The Plight of Online Opacity

How having a tight-lipped company website could be suffocating your business

At this point, finding relevant information on a company’s website shouldn’t be difficult. But for one reason or another, companies in certain industry remain unnecessarily silent when it comes to important company attributes. Take for example this user’s comment about Tesla’s new website (from January 2015):

I think the new website is attractive, but some aspects are a little hard to navigate to. Take this forum for example. You can get here directly [via a specific URL], but most folks won’t know that URL. They will need to go to the bottom of some pages—not all pages—and click on the Forums label.

~buickguy

Here’s another one about ITAC Sentinel:

I tried to call their customer service to ask a simple question. They put [me] through a whole series of “offers” and then I got a message saying the toll-free number for my area had been changed. When I tried to call that number, busy forever! Their website has no email contact available, only snail mail. All so unprofessional!

~Nancy

And the list goes on. . . .

This is a problem our researchers at BestCompany.com run into all the time. How can you get a whole picture of a given company, when its website is not a reliable source of information? Now, I get that complete online transparency is not always in a company’s best interest; companies don’t want to give away too much of their secret sauce. But customers are entitled to know what doing business with your company will actually be like.

An opaque website poses more disadvantages to your business than advantages: customers may think you have something to hide, or competitors may gain the edge when they tell customers what they want to know.

It’s one thing to say that all corporate website should be more transparent, but how transparent? Answering this question depends on the legal requirements of your industry (e.g., credit repair companies are not allowed to make guarantees of improved credit—and must say so on their websites). Here are a few ways to tell if your company’s website is suffering from online opacity:

The Information Is Buried.

Too many sites suffer from poor navigation and design: the homepage contains only sparse information; the homepage contains way too much information; there’s no visual hierarchy, or clear connection on how one page relates to another. At any rate, creating a clear path for visitors to your website to find exactly what information they’re looking for is critical to your online success. As Steve Krug, author of Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited, points out, “if the navigation is doing its job, it tells you implicitly where to begin and what your options are. Done correctly, it should be all the instructions you need.”

People visiting your company’s website come with certain expectations as to the information they hope to find—how to subscribe, sign in, or sign up, who to call or email, what your policies are, how to connect on social media, or how much your products/services cost (that’s a big one). If visitors cannot determine how to find this information at a glance, you may be losing business and not even know it.

The Usability Test

There’s a effective and fairly inexpensive way to know whether your company’s website is intuitive (or “self-evident,” as Krug puts it), and that’s to conduct a guided usability test. Simply put, a usability test will help you understand how an outside might view or interact with your site, and involves four key components:

• The User: or preferably, multiple users who represent your target audience—if you don’t have the budget to determine what your target audience actually consists of, lower your recruiting standards, and test frequently.
• Incentive: make it worth the users’ time by providing some kind of incentive (e.g., an Amazon gift card, free pizza, etc.). You’re much more likely to attract qualified users when they know they’re getting something out of it.
• A Task List: compile a number of tasks you’d like the user to complete on your site. This can be a written list, but the test will be much more effective if you have someone there guiding the user.
• A Way to Document: crucial to the usability test is a way to document the user’s journey through your site, and having some way to record the experience will help you later on. As an aside, be sure to have the users think aloud so that you can be clued in to their thought process.

The Information Is Not There.

Perhaps information on your website isn’t so much hard to find as it is nonexistent. Omitting key information from your company’s website is fueled by one of two basic reasons: you’re either hiding something really good, or you’re hiding something really bad.

Hiding Something Really Good

By “something good,” I don’t mean fantastic prices or features; rather, hiding something good is more a matter of competitive advantage than anything else, recognizing that your competition is just as interested in what’s on your website as potential customers.

However, omitting this kind of information from your website should not come at the expense of being straight with your customers. For example, LifeLock is one of the leading identity protection services in the world, and for good reason; however, specifics as to how the company detects, handles, and responds to identity threats is kept under lock and key. This process is LifeLock’s secret sauce, but rather than completely shutting people out, the company released a video containing all of the details that customers really care about:

Transparency doesn’t mean giving away your intellectual property or giving your competitors an unfair advantage; however, when it comes to the details that customers want or need to know, make sure you’re providing honest communication.

Hiding Something Really Bad

It’s rare that companies have a great deal of really good somethings to hide from their online visitors; what’s more common is when companies choose to omit facts that they’re not exactly proud of—hidden fees, high prices, the fact that your customer service is actually a call center in Southern Bangalore.

Granted, the incentives for being forthcoming about these less attractive attributes of your company are not immediately clear, especially if your company is already struggling as it is. But according to an article from Entrepreneur.com, “withholding or cleverly reshaping information is no longer a viable option for this new era of consumers who are savvier than any generation before them and for whom skepticism seems to be a default setting.”

Indeed, being more transparent about the good, the bad, and the ugly parts of your business not only builds trust, but it also presents an opportunity for your business to learn what customers really want—and improve!! If you stop viewing customers and online visitors as just a credit card or open wallet, at start treating them like a valuable resource for improvement, you’ll soon find that you have fewer bad somethings to hide.

Or Worse, the Information Is False.

The only thing that’s worse than no information is wrong information—intentionally or otherwise. Incorrect information could easily mean “manipulated” as it does “outdated.” In either case, if information on your site is inconsistent or misleading in any way, your competitors will swiftly point it out, and your customers will jump ship.

User Reviews

Earlier this year, news broke that the online retail giant Amazon.com discovered a slurry of fake product reviews littering its profile pages. Is was a major PR blunder for the company, as product reviews from “real” users play a significant role in the average consumer’s buying behavior.

The decision as to whether you should use fake or unverifiable user reviews on your site should be a no-brainer. (The answer is no, btw.) People who are conducting their own online research are far too smart for that, and it makes your company look really bad. Similarly—and this is something almost every company (reputable or otherwise) does—only posting positive user reviews can have a similar effect.

But it’s not enough just to post negative (but accurate) reviews about your company on your own site; it’s just as, if not more important to post your responses to the concerns and complaints posed in those reviews. This is a goodwill tactic that Domino’s Pizza has been using with great success for the past few years:

Publishing accurate customer reviews (both positive and negative) will help subsequent visitors to your site gain a better understanding of your company and develop realistic expectations. Furthermore, responding to the negative user reviews in a professional and helpful manner not only increases goodwill among both affected and potential customers, but will also improve how you do business in the future.

Increasing your business’s online transparency is a calculated risk, to be sure, but will pay dividends in cheap or free consumer research and more honest business practices in the future. And take it from me, as someone who regularly reviews and ranks businesses based in part on their online transparency, I can tell you that the honest ones are almost always the most successful in their respective fields.