We pioneered using generic online booking systems back in 2004 and went on to build one of the most sophisticated and flexible booking systems commercially available today. Our OBS.vites module will bolt into any existing web-site or sit standalone as a booking microsite.

Licensed on a volume level, prices start from just £250 pm plus installation, deployment and integration costs. Thinking of implementing a proper online booking system? Time to speak to Liam, Nick, Andy or Martin and discuss your needs.

Changing from an ugly and ill-formed email-based system into a simple, fast and cloud-enabled application has reduced costs, increased control and brought a whole host of really important improvements to how we work.

It’s not just us!

Seth Godin, a kind of visionary in this new world actually makes the radical suggestion of “Do not approve any project that isn’t run on Basecamp“. That is, I’ll grant you, a little extreme but as the the post is aimed at “catch-up” audiences he’s probably right – we’d certainly agree with him.

ps: If you do sign up using the link above then, thanks, we get a small reduction in our monthly bill, ta x

Why journey management?

Change management is a structured approach to transitioning individuals, teams, and organisations from a current state to a desired future state. The current definition of Change Management includes both organizational change management processes and individual change management models, which together are used to manage the people side of change [Wikipedia]

Organisational change is carried out as a policy handed out from on high and normally has the highest moral, ethics and intentions. This policy then has to be implemented at the people level and all people respond to change differently and at a different pace. It’s quite clear that moving an individual working in a manner type A to type B requires a number of processes, systems, feedback loops and measurement systems together with an infrastructure to deliver this change.

Change often equates to loss and forward-thinking organisations are seeking to use psychological / Neuro-linguistic programming approaches to dealing with, sometimes, huge upheavals that occur in organisations. Examples of these methodologies include the traditional grief cycle and more focused models such as Lewis-Parker and John Fisher.

Each of these methodologies is based on a journey from A to B via a number of personally significant stages such as denial, depression and acceptance. This journey can easily be mapped in an online environment with personal delivery of content, actions, assets, applications tailored to each of the various steps in the process. Rather than being a fixed-time linear process, journey management allows the visitor to move around the cycle and the system recognises what stage the visitor is at and deals with them in a way specific to the stage they are in, all automatically, all seamless and with the ability to report on the flow of individuals and groups.

It’s quite a fascinating subject and a particularly good use of a journey management platform.

The reality is this is really no different from a traditional sales cycle, consumers engage at different parts of the cycle and move around to completion (sales) or drop out of the cycle with lots of additional helpers along the way to make the transition as smooth as possible for as many of the people as possible. In the commercial model as many as 30% of the final sales comes from people who actually dis-engage during the process to re-engage later either by themselves or brought back into the cycle via other communication mediums such as email, direct mail, forums, twitter, facebook etc.

Theoretical in practice (example)

Take a traditional organisation that is moving to flexible working, striving to get more agility and performance from it’s staff and at the same time reduce the cost of space and communications. This is a fairly common scenario and a great deal of resource will have been spent designing the “new” shape of the organisation and how it will operate. Now it comes to start to deploy this change process and this requires the buy-in of hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of individuals – all with different agendas, ideas, motivations, fears and engagement.

Enter “My Journey”. An application designed for all the people in the organisation, available 24×7 online and with the ability to assist the psychological and emotional needs of the transitioners as well as the basic nuts and bolts operational stuff.

The online application has a unique login for every person and starts with a simple series of questions to establish where on the transition curve you currently are. Once established, the individual then has access to the most relevant information and applications to support him or her or their journey. A set of rules will dictate when the user is “tested” again to establish if they need to move onto the next stage. This would normally be based on a set of behavioural rules applied to what the user is doing and how they are interacting with the application.

Very often mentoring is a powerful aid to assist people during times of change and a forum would provide this mentoring, targeted to just the stage that the individual is in, so people who have been through the process before or professional coaches and mentors can help the stages as a targeted segment.

There would a hierarchy of change agents overseeing and engaging with the users, providing online guidance and help through community-type functions and also uncovering people that need that little extra help along the way. This help exists outside of the online environment to include classroom/workshop and team-building activities at one end of the spectrum, to one-to-one personal mentoring at the other end.

Each stage is truly multimedia-enabled and assets available to participants could include information, pdf libraries, images, video shorts, training courses, forums, webinars, booking systems, technical support areas, purchasing/ordering, time and holiday management, tests & evaluations, video conferencing, IP telephony, live assistants, FAQs etc. The list goes on and on.

These assets do not (and should not) be all contained within the journey management application; the key here is use the journey management system as a way to access these resources, applications and information. This avoids duplication, out-dated content and the need to have a huge, complicated, system to manage the thousands of assets that would be needed.

Some key pointers

To successfully deliver this needs engagement from all the change agents and also a really friendly and easy-to-use environment for the application to work inside. Engaging the thousands of potential users of the system is very much like a snowball, so requires key people to engage first and then spread the word and, importantly, the community to the other individuals.

The application needs to constantly evolve to improve – much of this could be self optimising and also should provide the framework to test the efficacy of all the elements in all of the steps (people in the commercial context call this conversion rates).

How VITES™ provides journey management

Designed as a platform to recognise who you are and what stage (in life/sales/change) you are at and then with the ability to deliver custom content, applications and information VITES™ is ideally placed to provide this framework. With a track record of successfully delivering personalised content since 2003 you are safe in the knowledge that you can access a highly sophisticated, stable, scaleable and flexible platform pretty much off-the-shelf.

Talk to us to take the next step.

These are all questions typically running around marketing departments at the moment and the stock answer is to “get a new one designed” on the basis that it must be better than the old one as it’s newer and we’ve learned things (have we?) about the current versions of the landing pages.

Trial and error economics

Don’t guess, don’t risk the return on the heavy-lifters. Your current series of pages act as a ‘banker’ – put simply the new stuff has to race the best of the best you have already. When testing the new pages against the current bankers use a reliable testing method (such as the null hypothesis) that gives results you can be confident in. If you can be confident in the results then you can queue up hundreds of ideas to be tested and leave the testing harness to do the hard work or evaluating the changes.

The risk is low because:

• Pages that perform a lot worse than the banker will show up as failing very quickly and can be removed from the test quickly.
• Pages that perform a lot better than the banker will show up as succeeding very quickly and can replace the banker quickly.
• Pages that perform similarly will take a lot longer to determine their value but as they are not hurting (or helping) the conversion rate there is no loss associated with leaving them in test except the loss of the opportunity to run another test.
• Testing small changes can help with specific learning. For example, the data-entry form might perform better with a solid blue background versus white. This is real learning and can be applied (after testing) across other landing pages.

In fact, taken as a continuous process (Kaizen) optimising the landing pages can be the easiest and fastest way to continually improve a site, although not very glamorous for a marketing department.

About VITES™ as a testing tool

Split testing using the null hypothesis is built-into the core of VITES™ and offers a fast, reliable and repeatable test harness. Testing can be done via profile, traffic type, campaign or any other superset of visitor data (postcode range, for example) and is not limited to A/B testing with support for 26 concurrent tests running in each profile.  Traffic can be split in any range, typically the fastest results are achieved using a 50:50 ratio in an A/B test but 80:20 tests are commonly used when clients are nervous about radical changes to high net-worth landing pages.

The results were stunning (for 2001) and showed that 80% of the advertising spend was pretty poor indeed. Not surprisingly our client was over the moon with this new-found transparency and their business exploded when they invested in the right online advertising and had faith in the value of it. It was a real way to measure the actual return on advertising investment.

VITES™ 1.0

Born in the middle of 2003, this was the first time page content was linked to data recorded. It was clear that first time visitors to a website needed to be encouraged to return to generate revenue, and that returning visitors to the website needed to be treated differently to first timers. So a simple “tunneling system” was implemented that established where the visitor was in the sales cycle by understanding their previous activity on the website and also by interrogating the offline CRM system.

By doing this, VITES™ dropped people into the most appropriate tunnel and fed them tunnel specific content, imagery and, most importantly, applications.

Conversion rates rocketed. We had stumbled across a killer application for the web. In much the same way as Sergey Brin devised a method at Stanford University to “rank” sites in importance based on inbound links – which then became the basis for Google – we stumbled upon the link between recording and behaviour and predictive purchasing or behavioural targeting was born.

VITES™ 1.5

The original version was a killer. It doubled conversion rates overnight but it was very cumbersome to build sites around it and the clunky tunnels were flawed when it came to bookmarking and search engine maps. This needed addressing so a specification to improve the whole system was hastily put together in 2004 to meet these shortcomings.

This was a simpler beast to operate, more flexible, more powerful but still required hand cutting of the tunnels. We had tunnel vision!

VITES™ 2.x

A huge step in development was identified in late 2005 and the move to visitor profiles is set in stone. The whole system needed to be rewritten and was completed by the middle of 2006. This included a number of innovations including profiles, rules and confidence ratings (how confident the system is that a person fits a profile).

The latest platform is developed was the established LAMP platform and the task of rolling it out to the first handful of clients started.

The tool

Soon after VITES™ 2.x was launched it was realised that customers were coming up with great ways in which to use this tool. It became a very natural and easy tool to customise web content so sites could change at the weekend or overnight or when the call centre was busy or any other internal or external event.

Market leading online advertising companies became exposed to the technology and started sharing their data with VITES™ allowing it to make better decisions. We’ve only just scratched the surface with the VITES™ tool – there are a hundred or even a thousand more uses for it that we are yet to find.

VITES™ is the ultimate online sales tool, offering sales focused reporting, visitor funneling, predictive purchasing and behavioural management. The very best sales and marketing learning can be handed to the website to pro-actively support your sales and marketing campaigns.

Marketing Reporting

By tracking where your visitors come from, how much they spend and how long they take to move through the sales process, you can get a unique insight into your e-sales cycle.

Each marketing campaign is given an ID and that ID is stamped on every visitor who comes to the site. If the visitor returns later via another campaign, the additional campaign ID is also recorded so you can see how many times you are paying for each visitor.

This ID is passed through the whole system, to your back-end CRM system and back (if you want) to your online advertiser so they can see which campaigns work and which don’t.

This is a level of transparency that is rarely, if ever, available in online advertising campaigns. And it comes as standard with VITES™.

Sales funnels

We all know that people take time to make decisions; they need persuading, and cajoling sometimes. What is better than knowing the actual stage that each visitor is at? You can plan your sales cycle and map it onto the website by creating a series of accurate sales profiles.

Within each profile you can have different content, imagery, calls to action and navigation. In fact, you can have a whole site custom designed just for the stage in the sale that the visitor is at. And this can change during the visit so that if the visitor moves onto the next stage, the site will adjust it’s content automatically to meet the challenges of that stage.

Talking to the right people at the right time never got easier, as you can add and remove calls to action at the various stages, dissuading (expensive) phone contact early on and encouraging the visitor to interact using the site itself and email. Later on in the process this could be reversed so the visitor has only one option left – talk to a person. Or the whole process could be in reverse. Your call.

Hows does that work then?

Each visitor is assigned a unique ID number which they carry with them throughout their online (and offline) journey. Against this ID VITES™ stores appropriate information such as which stage in the sales process they are at, their gender, their postcode and any one of a million or so different variables.

When they arrive at the site, or click on a navigation button, VITES™ intercepts the requests and decides what to show them based on what we already know about them. These are a carefully crafted set of rules that are configured into the VITES™ platform using a simple “if xx then yyy” format so it’s easy to understand, flexible to use and very scalable.

What about my sales team?

VITES™ is the ultimate sales tool. According to what rules are set, it will profile the visitor long before direct contact is required. And when you do need to interact with this person offline, the ID is passed to the CRM system so all the information is easily available, making the sales person’s life far easier and more efficient. Thus it is easier to prioritise enquiries and deal quickly with the urgent ones and invest time and effort in the high value ones.

Offline activity recorded on the CRM system can then be passed back up to the website using the unique ID code, and the website then re-synchronises with what has happened – if the offline conversation resulted in the potential client moving along the sales cycle then the site will know about it and the message, content and calls to action will all automatically reflect the progress made offline.

This unique ID can also be used with email so email campaigns can be better targeted and also drive returning visitors to the right sections of the site after an email drop.

VITES™ is a simple philosophy applied to a cross-channel marketing and sales strategy and can do pretty much anything once you understand that individual visitors can be recognised.

Have an idea about how you could use this? Or just want to know more? Why not contact us?

The dynamic web understands better what the visitor wants and provides a vastly improved experience, an experience that is largely personalised to the visitor and one that better matches the needs of both the web-site owner and his or her visitor.

The silent salesperson

With flat web sites having to meet the needs of anyone who might stop by, the key sales messages that you would want to get across to certain groups cannot be given their appropriate space. With VITES™ you can identify the target groups and tailor the message, the content and the path though the site. It’s like having a silent salesman watching every visitor and gently guiding them down the most appropriate path.

Web statistics are poor

The current crop of session and page reporting systems are very complex, very powerful reporting systems. Some can even make sense of real people and try to give you statistics and value rating. But the learning you get from them can be time consuming to understand, possibly misleading and ultimately only tends to explain why something happened in the past.

You have to translate these “findings” into recommendations and then implement them on your (different) web platform. Also these changes can, in their own right, ruin any reporting you might have. A better solution, surely, is to segment all the visitors into groups, report on them and then tailor their path so it improves the value to your business.

Radical?

Not in the slightest. Behavioural techniques have been used in selling since the middle ages – in fact almost all selling has behavioural understanding at it’s core and the best selling is done face to face or one-on-one. VITES™ gives you the opportunity to perform that one-on-one selling role in the world of new media.

Amazon does it, Ebay does it and Google does it a little more subtly so it’s pretty commonplace. But because it happens “behind the scenes” you do not see it as a visitor. These are all very large in-house developed solutions; for the first time VITES™ offers you a commercial product available off the shelf and which is straightforward to implement.

Overview

Break your visitors into groups of any size (1-1,000,000) and serve them their own version of the web-experience, now and every time they visit. Personalised calls-to-action (CTA), web 2.0 functions, layout, navigation, content and design. Automatically move your visitors from group to group using simple rules. Restrict what the groups see and can do. Communicate via email, ICQ, dmail & social networking according to the needs of their group.

End of the “one-size fits-all” web?

The “one-size fits all” web is a compromise, a general-purpose attempt to deal with all the potential combinations of types of visitors. By way of example, the benefits of creating creating custom landing pages by simple keyword groups is widely documented as hugely improving online conversion rates. Despite this, even the most savvy organisations don’t carry this any further than the first landing page and certainly look to learn from this when the visitor returns to the site. This represents a huge loss in conversion rates.

Compounding this loss is the increase in visitor expectation. No two people have the same needs and need to be dealt with in an intelligent manner or they well simply go somewhere else.

Web III? (sic)

Personalised, adaptive and tailored content goes a long way to answer the need of this new breed of customers and the results speak for themselves. For most organisations this means that they can successfully dominate their Internet marketplace with a reduced cost of marketing and increased visitor value.

An organisation showing a 20% reduction in cost per enquiry could use the marketing spend to fund the driving of an additional 30% of revenue, this is a powerful reason to chase the goal. This is not chump change, this is a seriously attractive and compelling goal.

Web plus (sic)

Interactions don’t just exist in a single online space anymore, other mediums are frequently used to talk and drive the site visitors (call centres, direct mail, physical meetings, email, ICQ, social networking, off-site interaction). These are all source of intelligence and information [and covered in-depth here] and can be used to either feed to personalisation engine or be fed by the engine. The relationship is bi-directional and so it should.

The sky’s the limit

When considering tailored or personalised content there is really no end to it’s uses; it really is a marketers dream tool. Any item of information available anywhere can influence what a visitor is shown. Some examples of the triggers for content change are shown below:

• Macro environment. Time of day, day of week, season, weather, public holiday, event, share price of BP, lead news story.
• Visitor environment. Geo location, browser, operating system, ISP, IP address, iphone.
• Visitor history. Last visit, first visit, frequency, pattern, number, relationship period.
• Visitor engagement level. Place in sales cycle, previous actions completed, next planned actions, off-site interactions, email interactions, telephone, face-to-face
• Source. Ad type, keywords used, product/service interest, ad network, demographics learning
• Demographics. ACORN type, income, peer-group learning

What’s next?

If you want to learn more about how you can utilise this element of the VITES™ platform then contact Liam, Nick or Martin or you can learn more about the other 4 key functions and benefits of VITES™.

The art of improvement is simple; make a change and then test it. If it’s better then use the latest version as the best and then cycle round again. The compounding effect of making lots of small improvements gives a number of key benefits:

• Continual improvement drives the performance up, relentlessly
• A frequent change culture encourages the testing of lots of ideas, sometimes the daftest or smallest of ideas have a major impact on performance
• Reduction of risk, a poorer performing idea is quickly and efficiently scrapped
• Much wider pool of thinking, more ideas from more people adheres closely to the concept of “the wisdom of the masses”
• Avoids the “Highest paid persons opinion” (HiPPO) quandary where decisions are made at the wrong level by the wrong people
• Compounding small improvement generates a huge improvement over time
• Real learning is possible and this helps the feedback loop for the next test
• No idea is right or wrong – it simply generates learning

The downside of kaizen in the digital world is that most web-site environments are simply not built to allow the kind of rapid change, test function that is required to get the most from this approach. VITES™ at it’s core is built around this philosophy.

Trial and error culture

Connected adopt a Kaizen approach to ongoing development and conversion rates where staying agile and making lots and lots of small changes – each time testing them to measure success – and then moving on again. Connected offer a number of services to help make this happen:-

• Fixed Kaizen contracts. A fixed number of tests or hours in a given period with a planned target to reach.
• A/B testing suites. Utilising the VITES™ platform to provide accurate, reliable A/B testing.
• Profile/persona-based testing. VITES™ supports unlimited profiles and profiles types, each can be tested independently or raced against a “banker”.
• Micro-site build & development. Avoiding the need to completely re-develop a client web-site and provide much of the improvement via a micro or landing-page site.
• Business Intelligence reporting. VITES™ Passport ™ provides a huge mine of data that can be accessed to provide unique learning. Provided as a service or as an API.
• Landing-page heavy lifting projects. The key first-wins for most commercial traffic sites, provided as a service, turnkey or consultancy.
• Performance contracts. Fixed target-based contract rewarded around specific goals and milestones.

Connected provide these services either standalone or linked with existing build-and-manage contracts.

What results can you expect?

Depending on the start point most clients can expect to achieve a doubling of conversion rates during the first year. The law of diminishing returns can apply and often the major advances are made in the early part of the project. Pushing down the “long tail” still has great value and the ongoing refining of the solution frequently uncovers surprises and big jumps on online conversion rates.

Keen to find out more?

Thinking of entering this world? Talk to Liam, Nick or Martin on 0845 051 4228 and he’ll sit down with you and go through the various options available and how to best approach improving your digital offering.