ConnectFive/////

Planning for success is important, foreseeing it’s effects is critical. Making improvements to a site design should result in, well results. But if we are not thoughtful and consider the effects of success we could end up like the beaver above.

So you must ask yourself, “if this change is successful, what will it impact directly and indirectly?” Will fulfillment be able to keep up? Does the sales force know about the change and it’s potential effects their customers inquiries? Does the Customer Service staff know about the change so they can answer questions and offer a good customer experience? Does IT know about the change and the traffic it may direct to particular services?

Obviously, not all changes will have dramatic results but how do you know? When demand is pent up because of a bad label or layout and an effective change is made, you can see results immediately and many times dramatically…because it’s been pent up. This is especially true when you add a new feature that you think customers desire. I know of new features that have been added and needed to be quickly “shut off” because they created demand that was unforeseen and were resulting in bad customer experiences. So the feature’s strategy and design was “successful”, but not successful for the customer or the business.

So how can you predict? By measuring successes and failures over time…creating quantifiable history to learn from. The more history you have to learn from the better you are looking forward and predicting orders of magnitude, which may impact how you release a new feature or test a change on a smaller subset of users.

Either way having a web metrics tool implemented is critical to predicting cause and effect accurately over time. The web is unique in how measurable and wide reaching it is…but you have to be proactive to harness it’s power. You need well implemented tools with metric plans to measure activity and most importantly qualified people to analyze the results and communicate them in a way that’s meaningful to the business.

So the next time your planning a change, ask yourself “how can I measure success and what will it impact if it’s successful?”