John Linton
It always surprises me how many people (customers) react so violently whenever we make a change to our web site - which we do constantly and have done ever since January 2004. I would make between 20 and 50 changes each week to the web site either adding or deleting pages or modifying the text in some ways to add clarity or to better describe some aspect of the services. Sometimes, obviously, there is a need to add a whole new section or to completely revise a current section - the latest case in point being the total re-work of the User Facilities that was executed over a five month period with a complete re-design and a lot of additional function.
More recently we have completed the changes to the front page that we began over 9 months ago. While there are still some minor changes that will be made over the next 2 - 3 months the major work is now complete - apparently much to the ire of some of our more vociferous customers - mainly objecting to the use of 'flash' on a web site front page. I understand some of the more thoughtfully worded 'criticisms' which, of themselves, make perfect sense.
However.......
I have always taken the view that Exetel's web site is its most important 'selling tool' and as I have 100% responsibility for generating the revenue for Exetel I think I can rightly state that the usability and information layout on the Exetel web site is decided on and determined by the one person whose whole commercial personal existence is dependent on how well the web site operates. Exetel has no marketing manager, no advertising manager and no sales manager nor do we have outside creative consultants or advisers.
What we do have is the tyranny of second by second reporting systems that measure every aspect of new order receipt, activation and cancellation across a range of ten services.
Unlike the senior executives of, I imagine, all of our larger competitors we also have the ability, via a comprehensive web hit tracking system over 500 plus pages, to see the effect of any changes we make to the web site and whether they contribute positively, negatively or neutrally to our second by second business transactions and, also I imagine unlike the senior executives of our larger competitors, I have written every single word and 'designed' every single page layout on the Exetel web site.
I doubt that it's possible to take the importance of a company web site more seriously than Exetel do; and have always done. When we make changes we track the impact of those change, irrespective of how small they are, to determine their effect and then 're-change' them if we don't get the result we expected.
Our objective has always been to keep re-developing our web site until it looks and operates completely differently to the web sites of all of our larger competitors and to use whatever language and selling skills that I have developed in a life time sales career to do a much better job that the 'marketing' children (in relative terms) employed by our competitors. Whether we will succeed in that or not can't be assessed after four years and, in many respects, may never be able to be quantitively assessed in any time frame.
What we can do is determine whether or not our web site brings in more business each month and whether or not the changes we make add or subtract from any upward trends. We do that every second of every day.
So the 'squares design' of the front page is there for a reason as is the moving cloud design and the simplistic logo (and now the associated 'mission statement') and the finch and the Deloitte and Carbon Neutral logos. They are all part of an almost complete design intended to make it very apparent that Exetel is very, very different to the companies it competes with.
Whether it does/will do that will continue to be intensely invigilated and constantly changed based on the information that is fed back
- not in "omfg your web site looks like it was designed by a five year old" terms but by analysing the detail collected from the web trackers and the management reports generated every second of every day and constantly reviewed by the people responsible for making sure Exetel operates as effectively as possible.
...currently 48 months of revenue growth in succession and planning to make that 49.