Talk of Many Things

Credit card holders in India might have noticed of late that they’re receiving SMS alerts on their mobile phones each time they use their cards. I’m not sure if this is a bank/card-specific initiative or the outcome of some new government regulation applicable across the industry, but I’ve been receiving these notifications from the issuers of both my Visa credit cards since the middle of June.

At the outset, let me thank both banks for this new ‘product’.

Since these alerts occur in realtime, I guess they’re primarily intended to help cardholders to detect fraudulent transactions rather than to serve as a budgeting / expense tracking tool. I can’t be sure of their true purpose since I never received any communication from these two banks when this product was launched.

As I’d pointed out in this post a few months ago in a different context, a little extra effort at communication on the part of banks can go a long way in fostering customer retention and customer delight. However, I won’t complain if these banks have chosen to stay silent either out of humility or the desire to stay below the radar of one CNSC. This Miami, FL-based company sued Visa for launching a few pilots of something similar in the USA last year, claiming that it infringed upon its patent on the underlying technology. (I don’t know how SMS can qualify for a patent, but I’ll let that one pass for now).

Assuming my guess is right, let’s see how these SMS alerts help cardholders detect fraud in realtime.

First, let’s look at a couple of recent alerts I received from BANK1, a large multinational bank headquartered in the UK and active in India for several decades.

SMS Alerts From BANK1

Since I’d handed over my credit card at a store for a purchase of INR 2370.00 on 21-Jul-2011, I could be sure that the first transaction was genuine.

Now, when I received the second alert, the card was tucked away safely inside my wallet. I’d neither handed it over to anyone nor used it online. However, for all I knew, this could’ve been an alert for one of many genuine card not present transactions put through by a merchant on the back of a recurring mandate issued by me before. Such recurring transactions based on a one-time approval are very common among American merchants (e.g. Hostgator for website hosting, Skype for monthly calling plans) and have recently started making an appearance in India as well (e.g. Regus for office rentals). Since they don’t require case-by-case approval, such transactions don’t always ring a bell at the exact instant that I receive the alert. Exacerbating the ambiguity is the fact that, while the mandate amount would be a constant figure in US$ or some other foreign currency (say US$ 8), the amount displayed on the SMS alert is in INR and varies from transaction to transaction depending upon the USD:INR prevalent on that day. If this alert was the result of transaction coming out of some such pre-issued mandate, it didn’t signal a fraud.

On the other hand, the alert could equally well have been triggered by a card not present transaction initiated by a con artist who had stolen my credit card details or a fraudulent merchant to whom I have not issued a recurring mandate.

Point is, without the merchant’s name in the SMS alert, it’s difficult – well-nigh impossible if you do a lot of CNP transactions like me – to figure out the authenticity of a transaction.

Now, let’s look at the following alert from BANK2, which is a Top3 Indian private sector bank.

SMS Alerts from BANK2

As you can see, these alerts provide valuable extra information viz. the merchant name and the time of transactions. Using these additional details, it’s much easier to differentiate between genuine and fraudulent transactions: Since I’ve never dealt with anyone called KUMARAUTO, I could conclude that the first transaction was fraudulent the moment I received the SMS alert. Whereas, since I’ve signed a mandate with HOSTGATOR for auto debit of monthly website hosting charges, the second transaction was genuine.

In Part-2 of this post, we’ll look at these SMS alerts as a ‘product’ and see how well they work for the customer towards detecting and then preventing fraudulent credit card transactions. Spoiler Alert: One bank’s product rocks, the other one’s product sucks, and the difference is in the details.

Those of you familiar with the world of search before Google would know that Google’s search engine attained massive following because of its blazing speed and exhaustive coverage of the Internet. Awed by the speed of Google Search across billions of websites spread in the far corners of the world wide web, have you ever wondered

1. Why does it take far longer to do a Windows Search of your PC’s hard disk?
2. Why do search results on one website leave a lot to be desired even when you’re using Google CSE (Custom Search Engine) to conduct your search?
3. Why is it so hard to find a particular transaction within your Internet Banking transaction history?
4. Why is it even more difficult to search for a particular post or comment on a blog? As TechCrunch says, “TechCrunch has published thousands of blog posts over its nearly 5 and a half years. Many are good one-day stories, some we’d like to forget, but others are gems. These classics are just as interesting today as when they were first written … But try discovering them. It’s nearly impossible.” By the way, TC uses Google CSE for site search.

I’ve obsessed over this subject for a long time. Only recently I learned that this is not a problem with any specific website. Since Google and many other search engines rank a web page on the basis of backlinks to it from other websites, they fail to do a good job within a website where the concept of backlinks doesn’t apply.

Is there a solution to this problem, then?

Looks like I stumbled on to one.

I was recently trying to recall the name of a PPC search engine about which I’d read a post on TechCrunch a few weeks ago. When I used Google CSE to find this post on TC, I got long list of results but none of them took me to the right one.

I was about to give up in exasperation when it suddenly struck me that, like most posts on TechCrunch, this one also might’ve been retweeted a few times. I did a Twitter Search for “TechCrunch PPC” and struck paydirt. There were only two results to go through and both of them took me to the TC post that I was looking for.

Given the realtime nature of Twitter, I’m not sure if its search would be as effective a few days or weeks later, but for now, it works!

In Part 1 of this post, we’d introduced the new crop of cloud-based providers of A/B testing solutions. To do a quick recap, Optimizely, Unbounce and other providers of such solutions do all the heavy duty lifting on the cloud, freeing up website designers to focus on the business side of optimizing their web pages. Designers don’t need to do any programming. By adding one line of code to their websites, they trigger the A/B testing and leave it to the service providers to handle the rest. Some providers like Optimizely provide many popular metrics out-of-the-box viz. engagement (i.e. percentage of visitors who clicked any part of the experiment page) and signup (i.e. percentage of visitors who triggered Sign Up).

EMAIL360 Original Page

We were recently curious to find out if there was any scope for improvement in the text and color of the CTA (call to action) element on the homepage of our EMAIL360 website. As the screenshot on the right shows, the original page had the somewhat geeky “Get this widget!” text inside a somewhat staid gray-color button. This probably echoed the flawed assumption of the original design team that EMAIL360 would be used by programmers who knew what widget meant and didn’t bother about aesthetics. However, we had no intention of restricting EMAIL360 to the geek squad. In fact, it has more value for small and medium businesses who lack much IT support. Therefore, we started wondering if changing the text to something less technical (e.g. “Sign up!”) and the color to something more attractive (orange / blue) would make a significant difference to conversion i.e. percentage of visitors who actually entered their details and clicked this button to collect the widget code. Since there was no definitive answer to this subjective question, we decided to carry out an A/B test.

Put off by Wingify / Visual Website Optimizer, who was the first vendor we contacted, we used Optimizely for our A/B test. Our test was conducted on the original page and four variants of button text and color i.e. five versions in total. To illustrate, variant 4  matched the original page’s text (”Get this widget!”) but sported a more attractive blue color.

Original Page versus Variant 4

As promised by Optimizely on its website, we didn’t have to do any programming while specifying the different versions of the page. We used five metrics, including the most key one, namely, sign-up. We ran the experiment for around two weeks, which was the time it took for the results to reach statistical significance.

A/B Test Results

On the engagement metric (i.e. percentage of visitors who clicked any part of the experiment page), all five versions performed fairly similarly. Whereas, when we looked at the key signup metric (i.e. percentage of visitors who clicked the “Get this widget!” button), we found a significant difference between the five versions. Our original page had a paltry 5.8% conversion whereas Variant 4 delivered more than 3X conversion at 16.7%.

The writing was the wall. Thanks to Optimizely, we acquired a strong scientific basis on which to take the following decisions:

• Don’t change the button text
• Change the button color

We implemented the above change to the homepage of EMAIL360 and have since seen a sharp uplift in customers.

It’s worth noting at this point that the incremental customers we acquired subsequent to our A/B testing came from absolutely no increase in website traffic. In other words, A/B testing fits into the CONVERT – rather than ATTRACT – stage of inbound marketing and logically forms a part of our suite of Frictionless Online Interaction Solutions.

We’d like to take this opportunity to laud Optimizely for its excellent understanding of our situation and prompt support at all crucial times of the experiment. The next time we intend doing A/B testing for ourselves or our customers, we won’t look anywhere else. For the value Optimizely delivers, its price is hardly a pocket-pincher. For vendors like Wingify / Visual Website Optimizer who bungle on the very first base and seem to lack any go to market theme other than low cost, our experience should serve as an eye-opener: Genuine customers will always pay for value and won’t buy products that lack in value even if their sellers give them away free.

I’ve traditionally been buying books regularly to feed my self-admittedly voracious reading habit. A few months ago, I started running into a severe space crunch in my bookshelf and therefore decided to borrow books instead of buying them.

However, my experience with book lending libraries hasn’t been anything to write home about. Over the last 12-18 months, I’ve tried and given up on two online libraries, Librarywala.com and BooksAtHome.in. I’ve written about my woes with the former in a previous post (in short, erratic logistics and q’jacking). While the latter has decent logistics and is insulated from q’jacking since it doesn’t use a queue, its collection of books simply sucks. It accepts recommendations for new books from its members but doesn’t seem to do anything about them for weeks. My plan entitles me to borrow two books at a time. When I recently found it impossible for the third time in a row to find the second book to add to my shopping cart – which is what its website uses in the absence of the queueing feature that’s common to leading online rental companies – I decided to bid farewell to BooksAtHome.in.

At about this time, I came across JustBooks. From its newspaper insert, this library seemed to blend the online and brick-and-mortar worlds in an innovative fashion. A trip to its nearest store confirmed my first impression.

Unlike the aforementioned online libraries that deliver and pick up books from your home/office based on your online actions, you need to visit a JustBooks’ physical store location to borrow and return books (unless you sign up for its AVID READER plan, more on that in a moment).

However, JustBooks makes excellent use of technology in its stores to deliver a superior customer experience. Its membership card and books have embedded RFID chips in them. To have new books issued or to return read books, you place your membership card and the stack of books on a kiosk located at the front of the store. The kiosk recognizes you based on the RFID chip embedded in the membership card and automatically logs you into your account. You simply tap on the ISSUE or the RETURN button. The kiosk automatically reads the names of all books in the stack at one go – no scanning one barcode at a time. You confirm the list, logout and off you go. That’s it.

Now, if you sign up for JustBooks’ highest end plan called AVID READER, you get to experience “order online, ship from in-store inventory”, which is one of the most cutting-edge omnichannel retailing practices according to analysts like RSR Research. Customers of this plan can order a book on JustBooks’ website and the nearest physical store will deliver it to their homes. I asked the owner of a JustBooks franchise how it could afford the cost of home delivery, especially in the low value book lending business. She told me that that JustBooks is hoping to recover the higher costs through substantially higher revenues. This is entirely possible considering that the store-to-home feature is restricted to JustBooks’ most expensive membership plan. Unlike other plans where customers pay a small amount on a monthly basis and can walk out anytime after the initial three months’ lockout period, the costliest plan locks in the customer with an upfront payment for one full year, which results in 20X greater revenues. As an aside, this example shows that it’s possible to adopt innovative practices that fulfill customer’s needs better, and, in the process, upsell and boost topline without necessarily sacrificing bottomline.

It’s still early days for me with JustBooks. Much as I found their process and technology innovative, I wasn’t too impressed with their staff. One of them was perpetually grumpy, another was highly patronizing and the third one couldn’t speak English and doesn’t belong in a lending library for English books. They might need one more kiosk to handle peak rush. I don’t like it that they charge a 2% ‘convenience fee’ for paying monthly fees online. They keep whining about accepting credit card payment for monthly fees even though they confirmed to me at the time of signing up that I could always pay by credit card and also prominently display a “credit card welcome” sticker on their door. Given my not-so-great experience with the two aforementioned online libraries, I’m keeping my fingers crossed with JustBooks. But, whether I stick around around with JustBooks or eventually order another bookshelf, its novel business practice and innovative use of technology must be noted. Consider  it done.

Beneath their hoods, software applications and websites may be all science but there’s a lot of art on their surface. There’s no right answer when it comes to screen layout, color schemes, navigation flows and other design elements. While one designer might prefer an orange button over a black background, another would swear by a white background and blue button. Some etailers might be satisfied with basic credit card validation, fearing that CVV, VbV and other stronger authentication methods might turn off an average online shopper whereas others might want to minimize their fraud risk and let the shopper be ferried around by electronic payment gateways across third-party websites before bringing them back to their own website to issue the order confirmation.

Traditionally, gut feeling has played a strong role in deciding what option to choose when it comes to the aforementioned design elements.

However, website owners, etailers and designers are aware that even small changes in design could have a major impact on the conversion of browsers to buyers, so they’re forever  looking for scientific techniques to help them with their decision making instead of leaving it totally to their gut. Traditionally, they’ve relied on surveys and focus groups. However, in today’s world, such techniques are not really adequate. Witness, for example, the fate of BORDERS and Barnes & Noble who continue to close stores across the nation even as they managed to take the top two spots in Forrester’s annual Customer Experience Index that is based on surveys.

What if designers had a way to test their alternative designs using live traffic instead of relying on the verdict of a bunch of community testers?

With online A/B testing, they do. Designers select one or more conversion actions on a given web page and model two versions of that page. They split their live traffic into two parts and route one through version 1 and the other, through version 2. By measuring the conversion metrics on each version of the page, they can scientifically conclude which version fares better.

In the above illustration, a click on the “Sign up!” button by a website visitor would be an important conversion action. The two versions of the webpage are Design A and Design B which have different background and button color as shown in the above diagram. If an A/B testing indicates that (say) Design B converts better – that is, has a higher percentage of visitors who clicked the “Sign up!” button – the designer would be in a position to scientifically decide that Design B is the way to go and ditch Design A.

While A/B testing as a statistical tool has been around for a long time, its use in software design has been restricted. Despite early adoption from the likes of Amazon, A/B testing never went past the realm of the big e-commerce players. The reason isn’t hard to figure: While designing an A/B test and developing multiple versions of a page (or sets of pages) are quite simple, executing the test demands close coordination between the designer and the hosting provider in order to activate the right version of the page at the right time, manually record traffic and conversion for each version, and jump a few more hoops.

Google tried to mitigate some of the pain involved in executing A/B testing with its Google Website Optimizer launched a few years ago. However, according to anecdotal evidence, GWO didn’t go far enough and A/B testing remained too difficult for the average website owner.

No longer.

A new crop of cloud-based solutions from Optimizely and a couple of other companies makes A/B testing easy. These companies do all the heavy lifting on the cloud and free up designers to focus on the business side of optimizing their pages.

EMAIL360 Original Page

We recently wanted to carry out an A/B test to figure out the best possible button text and color for the “Get this widget” button on the home page of our EMAIL360 website.

At about this time, we’d read about Wingify / VisualWebsiteOptimizer in a local newspaper, and signed up with it. Unfortunately, VWO couldn’t track even elementary conversion actions like a button click. As a result, we decided to abandon it. We got an email from its founder a day later. Although we’d set up our experiment on Wingify’s website, its founder’s email showed no prior knowledge of what we’d attempted to do, and why we failed. We replied back asking them to review our experiment and tell us how to proceed. Instead, their response was, like, duh. This send major alarm bells ringing in our mind. Since we knew the basics of A/B testing, we weren’t sure how Wingify would handle more complicated questions that would inevitably crop up as we went deeper into the execution of our experiment and decided to stop dealing with it.

We then decided to check out Optimizely, a startup we were quite impressed with when we’d read about its launch around a year ago.  Thank goodness we did that. Whatever our  experiment needed, we found them easily on Optimizely. Its founder, Dan Siroker, himself stepped in with help at crucial times. It was commendable that a person of his pedigree – Director Analytics for Obama Campaign and Google Chrome Product Manager - was personally involved during the whole process, “getting” our questions immediately and reverting back with crystal clear, actionable responses within reasonable time.

In Part-2 of this post, we’ll share the findings of the A/B testing done on the EMAIL360 website using Optimizely (Spoiler Alert: We learned that the original design had a lot of scope for improvement!). Stay tuned.

Crossword, Landmark and other physical bookstores in India would surely be aware of the fate of BORDERS, the leading American bookseller that recently filed for bankruptcy protection and closed down its stores after years of getting thrashed by Amazon and other online bookstores.

I was recently complaining to the manager of a CROSSWORD store that its prices – no discount on the list prices printed on the back covers of the books – were simply too high compared to the 15-30% discounts offered by various online booksellers like @Flipkart. He agreed with me and defended his prices on the basis of the higher cost structure of a brick-and-mortar store. Apparently, Crossword pays INR 3-5 Lacs (equivalent of US$ 6,666 – 11,111) per month just in rent for a typical store in an upscale retail location. Add salaries, utilities and other costs, and I was supposed to get the drift and fork out the extra cash happily. Thankfully, he probably realized that we were well into the second decade of the 21st century, and spared me the standard spiel that many others would’ve given under such situations about how online shopping could never match the touch-and-feel experience afforded by a physical store.

I began wondering that day if Crossword was heading towards a ‘BORDERS moment’.

Today, I became convinced that it was, indeed.

While trying to find out its Twitter handle – it’s @crossword_book, by the way - I discovered today that Crossword has an online store. In fact, its online prices were substantially lower than its store prices for many books I checked. Besides, shipping was free.

For a brief moment, I wondered why Crossword’s store manager never told me that I could buy books cheaper at Crossword’s own online store when I was grilling him about the lower prices offered by its pure-play Internet competitors. I then realized the answer to that question in a flash: Like BORDERS, the physical store and web are probably two different channels for Crossword and never the twain shall meet.

While Crossword surely knows what happened to BORDERS, it might be enlightened to note that BORDERS faced a ‘BORDERS moment’ not because it didn’t have an online presence. Despite having a website that rivalled Amazon’s in variety and prices, BORDERS sank because it had never managed to integrate its online store into its organizational psyche. Employees of BORDERS’ stores rarely promoted its website even if that meant losing business to Amazon and other online competitors.

I see parallels at Crossword, which is why I’m convinced that it is hurtling towards a BORDERS moment. But, since e-commerce is not yet mainstream in India, Crossword can easily escape BORDERS’ fate.

How? By behaving in a channel-agnostic manner in front of customers.

Will that happen by itself? No chance.

Can Crossword make it happen immediately with the wave of a magic wand? Doubtful.

Will Crossword bite the bullet and bring about the required internal transformation to make sure it happens soon enough to escape the BORDERS moment? Probably. Only time will tell.

In the first part of this post titled Does Google Find Something Different About You?, we’d covered the ‘Something different’ section of Google search results that contains links showing some queries that may be in the same category as your original search. Based on the criteria used by Google to build this section, we’d seen how

1. Companies with poor web presence don’t have this section, and
2. Long-dead companies that once had a strong web presence got a rebirth in someone else’s SDG.

In this part, we shall explore reciprocal relationships between a company and its SDG members.

Based on what we know so far about SDG, we’d intuitively expect to find a reciprocal relationship between a company and its SDG members. In other words, if X belongs to the SDG of Y, we’d expect Y to belong to the SDG of X.

If we take Wipro / Infosys as an example, we find that this is indeed the case.

However, when we explore further, we find that reciprocal relationship is not guaranteed. For example, Amazon’s SDG includes Walmart but Walmart’s SDG does not include Amazon.

Likewise, Wipro’s SDG includes Accenture but Accenture’s SDG does not include Wipro.

Seasoned marketers would immediately understand the implications of this apparent anamoly.  A potential buyer who searches for Wipro might notice that Accenture is in the related business and might contact Accenture with the same requirement. On the other hand, Wipro won’t receive such a collateral lead from a prospect searching for Accenture since it is absent in Accenture’s SDG. Therefore, lack of reciprocal relationship between SDGs impacts Accenture positively and Wipro negatively.

This underscores two major imperatives for marketers, especially those who use social media, search and other forms of inbound marketing within their marketing mix:

1. Make sure that your company has an SDG, otherwise your prospects might think that you’re too small for them.
2. At the same time, make sure that your SDG doesn’t include your competitor’s names since you don’t want your marketing efforts to result in leads for them.
3. Get your company named in the SDG of your major competitors.

Achieving these goals might spawn a brand new cottage industry, which we shall call Something Different Optimization, or SDO, for now. For all we know, SDO could become the next Holy Grail of digital marketing consultants and agencies out there who have been trying to game Google search results all these years with Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

With Google finally cracking down on content farms, paid links and other common SEO techniques, the era of SEO appears to be on the wane and SDO seems to be emerging not a moment too soon!

The jury’s out – well, not even selected – on this latest one but, at 1:1, the verdicts on the two previous lawsuits around EFT and ACH frauds in the USA are matched evenly between corporates and banks.

It seems fair to find in favor of corporates where banks haven’t complied with FFIEC and other well-established security guidelines. Issued over five years ago, and updated last month, FFIEC’s guidance around two factor authentication for Internet Banking have been around for a long enough time and there’s really no excuse for the failure of banks to implement them. The growing popularity of Mint, OfferMatic, BillGuard and other websites that access the customer’s bank account on the basis of a simple username and password suggests that there are still plenty of banks in the US that fall under this category, at least when it comes to retail banking, and I won’t be terribly surprised if a similar situation prevails in business banking as well. UPDATE: The complaint filed by Village View Escrow alleges that Professional Business Bank hadn’t implemented two factor authentication on its website even though its contract claimed that it had.

However, things get very murky when banks get judged by a broader canvas of expectations around what they should, or shouldn’t, be doing with payment instructions received from their customers.

Take the lawsuit of Experi-Metal Inc. v. Comerica Bank, for instance. According to the BankInfoSecurity article quoted in the Finextra story, the court found in favor of EMI on the grounds that “EMI’s prior wire-transfer activity, which had been limited to a select group of domestic entities, should have been noted by Comerica before it approved transfers to overseas accounts”.

This prompts the following questions:

1. Should a bank ignore the “there’s a first time for everything?” maxim?
2. If yes, by the same token, should a bank stop payments to all new beneficiaries just because the corporate had never made payments to any of them in the past?
3. If no, why blame a bank for approving the first cross-border payment, which could signal the corporate’s entry into an increasingly globalized world rather than fraud?
4. Assuming that the bank finds a cross-border payment suspicious, what is its contractual obligation to the corporate?
5. Assuming that the bank decides to go beyond its contractual obligation and takes the initiative to check with the corporate. As experienced bankers know, this could take a couple of hours at times, longer in case the authorized contact at the corporate is traveling or otherwise unavailable. Because of this time lapse, suppose the corporate misses the deadline for submission of security / earnest money deposit for an overseas government tender and sues the bank for loss of the business opportunity?
6. On the other hand, what if a bank sits on a payment on the pretense of carrying out fraud checks only to enjoy the float? Neither is this a rare scenario, as experienced treasures would agree!

As these issues illustrate, holding banks responsible for things other than contractual commitments and well-established security guidelines might result in unfavorable outcome in the long run – not just for banks but also for corporates. Let’s hope that these cases are decided with this consideration in mind.

At this point, it’s not clear if these are one-off cases or portend a tsunami of ePayment fraud lawsuits waiting to strike banks in the coming months and years. Either way, ‘ePayment Fraud Chasers’ will likely emerge as a new and lucrative category of practice in the American legal profession very soon!

Usability is generally associated with benefits like reduced friction, superior UX and greater cross-selling for e-commerce providers. Click here to read a couple of my articles and blog posts about usability in this context.

During a recent transaction, I realized how better usability could also cut costs for an online business.

I normally buy domain names from the leading registrar GoDaddy. From time to time, I receive coupons from GoDaddy for 15-30% discounts. Since I normally order one or two domain names for one year duration at a time, my orders seldom surpass the $40-80 floor values required to qualify for these discounts. As a result, I’ve generally been ignoring these coupons.

Recently, when I wanted to buy a domain name for five years, I noticed that it cost $60.85. I was delighted to get the chance (finally!) to use a GoDaddy coupon. Taking advantage of the huge – now unlimited – storage provided by Yahoo! email, I never delete these GoDaddy coupons even if I’ve been unable to use them. Sure enough, when I searched my archive folder, I was able to locate a recent coupon from GoDaddy that offered 30% off on a minimum order value of $60. I plucked out the discount code from GoDaddy’s email and entered it on the checkout form of the GoDaddy website. However, after applying the coupon, I got a cryptic message saying “The promo code you entered is invalid, expired, or ineligible for the items you are purchasing.”

Well, since my order value exceeded $60, I couldn’t figure out why GoDaddy was rejecting my code. Clicking the View Offer Limitations link didn’t help much.

I was about to abandon my shopping cart at this stage. Not that 30% savings on $60 was substantial in absolute terms. My decision was driven more by getting ticked off at not being able to avail myself of GoDaddy’s discount the first time I qualified for it in all these years. On a higher level, I probably felt betrayed by GoDaddy after years of being loyal to it. Whatever.

Given my state of mind at the time, I’d have quit the website – and, who knows, GoDaddy itself forever – except that I happened to notice a 24/7 Sales & Support telephone # displayed prominently on the top of its checkout page. Since I anyway had an unlimited Skype calling plan for the USA, I decided to don my headphone and make the call.

The Customer Service Representative who came on the line immediately “got” me. There was none of the usual duh-like response that one gets from many call centers these days. Apparently, my order value of $60.85 included a $1-odd fees payable to ICANN. Since my net order value fell below the $60 qualifying limit, the website had rejected my discount code.

Now, domainers are aware that ICANN, or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is the private sector, non-profit corporation created to assume responsibility for coordinating domain names across the hundreds of for-profit domain registrars like GoDaddy. Therefore, fees payable by GoDaddy and other registrars to ICANN are tantamount to taxes, duties and levies. Like anyone reasonable, I’d no problem in accepting GoDaddy’s policy of netting out ICANN fees from its order value.

Where do usability and cost reduction figure in all this?

Simple.

If only its website had explained its policy clearly, GoDaddy could’ve saved money on providing higher cost telephone support. If displaying multiple charges makes things confusing for an average GoDaddy customer, fair enough. The website could show this breakup at least when the order value is close to the eligible floor limit for the entered discount code, like mine was.

For those wondering if there’s any business case in making the necessary enhancements to the website to deliver superior usability in this narrow context, let me do some back-of-the-envelope calculations below and see what conclusions we can draw from them:

1. The telephone call took around 15 minutes
2. The CSR was definitely not located in some low cost call center
3. 15 minutes of a high-quality CSR’s time can cost more than the $$ figure deal size.

Since not every GoDaddy customer is likely to have an unlimited Skype calling plan, they wouldn’t have made the call unlike me, and GoDaddy would’ve lost the deal, if not a loyal customer forever (Note to complacent vendors: I moved a large portfolio of domain names from another registrar to GoDaddy a couple of years ago, so I won’t hesitate to move it once again if it comes to it.)

To come to the conclusion of the story, GoDaddy’s CSR immediately came up with the suggestion of upping my order to six years. For this longer duration, the order value crossed $60 net of ICANN fees and therefore qualified for the 30% discount. Faced with one quote for 5 years @ $60.85 and another for 6 years @ $55, no  prizes for guessing what I did, so the story had a happy ending.

I’m sure that even with the best of design and programming inputs, it’d be impossible for a website to match a human CSR’s ability to come up with a winning alternative proposal interactively and in realtime. So, I’m excluding the concluding part of the telephone interaction from the purview of website usability. (Although it’s probably within the realm of capabilities of virtual agents, but that’s a topic for another day). Having said that, the earlier part of the process flow on the website could’ve always been designed in such a way that the website doesn’t have to face such an impossible situation in the first place.

GoDaddy immediately followed up this telephone conversation with a customer satisfaction survey email where it asked two simple, but highly relevant, questions. Once I gave the above feedback on this survey, I decided to take up GoDaddy’s suggestion to tweet my views – just to see where it went. @GoDaddy tweeted me back almost immediately asking for more information. Credit where it’s due, I haven’t come across such quick response when I’ve tweeted my feedback to a lot of other companies. According to its HEATMAP360, GoDaddy has a 50:50 sentiment on Twitter, so it has the opportunity to improve its service so that its positive sentiment improves even further.

'Something Different Group' of Skype

Although we believe it’s been around for a while, it was only recently that we stumbled upon the ‘Something different’ section on the left-hand panel of Google search results. According to Google, the set of links in this section shows some queries that may be in the same category as your original search. These alternative queries can help you discover webpages that are indirectly related to your search.

For example, if you search for Skype, you could see Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk and MSN Messenger, which are Skype-equivalent services. Likewise, the ‘Something Different Group’ (SDG) for Amazon’s search results shows leading retailers like Barnes & Noble, NewEgg, Walmart, Circuit City and Best Buy.

Different pages on Google’s website explain how Google determines what links to show in a keyword’s SDG and how SDG is different from the “Related searches” section listed at the bottom of the search results page. For the purpose of this post, it’s relevant to note that “Something different” relies on web documents and users’ search queries to identify concepts that that may be related or are in the same category whereas ”Related searches” generally help you drill-down further into the given keyword. For example, if you search for [giraffe], “Something different” may list other animals like zebras and elephants, while “Related searches” might delve deeper into your original search with things like giraffe pictures, giraffe facts and safari animals.

From the aforementioned criteria used by Google for building the ‘Something different’ section, we might be led to conclude that companies with poor web presence will be missing this section altogether. The following screenshot proves that this is indeed the case for a couple of such companies.

Poor Web Presence Means No SDG Section!

Andersen Consulting is still around - at least in Accenture's SDG!

On the other hand, long-dead companies that once had strong web presence achieve rebirth in the SDG of someone or the other. Witness, for example, Andersen Consulting – a company that downed its shutters in 2001 on the back of Enron’s bankruptcy – in Accenture’s SDG.

In the next part of this post, we shall explore reciprocal relationships between a company and its SDG members and how they impact the business development efforts of different companies in a given industry.

Spoiler Alert: In the absence of any guarantee of reciprocity, we might see the birth of a new industry, which we’re calling Something Different Optimization. SDO could very well turn out to be the next Holy Grail of gaming Google Search.