Just what is a Web support site? When we first got into this Web support issue, Web support sites on the vendor side were essentially online knowledge bases. Companies were taking their internal Q&As and putting them on the Web. Pretty easy proposition. Then they turned into more like portals for all kinds of business process information. And on the vendor side, we started to see training and consulting and license management and patches and anything a customer could possibly be interested in to support the product.
On the IT side -- this is relatively new -- the sites are beginning to be more focused on all the business processes within the company. I was just doing a site evaluation for a very, very large government organization in Washington, and they have this fascinating site that covers everything from ordering airline tickets to expense accounts to training. It's not related to software support but to supporting all of their employees. It's very effective, and it's getting traffic from their employees who would have been trained or supported individually in things like filling out an expense account and buying airline tickets. Now it's all on the site.
What would IT managers learn from looking at the top 10 report? I'd love to see them recognize the potential of moving support away from bodies to Web pages. It's not an easy transition. The potential is there, but lots of companies tend to see it as a cost-deflection issue. That's not really what it is. It's about the best way to transfer information to people. It's a huge philosophical question that gets into the issues of corporate culture, interaction with employees and customers.
Let's walk through the ASP's criteria. You start with overall usability, design and navigation. What do the judges look for? The judges look for good, clean navigation and text, which turns out to be harder to achieve than it seems. We often see sites where the people developing the site were conned by developers into creating all kinds of dynamic pages. It's the same old story: Developers promise no performance problems, but once it's up, pages move like molasses.
These sites also tend to expose silo problems in companies. I've seen this even with very big, sophisticated organizations. Every little department has its own content and its own graphical standards and its own turf on the Web site. That's awful for someone trying to navigate.
I was evaluating a site recently where the incident-reporting form was different for software than for hardware because they were two different departments. If you had a hardware question, you went to a page that looked very different from where you'd go for a software question. We penalize people for that kind of confusion.
For some companies, this is a really tough issue; for others, there's enough centralized IT control that it's not an issue. I guess the real issue is, do the site developers have the guts to fight this problem when they see it? Lots of times they don't.
Another category you evaluate is knowledge and search implementation. What makes a good search function? The big issue is recognizing that people have different learning styles. Some want to look up a problem and have it solved with a tech note. Others may need some training, templates, cookbook solutions or consulting, and it's tricky to bring all these things together.
If you just use a problem/solution model, then that probably isn't going to satisfy a lot of people. At an accounting software company, for example, the problem might not be solved by a tech note because it might be that the user doesn't understand double-entry bookkeeping. Or maybe he needs a template of a chart of accounts. Or maybe he needs a consultant to come in and set up the books. So if it's just a problem/solution approach, that isn't going to work.
Interactive features is another criterion. What do you want to see there? The same as you see anywhere else on the Web. It's particularly important for support sites because problem solving tends to be more complex than ordering a product. Ordering a product is a linear process: Give the order and take the money.
Problem solving tends to go off into more paths, some of which are dead ends, so you need some way for there to be a dialogue or exchange of information or a progressive disclosure of information. A tree structure for solving a problem can be very complicated. That's why people in tech support have conversations: You need feedback. Once you start opening up the issue of feedback, this gets very threatening for classic command-and-control organizations. They don't want people to say, "This is confusing" or "There's a better solution than you're offering." But that's what you should want. Interactivity means letting employees and customers have a say in what you're doing.
But interactivity is also good just as a way to keep people engaged, and it helps lock in relationships with people so they keep using the Web for more than just very rare problems. If they come only when they have a serious problem, they may not remember how to use the site or they many not have a lot of faith in it. But if they come to order airline tickets and answer expense account questions, they will probably take a more complex problem to the Web, and that's a real gain.
The final item is personalization. How important is that in a Web support site, and how do the best companies implement it? It varies. On the vendor side, we don't see much need for it with a small, single-product company. You can assume customers are pretty much alike. But as Web sites get more complex, it's almost essential to customize. For IT sites, that's generally really important. There's a big difference between the kind of information you give an executive versus a staff person. There's also going to be big differences among departments and their responsibilities -- sales people will want something different than accounting people. That's where you want to personalize.
Do you see many IT sites? We've had IT sites, but they tend to be behind the curve. Typically, IT organizations are five years behind the software companies on seeing the potential for support sites, because they're mostly focused on help desk issues, and corporate help desk deals with the simple stuff and immediately escalates anything difficult.
We got an entry the other day from a large utility company about providing electricity to customers. It answer a lot of questions, from billing to where not to dig [to avoid hitting a power line].
Some years ago, we were encouraging entries from corporate help desks, and they were lousy sites. So we stopped promoting in that area. But one of our winners this year was an internal site: McKesson. It was a very strong entry, and now I'm seeing really excellent IT sites.
What advice would you give to IT managers implementing or maintaining Web support sites? I never give advice. But there is a need to bring users into the process as much as they can. It's not always obvious what a given site should do. And this is true even on the vendor side. Often, IT has a very narrow definition of tech support, when customers have a different set of priorities. It's dangerous to assume that the IT people know what should be on the site. Users also notice inconsistencies, political issues, usability issues.
In some companies, old-timers know the jargon and shortcut ways of saying things, but those are incomprehensible to new employees -- and they are the people who need to learn this stuff. If they open up a business proc-ess explanation and see nothing but jargon and acronyms, they'll give it up. So it helps to get some feedback from people.
What would you say are the major challenges Web support sites still face? My guess is the big issues over the next few years will have to do with the broad area of usability. I think we've established that the concept works. You don't hear as many people saying, "No one will ever use a Web site for support, because they want to talk to live people." That issue seems to have gone away. Now we actually have the opposite problem of vendors and IT organizations throwing everything onto the Web site so you get these really complicated, hard-to-navigate sites, and that turns people off.
We have to fine-tune navigation to make sure people don't get lost. It's not immediately obvious how huge some of these sites are, but it's not unusual for there to be 50,000 to 100,000 documents, and not just the same kind: You've got documentation, training classes, articles, presentations, stories, patches, diagnostic tools -- it goes on forever.
For people doing multilanguage support, it's overwhelming because it's a moving target. Every time someone solves a new problem, they have to get the information translated and updated on localized sites. And if you don't do it fast, people in Japan realize that the only place for current information is the English-language site, and they stop using the Japanese site.
If you really want scary: People don't have all the same products in the same markets at the same time. The current product in Venezuela may not be the same as in Argentina. That's scary. But talking about multinational corporations -- their own business processes have to be consistent or at least accommodate across the whole world.
Ordering an airline ticket seems trivial, but when you're a multinational organization, suddenly that simple business process has become incredibly complicated. Somehow you have to let people figure out the difference between Washington, D.C., and Bangalore. So you see why the complexity is increasingly hard to manage. That's the big challenge: not to suffocate under your own success.
SIDEBAR
Principles of a Great Support Site
Shorten the path to useful content.
Organize support resources around "product" silos, whether actual products or information products.
Build personal portals that let users create "my support" pages.
Upgrade the search engine.
Clean up the clutter.
Standardize the look and taxonomy.
Avoid dead ends; give an easy path backward to a new jumping-off point.
Source: The Association of Support Professionals
SIDEBAR
The Winners
BEA Systems Inc.
http://support.bea.com
Cisco Systems Inc.
www.cisco.com/techsupport
Cognos Inc.
http://support.cognos.com
Interwoven Inc.
http://support.interwoven.com
McKesson ECSG
http://support.horizonhomecare.com
Microsoft Corp.
http://support.microsoft.com
Research Macines PLC
http://www.rm.com/support
Xilinx Inc.
http://www.xilinx.com/support
Pervasive Software Inc.
http://www.pervasive.com/support
think3 Inc.
http://care.think3.com