“The silent killer,” is what Michael Reene, CEO of professional services firm Enterpulse, calls a bad Web site.
OK, that may be overstating it a bit. But there’s no question that most sites today are “woefully unprepared” to give customers the level of service they want, says Reene. In a recent Enterpulse survey of 300 business executives (all heavy Internet users) in a variety of industries and roles, 66% said they rarely — if ever — return to sites after a bad experience. What’s more, 89% of the respondents are not impressed with the Web sites they visit, and 80% believe that business sites are designed from an internal viewpoint rather than to serve the external customer. Nearly half of the respondents find companies’ Web sites difficult to navigate.
One reason for the gap between customer expectations and online service is that a company’s Web initiative is often tossed from division to division, with no single unit taking responsibility for online projects. This “hot potato” approach must be replaced by a cohesive, holistic Web strategy, recommends Reene in a white paper analyzing the results of the Enterpulse survey.
For more information, call Karen Killeen at (646) 935-4154 or visit www.enterpulse.com.