Guest blog by Julie Hunt, blogger, consultant and software analyst.
While corporate websites are still important to the success of B2B vendors, these websites must change to better engage customers. Corporations must transform their websites from only reflecting the corporate POV to websites that customers want to use. Unfortunately over time and through multiple M&A actions, websites for large corporations can become nightmarish: fragmented, patched together, links leading to superficially rebranded acquisition websites, navigation that goes nowhere. For corporate teams, it can be overwhelming to try to figure out how to rein in the website sprawl and transform it to be customer-engaging and highly usable.
For professional research purposes, over several years, I have dipped into the older CA corporate website many times. The website epitomized much of what can go wrong when working from the company POV and when covering lots of different products, many as acquisitions. I experienced the difficulties of trying to track down information, finding that CA had duplicate sites that often had dissimilar information. Many times the same products were aligned with multiple solution tracks and initiatives, so the go-to-market thinking was fuzzy to visitors. Trying to get through the products list to find information was daunting - there truly were about 5 different ways to slice and dice what I might be looking for. Lots of M&A had transformed the CA site into a fragmented hodgepodge. But let’s be clear -- this previous CA site was no different from most of the other websites for large corporations, where “more really wasn’t better”.
At a recent Baynote webcast, I got a look at the new CA Technologies corporate website and an overview of the what, how and why for creating the new site: what comprises the new look, how CA did it -- and why - what was the strategy. After the webcast, I wandered through the new website, mentally overlaying the old version to see what had changed.
What comprises the new look?
I’m impressed by what CA has accomplished. The new home page and many of the main section pages are visually stunning and wonderfully spare in the right way. Clear ease of navigation and clear communication of what CA does. The menu bar is simple but calls out the categories that matter; the navigation to CA communities is front and center, as well as the My CA link: all the sort of content that customers are looking for. The Products menu is to-the-point, and the products lists for each category are easy to navigate: wonderfully clean, brief, but sufficient. I see a CA that has integrated and organized its acquisitions in ways that should make sense to customers looking for solutions.
How did CA do it?
VP of Online Experiences Larry Walker talked about the tremendous amount of work and thought that went into the website redesign, including serious reviews of what had been tried previously and of many potential notions for redesign. At the core, the new design focuses on creating dynamic web experiences for each customer or visitor. As part of the overall website design, CA uses what Baynote calls Adaptive Web solutions which include personalization and social search for customer-focused relevance to help optimize engagement and retention.
Walker called out these guiding tenets for the new web design:
Simplify - Succinct messaging, intuitive layout, few components: for a single experience across all channels, from the customer POV
Identify - Single identity across all sites, common profile: access, subscriptions, interests
Engage – Communities, MyCA: customer-focused content and interaction
Why – What was the CA strategic thinking?
Beyond the obviously extensive analysis and planning that went into creating the new corporate website for CA, what really caught my attention was the strategy for working with CA internal teams. Walker’s team understood that strategy for successful web experiences not only mapped to greatly improved customer engagement, but saw that internal CA teams had to be convinced to support the new website approach as well. A lot of effort went into enabling internal cultural change for CA teams to be able to work with the new “customer as buyer” and to better understand how to support that customer through the website (obviously with the hope that eventual purchase would result). Among methods to make the case internally, Walker utilized Baynote internal dashboards to help show the value of new website approach to CA teams.
Very importantly for corporate success, Walker states that efforts targeting internal teams led to these achievements:
− Improved, user-driven customer engagement
− Content offerings managed by user value
− Enriched metrics through customer behavior
– Changed perceptions of how to engage customers
The overall CA approach to the major website redesign strongly illustrates that customer experience is not just about external web presence, but is also about dynamic support from all customer-touching teams throughout the customer’s life cycle with a particular company. An engaging website is only part of it – how a company works with customers for any need is key to customer retention.
About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished software industry analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt
Technobabble 2.0 2010 Top Analyst Tweeters: Julie Hunt ranked #78 of 1000 listed
Disclosure: I have no affiliation with either CA Technologies or Baynote.
While corporate websites are still important to the success of B2B vendors, these websites must change to better engage customers. Corporations must transform their websites from only reflecting the corporate POV to websites that customers want to use. Unfortunately over time and through multiple M&A actions, websites for large corporations can become nightmarish: fragmented, patched together, links leading to superficially rebranded acquisition websites, navigation that goes nowhere. For corporate teams, it can be overwhelming to try to figure out how to rein in the website sprawl and transform it to be customer-engaging and highly usable.
For professional research purposes, over several years, I have dipped into the older CA corporate website many times. The website epitomized much of what can go wrong when working from the company POV and when covering lots of different products, many as acquisitions. I experienced the difficulties of trying to track down information, finding that CA had duplicate sites that often had dissimilar information. Many times the same products were aligned with multiple solution tracks and initiatives, so the go-to-market thinking was fuzzy to visitors. Trying to get through the products list to find information was daunting - there truly were about 5 different ways to slice and dice what I might be looking for. Lots of M&A had transformed the CA site into a fragmented hodgepodge. But let’s be clear -- this previous CA site was no different from most of the other websites for large corporations, where “more really wasn’t better”.
At a recent Baynote webcast, I got a look at the new CA Technologies corporate website and an overview of the what, how and why for creating the new site: what comprises the new look, how CA did it -- and why - what was the strategy. After the webcast, I wandered through the new website, mentally overlaying the old version to see what had changed.
What comprises the new look?
I’m impressed by what CA has accomplished. The new home page and many of the main section pages are visually stunning and wonderfully spare in the right way. Clear ease of navigation and clear communication of what CA does. The menu bar is simple but calls out the categories that matter; the navigation to CA communities is front and center, as well as the My CA link: all the sort of content that customers are looking for. The Products menu is to-the-point, and the products lists for each category are easy to navigate: wonderfully clean, brief, but sufficient. I see a CA that has integrated and organized its acquisitions in ways that should make sense to customers looking for solutions.
How did CA do it?
VP of Online Experiences Larry Walker talked about the tremendous amount of work and thought that went into the website redesign, including serious reviews of what had been tried previously and of many potential notions for redesign. At the core, the new design focuses on creating dynamic web experiences for each customer or visitor. As part of the overall website design, CA uses what Baynote calls Adaptive Web solutions which include personalization and social search for customer-focused relevance to help optimize engagement and retention.
Walker called out these guiding tenets for the new web design:
Simplify - Succinct messaging, intuitive layout, few components: for a single experience across all channels, from the customer POV
Identify - Single identity across all sites, common profile: access, subscriptions, interests
Engage – Communities, MyCA: customer-focused content and interaction
Why – What was the CA strategic thinking?
Beyond the obviously extensive analysis and planning that went into creating the new corporate website for CA, what really caught my attention was the strategy for working with CA internal teams. Walker’s team understood that strategy for successful web experiences not only mapped to greatly improved customer engagement, but saw that internal CA teams had to be convinced to support the new website approach as well. A lot of effort went into enabling internal cultural change for CA teams to be able to work with the new “customer as buyer” and to better understand how to support that customer through the website (obviously with the hope that eventual purchase would result). Among methods to make the case internally, Walker utilized Baynote internal dashboards to help show the value of new website approach to CA teams.
Very importantly for corporate success, Walker states that efforts targeting internal teams led to these achievements:
− Improved, user-driven customer engagement
− Content offerings managed by user value
− Enriched metrics through customer behavior
– Changed perceptions of how to engage customers
The overall CA approach to the major website redesign strongly illustrates that customer experience is not just about external web presence, but is also about dynamic support from all customer-touching teams throughout the customer’s life cycle with a particular company. An engaging website is only part of it – how a company works with customers for any need is key to customer retention.
About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished software industry analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt
Technobabble 2.0 2010 Top Analyst Tweeters: Julie Hunt ranked #78 of 1000 listed
Disclosure: I have no affiliation with either CA Technologies or Baynote.
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