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Website redesign
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Keely Morgan If you ask 10 people what they think your company’s website should look like, you’ll probably get 10 different opinions. If you need all 10 to agree on a final proposal, you may be facing an uphill fight. The solution is not to ask them what they want. Instead, help them show you what your site needs.
Next, gather comments and criticisms about your current site from the people who use it: policyholders, injured workers, insurance agents, healthcare providers, etc. Your customer service representatives and information specialists are excellent resources. They know better than anyone what your customers like and dislike about your website. Once you’ve sorted through your benchmarks and external feedback, you’re ready to visit with internal stakeholders. This should include key executives and managers, who understand the “big picture” as well as daily customer service issues. Visit with each one individually so you get specific responses without group dynamics coming into play. Remember that each internal stakeholder is likely to have his or her own opinion on what your redesign priorities should be. Your job is to use their expertise to learn what your site needs to better serve your customers. At Texas Mutual Insurance Company, we accomplished this in a four-step process. Wish list. We asked each stakeholder what he or she would like to see on our site. We told them not to censor their responses based on money or staffing concerns. We really wanted to know what they would like to have if they could have anything they wanted. Most stakeholders had specific ideas concerning their own departments but not much to say about other departments. Role-playing. We asked each stakeholder
to go to our current site and pretend to be an external user. The exercise
not only let them look at our site through different perspectives, but
it also made them more aware of our external customers’ online needs
in other parts of the company. We gave them specific roles and tasks,
such as: Site comparison. We took each stakeholder to several previously selected sites. We asked them to comment on what they liked and didn’t like about each site. We asked them to think about why they liked or disliked each feature and how external customers might feel about each feature. Final list. We asked each stakeholder to go back to his or her wish list and pick out which items he or she now felt were most important—and most appropriate—for our site. Every stakeholder shortened his or her wish list considerably. We had amazing consistency in their responses. For example, all internal stakeholders agreed we should use direct entry instead of a splash page, and that we needed to offer individualized sections for different customer-types. Instead of 10 people with 10 different opinions,
we ended up with a true consensus on what direction our website redesign
should take. By benchmarking other sites, gathering and organizing information, and interviewing internal stakeholders, we had no trouble mapping out the site’s key services and user navigation needs. Keely Morgan can be reached at KMorgan@texasmutual.com or (512) 404-7045 Download complete newsletter in PDF format |
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Start
by doing your homework. Before you talk to your company’s decision-makers,
benchmark your site against others. The AASCIF sites provide a good starting
place, but your best comparisons likely will come from national and international
insurance sites. If possible, look at competitors’ and non-competitors’
sites, making sure not to limit yourself to insurance-related sites.
