Technology and exporting
Friday, 2 March 2007
Last Updated: Monday, 13 August 2007
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By Edwin Kuller
“We are a small Australian company planning to launch into export. What makes a great export website?”
Edwin Kuller answers: An export website performs three essential tasks – you need to understand them if you are to make the web work for you.
Task one: Establish your business’s credibility
As an exporter, your website will often be the first point of contact between your company and a prospective customer. Your website must make the visitor feel at ease and reassured that your company is capable, reliable and worth doing business with.
The best way to do this is to provide information describing who you are and what you do. Evidence of capability such as customer case studies and testimonials (including domestic customers) is effective.
Prospective export customers also like to see security and privacy statements on your website. It puts them at ease and encourages them to contact you via email, perhaps leave their email address or complete transactions on your website.
Task two: Make it easy to use
Your website design should make it easy for visitors to find information and complete tasks such as purchasing a product or sending an enquiry. A well-designed website may display product information in the form of a catalogue, list sales support or provide distribution information. It also allows the visitor to place an order or purchase a product.
Users today expect their web experience to be timely and intuitive. The usability of your website is important and will shape user perceptions of your business. A “clunky” shopping cart experience will colour the users’ perception of your company and put your product/service in a negative light.
It is also important to make sure you should have no hidden costs when providing pricing information on your website. Make sure you disclose all information regarding warranty, returns policy and liabilities.
For markets where English is not the main language, you don’t necessarily need to translate your whole website. Consider translating key pages (home page, product/service information, contact details) into the language of the user. Don’t rely on computer translations: accuracy and cultural understanding is critical.
Task three: Encourage users to revisit and reuse your website
A good way to do this is to constantly refresh the information on your website, give fixed period product or service offers, provide free information, and use email newsletters containing your website address to direct users back to the website.
In addition, the area of after-sales service, which is sometimes under-resourced or even overlooked by companies looking to find the next customer or sale, is important. The provision of customer/partner-only pages (using password access) containing technical specifications, product development information, patches and upgrades for software products, and even a forum area for discussion can build loyalty and result in re-buys and referrals.
12 tips for a good exporter website
Does the website:
1. Show organisation details adequately?
2. Use case-studies/testimonials to build credibility?
3. Support other sales channels such as the distributor network?
4. Provide current and frequently updated information?
5. Provide information in different languages? Should it?
6. Provide an email newsletter function?
7. Encourage the user to provide their email address for follow up?
8. Have a site-map?
9. Have a privacy policy?
10. Have a security policy?
11. Provide free information such as downloads to encourage revisits?
12. Support your business by being user-friendly?
Edwin Kuller is Austrade's e-business Adviser, providing strategic and operational advice to companies who wish to enhance their e-business effectiveness in export markets. He works closely with Austrade industry specialists to promote e-business as an enabler to generating international business benefit.
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By Brad Howarth
Everybody’s talking about Skype. How can it help you save money?
A broadband internet connection and the telephone are two must-have items for business today, forming the essential links between offices and the outside world. But now it is possible to use one to significantly reduce the cost of the other.
Skype is a free software tool developed by the European company of the same name, which enables users to make free phone calls using just their personal computer and an attached speaker and microphone.
The software digitises the speaker’s voice and transmits it as a digital signal via the user’s broadband connection, utilising the free backbone of the internet to carry the call potentially from one side of the world to the other. It’s called voice over internet protocol, or VoIP.
Once the user has downloaded the Skype software, they can begin to add in the names of other Skype users (often by using the software to find them), and begin making free calls. The status of each user, such as whether they are available, away or busy, is also displayed next to their name in the application. Users can also use the Skype software to exchange documents and send simple text messages through the software.
Skype can also make calls to the regular telephony network in several countries through a feature called Skype-Out. Users buy Skype credit that can then be spent on overseas calls. Because the calls are carried across the internet, the caller only pays the local call cost for terminating that call in the foreign country, skipping the long distance charges.
Another service, Skype-In, allows businesses to buy phone numbers in foreign countries, and have those calls routed across the internet to their regular phone. Hence a small business can have a local phone number for customers in a foreign country, where those customers only pay for a local call.
Skype’s Asia Pacific vice president, Scott Bagby, says initial interest in Skype came from consumers, but says that today about 30% of registered active users are business customers.
Not surprisingly, Skype has proven extremely popular for companies with multiple offices, and particularly with export businesses that are regularly dealing with colleagues and customers overseas. At the end of 2006, Skype had 171 million users, well up from the 44 million users when the company was acquired by the internet retailer eBay in September 2005.
Initially many users came from the technology industry; they are generally early adopters of new technologies. More recently the customer mix has spread.
“The reason they get into it is cost savings,” says Bagby. “Most don’t even know the full functionality of Skype until they have sat down and played with it for a while.”
Bagby says he knows of one company in Hong Kong that reduced its total telephony bill by 70% as a result of switching to Skype. Another client in the UK is planning to get rid off all but a handful of its office phones and replace them with Skype.
Recently Skype released new features to help small and medium-sized businesses better manage the way they use Skype, allowing a central manager to administer the software for multiple users. These include centralised administration of Skype accounts, and the ability to turn off features that are not wanted by the business.
“While cost drives people to Skype, the overall satisfaction tends to do with all our other products, rather than just saving money,” Bagby says.
Various companies have also developed software to make Skype more functional for businesses.
Melbourne-based Skylook, for example, has created software that links Skype to Microsoft’s Outlook e-mail and contact management application. The Skylook software enables users to make Skype calls directly from Outlook, but includes other features that allow callers to automatically record their conversations or send SMS messages to mobile phones. The Skylook software is available for sale from within the Skype Extras menu in the application software itself.
The developer of Skylook, Jeremy Hague, says he is witnessing steady customer growth. “Obviously there is a cost benefit with Skype, but now there are all these other things, like file transfer,” he says. “I think a lot of business still don’t know about Skype, but that’s changing.”
Interestingly, Skype does almost no traditional marketing or advertising, but relies on the network effect of one Skype user wanting to convert friends and colleagues to cut their call costs.
Another feature within Skype that is proving increasingly popular is video-calling. Any user that is equipped with a web-cam and a broadband connection can use the software to video-call any similarly equipped Skype user, effectively providing a free video-conferencing system for broadband users. As many as 20% of all Skype calls made now feature video.
Although Bagby says it is possible to make calls on Skype over a dial-up connection, the best results are achieved with broadband. He says Skype is constantly working to improve the call quality, and regularly surveys users for their opinions. Broadband is essential however for video-calling.
One Australian business to have embraced Skype whole-heartedly is ACI Global, a provider of competency-based training services. This service goes beyond regular written or oral examinations to observe a trainee’s behaviour and hence determine their competency at a task.
ACI Global’s managing director, Ian Erksine, says that by using Skype as a video-conferencing tool, his company can test any person anywhere in the world, provided they have access to a laptop computer and webcam, and the necessary bandwidth speed.
“It’s a very important part of our business, and it is something that is going to enable us to go out to the world and promote a training service that is very cost-effective, practical and what industry wants,” Erksine says. “This will put us way ahead of other players because of being able to embrace cost-effective and practical technology to do what others have been attempting to do, but at a fraction of the cost and more realistically.”
Skype will work with any standard web cam, and a range of telephone hardware is also available that works with Skype, including telephone handsets that allow users to make calls either through Skype or their regular landline. Skype-compatible telephone handsets are now available from companies including Netgear, Motorola and Plantronics.
Skype is by no means the only option for business users seeking cheaper, internet-based telephony solutions. Competitors include Engin, which for $9.95 a month lets customers make un-timed long distance calls within Australia for just 10¢. Primus Telecom also plans to release a packaged VoIP service in the second half of this year that will be suitable for smaller businesses.
In March Optus announced that it would launch a new VoIP product for small and medium-sized businesses in the second half of this year, to be called Optus inPhone Premier, although no details have yet been released.
Interestingly, in March the mobile carrier Hutchison announced that it would provide up to 4000 minutes of free Skype calls over its third-generation mobile data network, 3, for subscribers to its new X-series data subscription service.
Consumers who sign up for the new service receive a handset with the Skype software preloaded, and can then add their contact list and use the device for Skype calling as they would their PC.
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