Harte-Hanks surveyed 1,000 companies and found that 71% of them want to monitor their web site for problems, but only 34% do. Also, 71% want tools to find the root of problem, but only 21% have them.
The survey was commissioned by Symphoniq, a provider of monitoring tools, who additionally note that more than 3/4 of the time, IT departments find out there’s a web site problem from users calling the help desk.
Y! search blog talks about a new way to access Y! search by SMS. Yeah yeah. But wait, there’s some cool stuff here. First, no dorking around putting your phone in Internet browser mode, just send an SMS to 92466 (YAHOO). Even better: there are shortcuts (e.g. “d” for dictionary definitions) for when you’re deep in discussion with somebody about the usage of the words “indefinable” vs. “undefinable”. And it’s smart enough to reply with dumb text or rich content (e.g. maps) links, depending on your phone.
Frankly just typing “movies 94089” would be enough to meet a common need I seem to have. I pay 10c for sending an SMS message, but $1 or something to call 411. And don’t get me started with mobile web – I’m still on a prehistoric cell phone (which people like to point out any time I use it).
I probably read (OK, scan) a couple dozen press releases every morning, in the industries (or keywords) that are of interest to me. If you’ve done much of that, you tend to get jaded pretty fast, with organizations announcing essentially nothing, or obviously piggybacking on other big names in the hope that they’ll get some coverage. It sometimes works.
But this morning I laughed when I read this lead:
July 6, 2005 — (organization) has taken a step in the right direction (by adding a feature) …
I don’t mean to poke fun – it appears to be a Good Thing for their customers, and may get them more customers. But wow, doesn’t this illustrate how hard it is to write compelling copy? A step in the right direction? I get images of an organization lost in cyberspace.
…get new ones! 
Compliance Pipeline reports on a new Forrester survey:
A whopping 63% of large companies employ or plan to hire people to read or audit sent e-mail — that figure is 70% among the largest companies.
This is just offensive. Check out The GNU Privacy Guard.
ForeSee and FGI Research produced an insightful report called the Top 40 Online Retail Satisfaction Index (pdf is available here). It looked at the top 40 eCommerce sites and used the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) to scientifically measure (1.6 million users) how satisfied each retailer’s customers are. Here are the top dozen:
| Website | Score |
|---|---|
| Netflix.com | 85 |
| Amazon.com | 84 |
| QVC.com | 84 |
| Newegg.com | 82 |
| LLBean.com | 82 |
| OldNavy.com | 81 |
| TigerDirect.com | 81 |
| Apple.com | 80 |
| Avon.com | 80 |
| BN.com | 80 |
| Williams-Sonoma.com | 80 |
| HarryandDavid.com | 80 |
They had some great takeaways, like
Don’t waste time and money driving people to your website if you haven’t maximized the browser experience.
Netflix and Amazon have both been a couple of those “no brainer” destinations for a while now — known for their customer-friendly site and features, as well as innovative approaches to customer satisfaction. So it’s not surprising to see them at the top of the list.
What might surprise you is that Netflix’ original product manager of customer experience — who’s quite passionate about retailing and user experience, and scientifically proven (!) to be great at it — is available. Interested?
JZ comes back, asks what did I miss?. A good round-up is provided in the comments. (Nice to be an A-lister.)
Dude. You missed the teeth gnashing on TheUnofficialGoogleWeblog:
It is difficult to type this, but increasingly I find myself pushed away by Google’s intrusive attempts at personlization [sic]. At the same time, I am actively courted by Yahoo!’s lightning-quick embrace of current trends and technologies.
For the job seekers: jobster notes that HotJobs search results now contain Job Results From The Web. Sponsored listings get top billing, but check out all the new listings that have been found from hither and yon (do people still say that?). Nice to be able to go to one place rather than poke through every employer’s web site…
According to Gartner’s June 23 press release discussing their phishing report:
Approximately 77 percent of online Americans shopped online in the 12 months ended in May 2005, according to Gartner. An estimated 73 percent of respondents regularly logged on to banking accounts and 63 percent paid bills online.
Amazing stats, eh? Much higher than I’d have thought. I’ll assume that “online Americans” really means “online American adults” as I can’t imagine 73% of 10-year olds checking their banking accounts. Then again, kids are pretty up on things…
According to this NYT article,
Visitors to nytimes.com via R.S.S. feeds has soared from about 500,000 a month at the end of 2003, to 7.3 million last April, said Toby Usnik, the New York Times Company’s director of public relations.
Note it’s the PR director. All companies should make company news available via 
— clearly there’s a market for it. With the next version of Windows supporting RSS and Atom natively, even the technology laggards will have reading capabilities. This popularity is one of the reasons so many firms are trying to capitalize on RSS and Atom (with ads in feeds, etc.).
It’s a shame companies like Apple and Microsoft say “RSS” when they mean “RSS and Atom” but nobody has really come together on a decent name, so one is better than two (or three, if you count 
). And for dawg’s sake, get rid of the ugly orange 
buttons. I think the Firefox ‘feed available’ button 
has promise, except for the color. Maybe something like iTunes 4.9 new 
podcast button (but obviously not a microphone).
My name and color gripes aside (I guess I need my coffee fix), I’m surprised we haven’t seen more web analytics vendors announcing RSS features (analyzing the feeds, or making the results available via RSS), like we did when we saw everyone pile on other trends like Linux and mobile devices.
All the branding buttons — sheesh.
