COMPUTER direct marketer Insight has been through a lot of changes over the past few years. Now those changes are coming together at its Web site (www.insight.com).
The Tempe, AZ-based company has been switching its focus from the consumer market to business-to-business customers. It’s also trying to squeeze as much as it can out of the Internet to cut down on the need for sales and customer service people, including telephone service representatives (TSRs).
Insight started up in 1988 and four years later its sales were still about two-thirds consumer, one-third B-to-B. It has gradually been shifting to the point that 91% of net sales are now B-to-B (including education and government). Insight is especially aiming at small to medium-sized companies. It offers 50,000 products; last year’s sales were $703.7 million.
Insight’s Web site launched in March 1995 and was designed strictly for consumers. Eventually it divided into channels for consumers, B-to-B, government and education. Because of all the B-to-B activity the company began to rethink the site about a year ago.
In 1996, Insight began to turn away from print advertising and catalogs (its mailing universe has shrunk) to embrace outbound telesales. It now has fewer than 100 inbound TSRs but more than 600 outbound TSRs. The Internet comes into play here because business is driven to the site through outbound calling. (Another way the Internet comes into play: Insight is the new sponsor of football’s Copper Bowl, renamed the Insight.com Bowl.)
The company is now getting ready to relaunch its site targeting B-to-B customers, though consumer, government and educational customers are certainly welcome.
Insight’s Internet creative director F.C. Brigham admits maintaining the four channels-essentially four Web sites-was a burden and the consumer focus downplayed the importance of B-to-B by burying some of those features.
One feature that will be more prominent under the redesign is an area on the site allowing customers to save quoted prices for particular products in their shopping cart for a limited time while they decide if they want to make a purchase. (If the price goes down the customer can still get the item at the lower price without having to get another purchase order.)
Another feature is the volume purchasing agreement, which allows companies that buy for branch offices worldwide to keep track of orders.
In July Insight announced Insight Broadcast, an area that offers archived news from business sources through links to Broadcast.com. The new area includes keynote speeches by industry experts like Bill Gates of Microsoft and Lewis Platt of Hewlett-Packard, in addition to more standard fare such as earnings announcements from computer companies. Insight is working with Broadcast.com (formerly AudioNet.com) to target the content to customers.
Insight is also trying to develop an instant messaging system for clients to have immediate answers from account executives. But according to Brigham it’s had some snags.
“We’ve been beta testing instant messaging,” he says. “The functionality isn’t entirely there yet.”
Ideally, the customer could send in a message, leave the site and still get an answer over the Internet, he says. But the drawbacks are more fundamentally customer service based: The program would require people to cover the system full time and have the ability to predict where the customer should be sent-for example, to an account executive or customer service.
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