Creating Transactional Websites

Introduction

Most organisations have a website that allows one way communication with its visitors. Many corporate and public sector websites have also incorporated the ability for visitors to interact with the organisation via simple email forms such as “feedback” or “contact us”.

The challenge now facing forward thinking organisations is to realise the huge cost savings and enormous improvements in customer satisfaction from creating transactional websites.

What is a transactional website ?

A transactional website is a website that automates many of the routine interactions that an organisation has with its customers and business partners.

This enables customers to conduct business with an organisation at a time convenient to them without having to waste time in a telephone hold queue or be re-directed between numerous departments.

Creating a transactional website may require significant investment by an organisation, however once the require software is in place the automated customer service operation becomes immensely scalable compared to human staffed departments.

The cost of a typical transaction can be reduced from say £2 for a typical simple customer telephone order to fractions of a penny for the same order automatically handled online. For a large customer service department the potential savings can be very significant.

Automating routine enquiries is not just about saving money. Customer service staff are able to concentrate on more important tasks such as looking after higher value customers or converting “hostile” customers into friendly ones. Freeing up staff from dealing with the same boring, routine enquiries motivates staff and enables your organisation to attract and retain a higher calibre of customer service personnel.

Getting started with transactional websites

A properly designed transactional website can take a double leap forward into the future.

Not only can customers use your website to make their interactions with your organisation easier but they can also automate their own computer systems to interact directly and securely with your systems.

This is the idea behind the concept of “XML web services”. An XML web service is much like a normal web page containing a "form". The difference is that the XML web service is optimised to be readable by another computer.

With the advent of Microsoft .NET, the creation and consumption of web services is so easy for software developers that we are experiencing an explosion of inter-organisation integrated systems based on XML web services.

Supporting Human and Automated Transactions

The diagram below shows a simplified architecture for a transactional website that supports both human and automated computer transactions.

A simplfied transactional CMS website

This architecture has the following features:

The content management system combines product information and customer self-service applications to create a seamless high quality customer experience.

Customers are able to easily and conveniently initiate and monitor interactions with your organisation.

Long term customers or business partners are able to totally automate common interactions between your organisations.

Customer service staff are able to easily and rapidly update the product information in response to experiences dealing with customers.

All of the business logic (ie who can do what and how) is contained within the business objects layer. This means that web applications (user interfaces) share the same back-end code as the XML web services. This significantly reduces the cost of developing and maintaining such systems.

In many cases the web applications will talk to the web services layer rather than directly to the business objects layer. This can be a significant advantage when optimising your application for very high traffic loads.

Why Immediacy and Microsoft .NET ?

Immediacy Content Management System and Microsoft .NET have both been designed for creating high traffic transactional websites.

Immediacy leverages the enormous potential of .NET for systems integration and enterprise class, scalable web applications and makes website maintenance easy for non-technical staff.

Immediacy CMS makes updating product and marketing information very easy and is flexible enough to allow content authors to create varied and attractive page layouts. Corporate branding is still enforced through the use of templates and style sheets.

Immediacy plugins enable ASP.NET applications to be easily incorporated into CMS pages and configured by content authors or system administrators using friendly graphical interfaces.

For software developers and website designers, Immediacy makes use of all standard technologies so there is very little learning curve to creating an Immediacy site. One of the things developers like about Immediacy is how it doesn't "get in the way" when developing applications.

More Information

For more information about creating transactional websites please contact us.

Author: simon.gardner@immediacy.co.uk 21/02/2007