use Flash for (tends to deter lots of shoppers because it is slow to load) and how you would display the products.

Customer service:
Think harder about what different customers want when they come to the site. I will cover this in some more detail in next week’s lecture or in a posting here.

Technical:
Compatibility across platforms and browsers, search, product comparison and product exploration were all sensible ideas. Changing the implementation and scripting language, improving databases or using technologies such as Flash may be ways of achieving these improvements. You could be much bolder and consider developments such as syndication, price comparison engines and other devices that use information from the whole market.

Content: You generally need to think harder about the content you would put the web for your case studies. What information can you provide that would help the shopper come to a decision? Why do they go to other sites after this one? Is there information from other sources that would make your site more useful?

Search engines
I asked you to select some keywords that your case study companies would want to be ranked highly for. Many of you suggested the name of the company and although this is possible it is a wasted opportunity; Lush UK will find it easy to get to the top for its own name but much more difficult for terms such as “natural cosmetics” where it has competitors. I would suggest that these general terms are likely to be much more important in driving new customers. My task would be to brainstorm good quality generic terms and then research them and select those with the highest value (and fewest competitors). You would need to explain your choice in terms of the likely traffic that they will generate rather than just stating that these are good words.

I then asked you to look at the Google search results for these keywords and surprise surprise, those of you who had selected the company name tended to find they were at the top whereas for generic words they were generally more poorly ranked. Search engine optimisation is about targeting the highly trafficked words. Think about how you would improve the ratings for these more important words. It is definitely worth looking at those companies that are more highly ranked. Study their pages, their META tags and calculate the number of sites that link to them. You would have to help your case study companies do similar things to achieve the same sorts of ratings.

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