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Findability throughout the sales process

Posted on February 23, 2007
Filed Under Articles, Marketing, Clients |

To invest in your own findability, businesses need to ask themselves the following: does the totality of our customer’s experience lead him or her to find their desired result for the needs, preferences, and location they specify?

Findability is vitally important to ensure that customers locate the information they need to make a decision and achieve success with their purchase.

Becoming a business that is “findable” impacts more than just a purchase; it’s the difference between a prospect choosing that business or, not finding what they want quickly and easily, turning to one of it’s competitors who, wisely, focuses on findability.

In a world in which it is becoming increasingly difficult to reach customers, businesses have to make it easier- as straightforward and seamless as possible- for customers to reach them.

Becoming the most “Findable” within a defined set of selection criteria has spawned an entire industry of search engine optimization experts

Those who take the time to learn how people search for and retrieve information will be in a much better place to have their documents, products, services and thoughts actually found.

There are over ten billion web pages on the Internet; once a visitor actually finds a specific website, how time-consuming is it find what he needs? Customers today have incredibly short attention spans; if they don’t find what they want quickly on one website, they will promptly look elsewhere.

All understand the importance of a clean, well-designed web site. But few understand the Web and how people use it well enough to recognize the vital importance of findability.

Most businesses view their website’s responsibility and effectiveness from a top-down perspective: Can users find what they need from the home page? However, such tunnel vision ignores the fact that many users won’t start from a home page. Many will never even visit a company’s homepage or all the hard work devoted to it.

Information retrieval research consistently finds that most people use a search engine and arrive at an interior website page. Thus, the larger question once again relates to findability: Can the user find what they need on a website from wherever page they are on?

Once a customer finds your website, findability becomes even more important. Usage patterns suggest that once customers get to your web site, they expect your site’s search feature to find what they want. Forrester Research and Jupiter Research studies indicate that search is the number one means of navigation on 90% of corporate web sites and that 82 percent of visitors use the site’s search feature to find the information they need. However, the same Jupiter Research report indicates that 85 percent of site searches don’t return what visitors are looking for.

 

User expectations are high -they expect a website’s search option to provide accurate, rapid results. However, most websites fail to meet user expectations: 85 percent of site searches don’t return what the user sought,5 and 22 percent return no results at all.

When a site’s search leaves a customer staring at long and unorganized search results, that customer becomes frustrated. Every time a customer can’t get the answer he needs, there is a lost revenue opportunity, a damaged relationship, a contact center cost—or all three.

The cost to companies of an ineffective site search is clear: 80 percent of visitors will abandon a site if search functionality is poor.

For Brick-and-Mortar retailers with an online presence, findability online becomes an inherently location-based concept. As a web site leads the customer to make an offline purchase decision, it is critical to direct them to a physical store that can meet their needs.

Traditionally, this has meant helping customers find the store closest to their location. By and large, retailers today include simple mapping tools that allow a user to input their address and receive a list of several nearby locations, in order of proximity.

As e-commerce practices become more sophisticated, cutting-edge retailers are learning to build more intelligence into this process. The types of information that can be presented to make your products and services more findable are rapidly expanding.

Integrating additional data into the search, mapping and findability process can deliver the customer a more relevant answer, dramatically improving their experience with the company.

Smart retailers have also realized that the closest location to the customer is not always the best location for the customer. Including and factoring available inventory, personnel and even dealer incentives (most sales for the month gets the most inquiries the next month) into the search all influence the degree to which findability becomes a marketing and sales asset.

Additionally, retailers can use findability features to direct customers to a specific location they are promoting to increase its traffic. Some locations may have additional service centers with excess capacity, or even specific, knowledgeable staff (for example, a computer technician with specific certifications at an electronics store).

Data combined from users’ searches over time yields customer preferences and surfing habits, along with valuable location data.

You can plot your customers on a map and include other data such as household income, past purchases (or whatever variables you choose) in the plot. This allows for quick and easy visualization of where your customers are, and lets you analyze who they customers are, where they live, and what they are looking for.

To have the greatest effect, findability should be transparent to the customer. The customer’s interaction with both a company’s online and brick-and-mortar presence should seamlessly guide him to find the product, service, or support he needs at the best geographical location.

While this geographical location could be simply the closest store to the customer’s home, fusing business intelligence with findability software allows this location to be based on any number of other factors such as sales territories, inventory, quotas for locations, and staff specially trained to handle your specific customer’s needs.

Helping customers seamlessly and effortlessly find what they need where they need it has the potential to create a winning experience that creates long-term, priceless customer loyalty.

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