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Byline: Ann Meyer

Many of the most-used features on Quill.com's Website weren't the company's idea. They were its customers'.

From a personalized favorites list to an automatic return function that makes returning unwanted items easier, the office supplies marketer is constantly tweaking its site based on information customers have provided in one form or another.

"Know thy customers, for they are not you," says Sarah Alter, vice president at Lincolnshire, IL-based Quill, a division of superstore conglomerate Staples. "Companies trip up when they think they know the customer and they don't."

"Build it and they will come" may have been the mantra of the dot-com boom, but as the economic pendulum in this country has shifted, so too has the philosophy of many online marketers. "Listen and learn and they will come back" may be a better saying for today's customer-centric companies.

In keeping with that philosophy, Redmond, WA-based Eddie Bauer has eliminated the sophisticated virtual model that it debuted with such fanfare several years ago. "It was interesting for the media and the industry, but the customer didn't find it of value," says Troy Brown, the apparel and home goods cataloger/retailer's divisional vice president of e-commerce. While Eddie Bauer has used technological advances to speed up the site, Brown says the biggest change at its Website has been a new focus on the customer. "There's been a complete mind shift to incorporate the customer into the development of the Website experience," he says.

To ensure that she knows the best way to incorporate Quill's customers into the site experience, Alter spends as much time as she can in Quill.com's usability lab, observing how shoppers use the company's Website. Thanks to the lab, Quill learned that 80% of its online customers shop with the print catalog in front of them. Many of those shoppers, Alter says, would have appreciated a way to key in the product number directly from the catalog. Hence, when Quill revamped its site three years ago, it added a "catalog quick order" function that allows customers to type in item numbers from the print catalog, taking them directly to checkout.

Quill's customers clearly like what they see online. The $1.0 billion cataloger rings up more than a third of its sales online. It garners a 9.3 rating out of a possible 10 from BizRate.com, among the highest in its category. And its visitor-to-buyer conversion rate - 30% - is among the highest in the industry.

Yet the company isn't resting on its laurels. "Your job is never done. There's constant improvement," Alter says. Besides one-on-one usability tests, Quill.com studies BizRate scores and comments and relies on day-to-day feedback from customer service reps who handle phone calls and e-mail exchanges. It also conducts focus groups to learn how it can better serve its customers.

"The companies I see most successful on the Web are the ones that work their Website daily, weekly, and monthly," says Ken Burke, president/CEO of Multimedia Live, a Website design firm based in Petaluma, CA. "Very small changes to a Website can have a huge impact on sales."

In fact, while Burke estimates the average drop-off, or site abandonment, rate among i.merchants to be 60%-70%, he says marketers have been able to bring that down to as low as 25% by speeding up the site with new technology, better organization, and a simplified checkout process.

Lab work

Like Quill, Eddie Bauer draws upon customer research from multiple sources. Before, the company's e-commerce group included representatives from various areas of the company, from IT to merchandising. "But we were missing one element - the customer," Brown says. Now the company scours its Website traffic data and listens to all customer comments with a new ear toward finding ways to improve the site. Once the company identifies an area that needs addressing, it brings customers into the usability lab in its corporate office.

The lab consists of PCs similar to what the customer might be using at home but with a video camera connected to a television in another room. The customer is asked to demonstrate how he shops the site and may be asked to try a new tool. By watching the customer's every move, researchers can determine what works and what needs improvement.

One of the most significant changes has been a task-oriented home page, with more-focused links to paths and less creative content. "We've been able to reduce task time by 25%, which was a huge win for us," Brown says. "As we brought customers into the lab, we were amazed at how difficult it was to complete what we thought were easy tasks. They would hover over a button they were supposed to click and not recognize that it was the correct button. Customers really needed very specific guidance."

Usability studies also led Eddie Bauer to improve the speed of its site. "We reduced download time by nearly 50%," Brown says, "and saw departure rates decrease significantly."

Eddie Bauer has performed as many as 40 customer usability studies a week on customers and prospects, bringing in both savvy computer users and customers who generally shop by print catalog. Across the country in Framingham, MA, Staples has a similar lab set-up, where each month up to 80 customers and prospects participate in tests while researchers watch their moves on a big-screen TV in the next room.

The lab is ideal for homing in on a problem area, says Colin Hynes, Staples' director of usability. For example, one of Staples' traffic logs indicated that a significant portion of users were abandoning the site at the registration page, just prior to checkout. At the same time, customer service reps reported a number of calls and e-mails from customers who said they didn't understand where to put their registration information.

Site abandonment is never desirable, but it's particularly disappointing when it occurs during the registration process, after customers have made their product selections. "It's that much more scary when folks say, 'I've got what I want and I want to give you my money,' and then they drop off," says Hynes, who proceeded to conduct usability tests focusing on the registration area.

The tests showed that extraneous copy at the top of the registration page made the form appear longer - and more daunting - than it really was. In addition, a "Billing as Shipping" checkbox was difficult to see, leading to errors. And many users had trouble inputting a "user name"; Staples.com has more than 1 million registered users, so finding a unique name was no small task.

Armed with knowledge of the problem areas, Staples redesigned the registration form, significantly trimming the extraneous introductory copy and tightening the spacing. It relocated the "Billing as Shipping" information, clearly marking all required fields. And it automatically input the user's e-mail address as the user name, eliminating much frustration.

By helping users complete the registration process more quickly and with higher satisfaction, drop-off on the registration area decreased by 73%, Hynes says. That translates directly into higher sales and can be used to figure out the usability lab's ROI, he adds.

Besides the on-site lab, Staples researchers visit customers in their workplaces and observe how they order from Staples.com in their natural environment. The company also scours online traffic data and customer service reports to look for problem areas and improvement suggestions. "The customer is our codeveloper. That's our saying," Hynes says.

Survey says...

Because of the wide range of Internet users today, it's important to also survey your customer base periodically to determine how computer savvy they are. Apparel, home goods, and gifts cataloger Norm Thompson, for instance, asks customers who have completed an online order to answer a few additional questions. Marketing executives at the company, whose customers tend to be over the age of 50, were surprised when such research showed that its customers were indeed proficient computer users, says vice president of marketing Steve Jones.

Other findings led the Portland, OR-based company to add a variety of features when it relaunched its site a year ago. The "product recovery" feature, for example, helps salvage a sale in the event that an item is out of stock. When a customer selects an unavailable product, the product recovery feature brings forward other items that fall into same usage category that may be of interest to the customer.