How do vendor web sites stack up?

By Larry O’Brien, Research Director ARC Advisory Group,
and Walt Boyes, Editor in Chief

ARC and CONTROL jointly surveyed automation end-users to determine what is important for customers when it comes to automation supplier web sites and how the suppliers measure up. Is it easy for customers to find the in-formation they are looking for, or do they get lost after the first dozen clicks? Here’s a summary of the survey results.

Does a Vendor Website Matter?
Web sites have evolved to the point where they are the primary outward facing presence for automation suppliers, both for new and existing customers. Public supplier web sites have manifold purposes, ranging from public rela-tions to technical support and e-commerce. Many end-users reported that large corporate websites, such as ABB, GE, Honeywell, Siemens and others were less easy to use than end-user-targeted websites. This is almost certainly because of the dominant role of these sites in providing public relations and investor relations data, rather than technical information.

Good Content and Ease of Use Rule
It’s a no-brainer that content and ease of use would rate pretty highly among automation supplier customers as key criteria for web sites. More than 75 percent of total non-supplier respondents rated content and ease of use as being very important or extremely important. This only highlights the growing importance of automation supplier web sites as the primary means of communication between the supplier and their customers.

Good content is important, but what constitutes good content? For most respondents, product specifications and technical data are of primary importance (See Figure 1). Documentation and software downloads were important to close to 23 percent of respondents. Product configuration capabilities also ranked high, with a weight of close to 10 percent. What these statistics indicate is that most of the customer visits to supplier web sites are probably their existing customers looking for support data that is relevant to products that they already have rather than potential customers looking for information about a prospective purchase.


FIGURE 1: WHAT USERS WANT


It is clear what end users want from a supplier website. What is not clear is whether suppliers are listening.


This does not preclude, however, the importance of the web site as a tool for attracting new customers. Product and services selection and application tools, for example, were ranked third in importance with a weight of 12 percent. Information on industry-specific solutions also carried a high ranking of more than 10 percent, which could also be a potentially powerful attractor for new clients.

What is also reflected in the “good criteria” list is the relative lack of importance of the e-commerce function. Plac-ing orders ranked last in level of importance, accounting for less than a percentage point of weight in the total rankings. This could reflect a couple of key trends in the automation market that distinguishes it from other indus-tries.

First, automation solutions often contain a high degree of customization depending on the industry, application, environment, regulatory requirements, and so on. This high level of customization does not lend itself well to the “point and click” approach to purchasing products on the Internet. This statistic also reflects the conservative nature of automation market end users, particularly in the process industries.

Many of the key accounts that conduct e-commerce with automation suppliers do so through customized portals that have a highly secure connection, and not through public web sites. However, we must also point out the high volume of business that automation-focused e-commerce sites are doing, such as Omega Engineering (more than 50% of Omega’s order volume is now online) and the automation portal on E-Bay. This suggests that end-users who want information go to the suppliers’ web-sites, and some of those wishing to purchase do go to dedicated e-commerce sites.

Second, a good search engine was ranked as the most important criteria for ease of use (See Figure 2), and can be a real timesaver when you need quick support information on a specific product. For many end users, the search engine, if it is easy to access and use, is the first place to go for information. The number of clicks it takes to get to the infor-mation you need is probably not that obvious to you until you realize you’ve been clicking for five minutes and still haven’t found what you are looking for, so it was no surprise that minimal clicks was the number two criterion with a weight of close to 26 percent. Having the web site structured around the product categories offered by the sup-plier, carrys a weight of 24.5 percent.


FIGURE 2: THE ULTIMATE SUPPLIER WEB SITE


End users find agreement over what a good website should contain, and how it should be organized.


Think Global, Act Local
Respondents were split when it came to the preference for a single global site versus country-specific sites. Most customers want to see what the supplier’s capabilities are in their specific country, particularly in developing economies such as China and India, but the need for global corporate information and the presentation of a single face to the customer is also important.