One of the most commonly-stated goals of a customer-centric company is to put the customer at the heart of everything the company does, especially in customer channels. However, in reality many companies find this a challenge because they lack the methods to keep the customer’s needs front-of-mind when the pressures of implementation come thick and fast.
Page Goals are a way to operationalize Customer-Centric strategy in the web channel.
Lost benefits
Once the process of improving the website kicks off, customer-centric blueprints and wireframes are produced, which have the intention of producing major performance improvements to the website. However, many of these improvements will never see the light of day. In a surprisingly high number of web projects, the Customer Experience improvements don’t seem to make it through the production cycle.
So what’s going wrong in these cases? The strategy is right, the blueprint is right, but the benefits are being lost in the process between concept and go-live.
This is where Page Goals step in.
Page Goals is a methodology for making sure that a web page meets the goals it is supposed to meet, and for protecting these goals as it moves through the production process. I began developing the methodology as an Information Architect just over 10 years ago, and have continued to develop it as I’ve moved into Customer-Centric strategy, and incorporated a variety of tricks and techniques I’ve picked up along the way.
Conflicting goals
The Page Goals methodology is based around the idea that each page is trying to achieve a range of goals which are often conflicting. An effective webpage achieves balance between these goals, and it is the role of the website improvement project to maintain these goals over the course of the project, but this can be difficult. Some of these goals originate far away from the project (Corporate Strategy), and in particular, some of them originate from the Customer, who is not present.
The strongest influence on the project is usually the project stakeholders, who may or may not hold these business and customer needs close. By defining the goals of the page early on, when the user insight and corporate strategy have been balanced to produce the solution that works best for both, the inevitable twists and turns of implementation can be navigated without undoing the benefits of the project.
An example
An example might help illustrate this. I’m sure you will be familiar with some web pages which are full or promotions – banners everywhere, every part of the page ‘shouting’ at the customer, with all kinds of conflicting messages. This is a classic example of a conflicted page, with unclear page goals.
I’ve sat in many meetings in various companies negotiating how to keep the stakeholder happy whilst also making the page more effective. In a stakeholder-centric environment, the discussion can go something like this …
The person responsible for the Customer Experience:
- “The customer is being confused by this barrage of ‘shouting’ banners and colour – can we focus on just a few things we want this page to achieve?”
To which the stakeholders in the room will reply:
- “We need this page to drive sales to my part of the business”
- “We need this page to drive sales to _my_ part of the business”
- “Yes, but we also need to drive sales to _my_ part of the business”
- …. Etc.
And so the page ends up turning out very much like the meeting might turn out – a tug of war, with the overall objectives of the business being lost in the process.
Page Goals provide a set of processes for maintaining strategic direction and customer focus throughout the lifetime of a web project, not just when the Customer Experience team are involved. Once the site is complete, they can then be used for measurement of the website against its original goals.
There must be a more effective way of managing the web channel to deliver on strategic goals, and the Page Goals methodology provides this more results-focused way of managing websites.
