Dear Final Debug: I know this is a bit more business-related than most of your questions, but no one at my company knows the answer. We have a Web site that is wasting all our time, not because of any technical issues, but because of the many customer calls and queries we receive regarding our site. Any suggestions?-Steve Marshall, Chicago.
Final Debug Responds: Steve, we know of one company that used its Web site to solve just such a problem. For Cambridge Soundworks, the Net has done something marvelous: it’s helped the company get rid of its worst customers.
The Needham, Mass. firm, founded in 1988 by longtime audiophile guru Henry Kloss, recently bought out by Creative Labs, sells high-end audio equipment.
“We’re high end in quality, but we have a hard time being as expensive as we could be,” says Thomas Hannaher, senior vice president of marketing for the company. “We had a Saudi prince as a client. He wanted the absolute biggest, best home-theater system possible. Price was no obstacle. We couldn’t top $40,000, including all the components and the speakers, and we had to try hard to get that high. I know of other companies that sell speaker systems alone for $65,000. We can’t get you to spend that much, even if we try.”
However, it’s not members of royal families who scour the Net for best buys on audio products. Cambridge Soundworks uses its mail-order business, 26 retail stores and factory warehouse to move its own line of speakers, but it also sells name-brand components as a convenience for customers, providing one-stop shopping for all audio or home-theater items. Because speakers are the company’s primary business, as opposed to other-brand components, Cambridge Soundworks’ prices are not competitive with chain stores or discount houses like The Wiz. (In the other direction, the company’s distribution deal with Creative Labs, signed before the acquisition, will put Cambridge Soundworks’ multimedia speakers in as many as 50,000 stores, alongside traditional, heavily discounted competition.)
“The people who are looking for deals on name-brand components represent the bad end of our business: the least profitable, the most problematic,” says Hannaher. “There’s a certain shopper out there who’s buying brands like Sony, Panasonic, Pioneer, brands that anyone can sell. These people are very price sensitive and check everywhere before they buy.” These customers used to call the company, ask for prices and try to wheel a deal.
“Now people can go to the Web, see our prices, and that’s that. Having this available on the Web means less of our time is wasted on these calls. Even at the higher end of our business, the Web data is helpful because people are that much better informed when they call to order.”
All this comes after what Hannaher characterizes as a minimal investment in the company’s Web site. “Because we spend so little on our site, we’ve been profitable on the Web for years. Of course, we need to be more aggressive on the Web now.” Toward that end, the company has begun using AT&T’s SecureBuy commerce system to facilitate transactions-and, it hopes, more of the good kind of customers.
Contest Answer
This time, we’re giving a copy of O’Reilly and Associates’ Webmaster in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference to Jules Medina, who answered this question:
Microsoft’s new XML parser does something differently on Netscape browsers than it does on Microsoft browsers. What does it do?
Here’s his answer: The XML language recently changed to become case-sensitive. This is clearly a breaking change from the 1.0 version of the parser and is enabled by default, but for backwards compatibility the object model provides a switch to set the parser back to case-insensitive, as follows:
Document d = new Document();
d.setCaseInsensitive(true);
d.load(“http://www.foo.com/example.xml”);
Come back next week for a new contest.
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