Re-engineering the Customer Web Experience
Like many corporate websites, ours has grown organically over a period of years and now consists of 12,000+ pages. A distributed publishing model with most content being written from an agency perspective (using agency language) often means that finding what you need on the site isn’t straightforward.
Over the past few months various groups have been working on how we might rebuild our website to modernise and improve the experience customers have when engaging with us online. Unsurprisingly implementing a new information architecture and rewriting 12,000+ pages of content will take considerable effort so in the last few weeks we have been thinking a bit more laterally about the function our website fulfills.
Most conventional wisdom suggests customers want a great experience when visiting a website but I’m not convinced this is the case when dealing with government agencies. We aren’t an online retailer or bidding site which users visit to browse and explore. When visiting our website I would suggest customers want to perform a specific task or answer a specific question as quickly and effortlessly as possible and then go back to browsing that online retailers site. So what can we do to create this low-friction experience without re-writing an entire website?
Firstly we should make the things users do most on our website are also the simplest things to find and do. Most organisations will probably find that 70%+ of their website visits relate to a handful of pages or functions - promote those to your home page and make them as simple as possible to do. This sets most users up for a quick visit to your website to do whatever they needed to do with the least searching and clicks possible.
The second idea we had was to abstract the landing page experience by having users land on a simple ‘what would you like to do’ page which allows them to type in their query into a textbox in the same way they do when interacting with Google. A combination of knowledge base and natural language search technology can unlock the value of the information in the 12,000+ pages without requiring the user to figure out how to navigate the structure. You can also provide a ‘click here to go to our main page’ link on the landing page to give people the choice to continue with the current website experience.
Coupling this landing page with some visitor analytics allows you to continuously refine your knowledge base with what questions your customers are asking and improve the answers they are provided. The added bonus is that you can then re-use that knowledge base in other parts of your organisation, such as a contact centre or online chat functionality.
The landing page idea can also be implemented around a specific event or for a specific time. If you know that during a certain month most of your traffic is associated with one specific business function then you can set up the landing page to cater for that. Outside of those specific periods you can integrate the ‘what would you like to do’ functionality into your normal home page. Our main page isn’t currently responsive so we have considered using the landing page idea for website visits originating from mobile device, whilst routing traditional desktop devices to our normal website.
The third idea is somewhat reliant on the first two - it involves standing up a new, parallel website containing the most popular content and functionality (based on visitor analytics) aligned with a new modern information architecture and linking back to key pages/resources on the old website. This is really a transition state - it’s not sustainable long term - but does allow you to get going sooner and then migrate things over as you have time and budget. You may even decide that many of the page you currently have are used so little they don’t warrant migrating. This approach would work if business units continue to be in charge of publishing their own content but do so with guidance on style, language etc. from a central editorial/publication function.
We have a whole different API-based strategy for services and data we deliver online but that’s another whole blog post in itself.
Over the coming few months we will be experimenting with these and other ideas to re-engineer the customer experience without doing a complete website overhaul. At the heart of any of these changes is data - understanding what customer visit your website for is an essential first step so if you don’t have analytics in place right now then I’d suggest that you need to do that first.