So much for conventional wisdom.

For the most part, I’d rather have a root canal than use most support Websites.

Search for information and you end up with a list of a bazillion documents with truncated descriptions that read like Sanskrit.

Want to take a different path? Try ferreting your product out of a laundry list of every product the company ever made.

Or try the “follow our logical links” scenario—where you end up drilling to China.

At the end of all of this wonderfulness is the real insult. Support content that either requires an engineering degree to understand—or a wad of general purpose instructions that dance around the problem and miss the issue by a country mile.

Finally, don’t get me started about most site’s support program content. (You know, the stuff that explains why you have to pay to play.)  First, you can’t find it. When you do, it’s packed with so many superlatives you need a dictionary to figure it out.

Honestly, you’d think support teams would get it after doodling on the Web for 16 years.

Drum Roll, Please

Given my opinion of support on the Web, I was surprised how much the 2011 support evaluations reflected my opinions of these support sites. Most of the sites we evaluated deliver half of the content, features & capabilities deployed on best-in-class support sites. With the exception of four sites—Cisco.com, Symantec.com, IBM.com and the IBM Software Group site—every site’s usability misses the Good Practice mark.

I’d probably throw a bone to Dell.com, EMC.com, and Microsoft.com for coming close—but the rest are simply not up to snuff.

I’ve just finished putting the finishing touches on our new 2011 online support rankings and ratings report which published today. Here’s some of the more interesting things in this new report.

IBM, Dell and HP have all the goodies

IBM.com’s, Dell.com’s and HP.com’s monster-size support sites handed them the top rankings this year. If you want to create a world-class support size packed with every bell and whistle, you don’t have to look much further than here. Among the players, Dell.com is the biggest, but IBM.com puts its goodies together to better effect (its usability ranks third; Dell.com ranks fifth).

This brings me to the real tail that wags the dog.

Cisco.com proves an important point

When usability is the issue, we’ve always said that small can be mighty—and Cisco.com proves the point. Cisco.com’s support site took first place usability honors—which is a testament to all of the hard work we’ve seen on the site this year. If you are a siteIntelligence Case Studies Library subscriber, you can see Cisco.com’s best-in-class innovations here: https://siteiq.centraldesktop.com/sirc/blog/1088332/view/bytag/cisco (Category: support, Tag: cisco). (Have your login info handy).

From a usability perspective, Cisco.com has the most complete roster of support information that is easy to find. To see why, take Cisco.com’s site search engine for a spin and pay attention to post search filtering capabilities. Then check out the support zone’s fly-out navigational panel. If you want to learn why these matter, check out Cisco.com’s best practice case studies here: https://siteiq.centraldesktop.com/sirc/blog/1088332/view/bytag/cisco. (You guessed it: subscription & login required.)

Finding support content on most sites is a "Where's Waldo?" moment. Only 5 sites hit the mark.

Not so fast. The winners should cancel their victory lap.

So where are the pleasant surprises? Put Brocade.com, EMC.com, and Symantec.com on that list.

• Brocade.com has the most complete & thorough support program information (a Best Practice) -– and does the best job of encouraging visitors to take the next step.
• EMC.com’s support program information is easier to find—and does the best job of providing program contact information.
• Symantec.com delivers the best support click streams, which generated the highest Good Practice rating for all of its hard work.

And what about the rest of the pack? You know, those other 13 support Websites on the evaluation list?  Let’s just say there was another interesting surprise.

Earth to enterprise: what are you thinking?

With the exception of IBM Software Group, enterprise software sites need to up their usability game. From my perspective, their rankings are downright embarrassing.

CA.com ranks 11^th, Oracle.com ranks 12^th and SAP.com brings up the back of the pack in 15^th place. The only support sites that are worse than these triplets are reseller sites (CDW.com, Insight.com and Newegg.com) –and they don’t provide much, if any, support on their sites. Yikes!

So how does IBM Software Group stay out of this industry ditch? IBM.com’s highly integrated support portal is the wind beneath its wings. To see why this portal delivers a bit of online support nirvana, check out our case study in the Library: https://siteiq.centraldesktop.com/sirc/blogentry/5334686/. (Yep, you’ll need that pesky login information).

Dell.com support is really a tale of two cities.

Finally, no analysis is complete without taking a look at the conventional wisdom corner; in this case the prevailing belief that Dell.com operates the biggest and best online support site. This may (or may not) be true behind the Dell Premier firewall—but it’s a mixed bag if you are on the public side of the equation.

When the numbers are rolled up, Dell.com’s support zone’s content, features & capabilities rank #1, but its usability slips into fifth place–right behind the IBM Software Group site. As important, it only ranks first in one out of ten usability categories (a Good Practice for support zone logic). Other than that, Dell.com persistently ranks in second and third place.

The bottom line

So there you have it. The roster of winners based on 138 things support sites should provide–plus ten ways they should help users achieve their objectives. For the top five, I send hardy congratulations. For the rest of the pack, roll up your sleeves. There’s lots of work ahead.

These stats don’t come as much of a surprise since tough times call for more attention to how effectively the company’s Website creates – and more importantly, harvests – qualified prospects. Face it, nothing beats a Website for its global reach and the ability to win and woo potential buyers at the lowest possible cost.

Given these realities, it should be really interesting to see if the sales forces we test have finally gotten eselling religion. I wouldn’t bet on it

This, of course, brings me to an interesting question. Assuming the Website does its job, what happens next? Are salespeople actually contacting ‘anatomically correct’ prospects streaming in from your Website – or is your sales force still playing the same games we’ve seen in previous years? Which leading IT companies are doing the best job harvesting interested buyers? Which companies need to kick their sales force in the pants?

Since selling is the name of the game these days, we’ve decided to launch our 10th siteIQ Secret Prospect study this week. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this study, here’s the basic approach in four easy steps.

1. We create a fictitious buyer with the right title, authority, budget, and buying timeline.
2. We go out to every Website on the siteIQ eBusiness Index, pick one or more products or categories, and test different ways to engage with the sales force. We fill out the contact forms, send emails, and hit the “call me now” buttons. About the only thing we don’t bother to do is request an online chat (previous tests show that these features typically work like a charm).
3. Along the way, we document every part of the process. We identify how many inappropriate questions are required on forms. We note all of the promises made, including when we should receive a response. We check to make sure privacy policies are front and center. After we’re finished, we measure how effectively the company continues to market to prospects and how efficiently it connects them back to the right place on the site.
4. Then we sit back and start the stopwatch. We track when the salesperson calls, when we receive various emails – and how often the company’s sales organization reaches out. After 18 days, we close the study, add up the numbers, and publish the results.

Looks pretty simple, but the results can sometimes be damning. I’ve provided a peek into how companies like Oracle, IBM, HP, Adobe, CA, Microsoft, Symantec, Cisco, Nortel, Accenture, and EDS fared in our last test in the siteIntelligence Research Center (siteIQ clients can log in here). From a big picture perspective, here’s how the industry’s biggest players tend to behave.

• Getting a response across a company’s product groups is largely the luck of the draw. One product group will respond within minutes, while others fiddle around for days (if you are lucky).
• About half of our requests go into a black hole. Meanwhile, sales chat almost always delivers the goods, while request a quote and email requests are hit and miss at best.
• Handoffs to partners almost never work (typically a function of incompetent handoffs, plus partners who apparently don’t like the vendor’s leads).
• Finally, few companies follow up on prospect requests unless the prospect calls back – and almost none use email (cheap, fast, and effective) to keep prospects warm.

Given these realities, it should be really interesting to see if the sales forces we test have finally gotten eselling religion. I wouldn’t bet on it. After nine of these tests, my bet is that we’ll see the same old dysfunctional behaviors. On the other hand, I’m ready to be pleasantly surprised. We’ll be posting real-time results in the siteIntelligence Research Center — and will publish the winners and losers here in April. Stay tuned.

Insight.com and Newegg.com both receive scores that place them in a league with IT industry leaders — and well ahead of one of their major partners — HP.

When I rolled up the first quarter 2008 usability numbers this week, a couple of interesting facts jumped out. First, Newegg.com’s product marketing score is nearly 71%, which puts it on par with the eBusiness Index average (71.38%) — and places it in close proximity to enterprise systems heavyweights in the effectiveness rankings. Second, and more important, all three reseller sites — Newegg.com, CDW.com, and Insight.com — earn e-selling-related usability scores that are well above the eBusiness Index average, and actually rival those of the ultimate online channel — Dell.com.

Admittedly, these are two bright spots in an otherwise checkered usability landscape for these companies.  Website design and navigation & architecture scores average around 60% — well below the target 75% score. Corporate marketing comes in at an embarrassing 44%, and services marketing & support scores sit in the mid 30% range. To add insult to injury, these sites clock equally appalling training & education scores that average around 30%. Community/industry marketing scores are the true disappointment, however. Here, the mean usability score doesn’t even crack 25%. So much for Web 2.0 among leading reseller sites.

Despite these bumps in the road, I have to give the teams managing Newegg.com, CDW.com, and Insight.com credit for focusing on “Job One” in their universe: making products easy for visitors to purchase online, and delivering persistent call to action elements that encourage visitors to become customers. These behaviors, combined with competitive pricing that often meets or beats the manufacturer’s suggested retail price, are undoubtedly partially responsible for the growing popularity of these (and other) reseller sites.

It’s my contention, however, that the real reason these sites are selling record numbers of their partner’s/supplier’s products is an architectural structure that facilitates forward momentum based on customer specifications and/or requirements. At these sites, visitors dictate the context in which they view products, and no matter the route taken, pricing and the ability to begin the purchasing process are central elements of the click stream. In fact, in contrast to some enterprise-class sites where purchasing the exact same product often requires navigational gyrations through  mountains of poorly organized content, these leading reseller sites make online purchasing a breeze.

I did something I never thought I’d do. I lobbied that we retire my pet personal systems sites from the eBusiness Index and replace them with three reseller Web properties including CDW.com, Insight.com, and Newegg.com

Not surprisingly, these discussions are usually quite lively, as Practice Leaders lobby for certain sites to be included for review, and often, for entire industry segments to be added to the Index roster. This was certainly the case when Kenna & I petitioned for the Business Software & Personal Systems segments to be added to the eBusiness Index back in 2005, so I was happy that these industries finally earned full-time Index status in the third quarter 2007.

Then, a funny thing happened in the fourth quarter. Gateway, which has operated the personal systems industry’s leading site since we started tracking PC vendors, sold its Small Business, Mid & Large Business, and Government & Education operations to MPC Corporation. Around the same time, news hit the airwaves that Acer’s acquisition of Gateway was complete, a sure signal that Gateway.com would be in for some changes—and might even go away.

Sure enough, in the midst of the fourth quarter, our evaluators noted that the Small Business, Mid & Large Business, and Government & Education zones disappeared from the Gateway site. Unfortunately, the elimination of these zones means that Gateway.com no longer corresponds to the traditional personal systems business model—and renders the site a mere shell of its former self.

Needless to say, the realization that Gateway.com is no longer a viable personal systems contender left me scrambling to find a site to replace it on the eBusiness Index. With our annual Index roster discussion looming, I set about the task of researching possible options. Given my knowledge of the industry, I knew this wouldn’t be easy. Enterprise giants like HP have been taking a pretty big bite out of conventional PC business for the past few years, so the number of dedicated personal computer manufacturers is waning.

Sure, there’s still Apple, and technically, Lenovo counts since its spin off from IBM; both are already evaluated on the Index. Then, there’s the aforementioned Acer, but its business model is more closely aligned to enterprise than personal systems, and a trip through its site reveals that it hardly represents best-in-class behaviors (and that pages load at a snail’s pace even using a FIOS connection) so it doesn’t qualify for inclusion in any eBusiness Index industry segment.

Other than that, the pickings are pretty slim. What’s more, every article printed, published, or posted to the Internet indicates that HP & Dell are earning the lion’s share of the PC business these days. As important, my ongoing study shows that resellers & channel partners are increasingly accountable for a growing number of PC sales. In fact, it seems that the evolving reseller market is only serving to fuel HP & Dell’s persistent munching of traditional PC vendor profits. According to all recent research, the combined one-two punch of direct—and channel—marketing is taking a serious toll; Apple currently ranks fourth in sales behind HP, Dell, and Acer.

Naturally, all of this got me to propose that  it’s time to look at the way consumers are purchasing hardware through a different lens. In particular, I decided we needed to get a closer view of just what vendors in the reseller/channel market are up to. So, when it came time to attend the annual Index roster discussion I did something I never thought I’d do. I lobbied that we retire my pet personal systems sites from the eBusiness Index and replace them with three reseller Web properties including CDW.com, Insight.com, and Newegg.com.

Surprisingly, once I’d stated my case and backed it up with plenty of facts, this suggestion met with less opposition than you might think. Even Marty agreed that the only interesting PC company left is Apple, but that its declining market share and Lenovo’s relatively small industry footprint make these companies—and their Websites—tenuous candidates for continued inclusion on the Index.

Thus, after some debate about each of the proposed reseller/channel site’s merits & drawbacks, and each vendor’s industry standing, we came to a group decision. This time we decided to add the Reseller/Channel industry to the eBusiness Index roster—and to kill the personal systems segment from the list.

As a result, beginning the first quarter 2008, we’ll be evaluating CDW.com, Insight.com, and Newegg.com on a quarterly basis, and factoring these site’s scoring & behaviors into the overall eBusiness Index mix. My gut feeling is that the inclusion of these sites is going to wreak havor on some category-specific rankings, and create some new standards for eBusiness Index sites as a group. Stay tuned…only time will tell if I’m right…