In 2001, SPSS acquired NetGenesis of Cambridge, Mass., with the intention of weaving NetGenesis’ Web analytics software into SPSS’s customer relationship management software. The thinking was that companies will want to track all customers, whether they arrive by foot, phone or the Web.
“What we’d really like to be able to do is combine our key clickstream data with our overall customer data warehouse,” says Carson, whose company has about $495 million in annual sales split evenly between phone and Web orders. However, 1-800-FLOWERS would need to get customer adapters built to make that happen, rather than buy software from NetGenesis or other vendors.
1-800-FLOWERS used NetGenesis software to test two versions of a calendar on its Web site. One featured a standard pull-down box for a delivery date, the other used a more advanced visual calendar that displayed the earliest date that an order could be delivered.
“The (visual) calendar won hands down,” says Carson. By letting customers see early on whether a delivery would arrive in time, the site dramatically reduced the number of abandoned shopping carts. “That’s the kind of thing we want the software to tell us.”
Larry Gentry, an executive at Countrywide Home Loans, thinks it should be easier to integrate Web data with other corporate data. The company did about $13.6 billion in loan funding last year, with almost $5.9 billion coming from e-commerce channels. “Our business channels want to compare branch statistics against online statistics,” he says. “They want to know, for example, how many people walked into a branch and walked out with a loan versus online visitors. Doing that today requires proprietary connections. It’s not as easy as it should be.”
