Panel Q&A: How to Fund Online Customer Experience Initiatives

Question: How do you prioritize customer experience projects?

We prioritize based on expected ROI. It’s important to spec out the projects really well. We weren’t always very good at that. We’d look at projects and say it would take four weeks, then IT would get it and realize that all the pieces that needed to be put in place would make the project take three months. Now we have a better idea of what each project requires. But we also look at gross cost vs. gross profit.
— Hawkins

Question: Does the low cost, high return always get you the best site possible?

Most merchants go after the low-hanging fruit first, but there are problems that you can see coming that you have to tackle now before they impact the business two years from now.
— Weiland

With word of mouth and customer generated content, the cost involved in getting people to talk is very minimal. Web 2.0 is often cheap. My CEO gave me $10,000 for a blog project and I did it for $150. And for the recent holiday, we made $50,000 through the blog. Cheap and easy has worked for us.
— Pinny Gniwisch, executive vice president, marketing, Ice.com

You often have to look at your pain points and fix those things first. Some are easy, and some are hard. The best way to find those is to talk to your phone reps. You may have a project that’s low cost and high return, but you find out when you talk to your reps that it’s not really addressing problems your customers are having. If you use your customers as a bellwether for what to do, you’ll find the return.
— Hawkins