DailyPost 1938
COMPANY WEBSITES – MODERN, UTILITARIAN OR COSMETIC?
They say that culture never dies, even if everything does. Conversely, if nothing survives, only culture does. The culture speaks of your upbringing and your thought process. The business culture will help you understand how far the businesses will be run, in which manner and of what quality. Will the same culture permeate from top to bottom or the other way round, a system of organic growth from bottom finding its way upwards? Tech business culture should be what modernity has to offer. Digital technologies have brought transparency to the world, but has it made any impact on Indian tech market leaders. With creativity and innovation, the prime movers of the day, are these capabilities just a matter of logos, taglines, sales pitches, interviews and fire side chats.
The website is the ultimate digital platform showcasing businesses; its capabilities, display pricing, communicating, guiding and transacting. The ultimate transparency everyone boasts of can be very well reflected in expertise, tools, execution, delivery and pricing through the tool called website. The website remains under the dynamic control of the company and they have liberty to showcase themselves to the world, which was not available till the advent of this technology. How many of the companies have used it in this manner? Have they even thought of those lines? Have the management even viewed it as a business development and sales tool? Though Amazon has permeated every aspect of our life, their focus on quality and price transparency, and the transparency in tracking has not brushed even our mental horizons.
That the digital experience seamlessly merges into the physical world, is immensely more powerful, compared to best feudal sales strategies, has been proven, done and dusted. If we don’t learn it, it is to our peril. Our websites have beautiful pictures, on a well proven template, the corporate communication content and the website fellow pasting it at the right locations. It is a legal requirement and so should it be. The words are pasted in a manner, just to catch eyeballs, crafted by Tech Shakespeare’s, who keep doing it for one company after another. What the customer needs is not the farthest thought on their mind. What impression will he have of the company, they have no idea? The website has been created for what purpose, or for nor purpose, only those managements would be able to tell us.
It is a digital publicity material with barely any business value and there is hardly any business that gets transacted on it. At the backend you have the battery of business development guys, marketing, pre-sales, sales and what not, navigating the business landscapes in the same feudal manner. They remain as non-committal on every single parameter of everything they sell, that it seems that they doing a favour to the client. With the nature of the website they have, these frontline warriors further aim to make it as complex a black box as they can, while selling it to the customer. With expertise, products, pricing unknown, what can one find on the website? A tech company should first learn how to use the website as a tech and business tool to start with. Rest might follow.
COMPANIES ARE WEBSITES AND WEBSITES ARE COMPANIES.
Sanjay Sahay