Home   Internet Marketing                                        Ward Hanson   Stanford GSB

Information Value - Session 6

Learning Objectives

VVAs and Business Models

Customer support & VVAs

Usability

 

 

 

 
 
Readings & Tasks
J. Nielsen 
Varian & Shapiro: Versioning
Sweiger
Chi
Hanson for background

Example Sites:

ASP Web Support Awards  for 2002

Compare to ASP Web Support Awards  for 2000

Bots in Action

Can Virtual Agents Save the Day.  An interesting collection of resources at CNET.  

Usability

 

Newstand & Airwaves
__/ 02-02\__
 The New Teamwork  the power of ecollaboration. Business Week. 
__/ 08-31-00\__
 Reboot:  Place your bets.  Some of the difficulties of using online support. The Standard 
__/ 01-22-01\__ Travel Sites Emulating Merchants, Redesigned Expedia and others are merging humans and software.,  NY Times 

 

 

 Learning how to best match technology and customer needs is the essential puzzle of online customer support.  After that, a marketer must decide how that gets turned into business advantage.  Will it be cost reduction prompting higher margins or possibly higher quality prompting expanded demand?  More generally, how do we turn information into more valuable information?
 
Web Costs:  The Net B2B site has tracked the cost of many different improvements.  This includes such items as email, online communities, database retrieval, and other features.
 

Combating SARS online:

Adding value to information can move from the convenient to critical when used to fight a deadly epidemic.  Researchers have been able to use the Net to collaborate, educate, and diffuse treatments for the SARS virus.  Some of the key sites are:

This near real-time compendium of health resources is proving extremely valuable to doctors, patients, industry, travelers, indeed the entire world.