Sites for sore eyes

14.11.2005
"The Year's Ten Best Web Support Sites - 2005" is an in-depth look at the makings of a great customer support site. Published by the Association of Support Professionals (ASP), a research organization that deals with support and service issues, and reflecting the evaluations of more than 50 judges, the report details what works and what doesn't work in sites ranging from internal employee portals to vendor support Web sites. ASP Executive Director Jeffrey Tarter talked with Computerworld's Kathleen Melymuka about what makes a great Web site.

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.