From...

August 18, 1999
Web posted at: 10:53 a.m. EDT (1453 GMT)

by Julia King

(IDG) -- Online success sometimes brings unexpected consequences.

Take the case of Home Depot.com, which discovered that educating customers online changes the kind of service they need in stores, according to Mike Anderson, vice president of information services.

Tougher questions

"If you're giving more information to consumers online and educating them before they get to the store, that means they're asking the really tough questions when they get to the store," Anderson said.

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For example, visitors to the company's Web site have access to online calculators that let do-it-yourselfers accurately figure the materials they'll need for a project like wallpapering a kitchen.

So Home Depot is now providing advanced training to help in-store service people answer the tough questions customers bring in, he said.

Unexpected popularity can also be a problem. Within six months of its 1998 launch, American Airlines Inc.'s redesigned Web site was racking up some impressive numbers.

Thanks to new personalization technology, more than 1 million frequent fliers had visited American Airlines' Web site to check their account status. Another 2 million people had signed up to receive weekly e-mails about low last-minute fares to their favorite destinations.

"Customer enthusiasm for the new site surpassed anything the airline ever anticipated," touted a press release early this year.

Yet internally, the site was drowning in its own success. The airline's eight-person Web publishing group couldn't keep up with customers' demand for personalized content.

"The advent of personalization drives additional challenges for content management," which the Web team didn't see up front, said John R. Samuel, American Airlines' vice president for interactive marketing.

Greater effort

"With personalized information, we can make customers happier than ever before," Samuel said. The team underestimated the effort it would take to keep new, customized information flowing into the site. So they recruited workers in virtually every other department to write copy to post to the new Web site.

But not all potential consequences of online success lie below the water line. Experts say that some, such as turf wars between a company's real-world and online ventures, are predictable -- and preventable with some up-front policy setting.

For example, many retailers, including Nordstrom Inc., sell their products both online and in stores. But if online shoppers can't find what they want online, they're referred to an in-store salesperson. The question becomes where the sale should be credited -- to the store or to the online venture?

To solve that problem, more retailers with dual channels will adopt activity-based costing to identify how much they spend on marketing and other functions and where costs should be applied, said Tim Harmon, an analyst at Meta Group Inc. in Stamford, Conn.