Primus Web Site Design

Primus Web Site Design

The goals of the Primus Web site are to retain existing customers, draw new ones and lower Primus' customer support costs. To meet these goals the Web site is being designed around a multi-point value package, described below.

Value Package

The components of the value offering are:

1) Stress-free experience for site visitors and customers

2) Professional quality research

3) Readily available quotes, available via a variety of media

4) Tools to allow customers to manage their portfolios

5) Customized advisory services

6) Online investment "workshop" experiences

Service Selection Process

During the previous three quarters Primus selected service offerings based on available budget, one-time and recurring costs, and labor costs. Most importantly, we tried to select services that we thought would offer the best value to existing and prospective clients, bringing them to the site to transact business. The following table shows the services we chose and some of the reasons behind our selections.

Q1

Ticker

(NYSE 1-minute delay) Helps customers keep up with the current state of the market. May update to Quote.com at a later date, but Q1 budget would not support the move at this time.

News/Views

(Outsourced) Financial research resource for customers. Outsourcing chosen because recurring costs were lower, and providing this service with in-house resources would not significantly improve the quality of the service.

Portfolio Tracker Serious investors need tools to help manage their portfolios. This feature was required to make the Primus site competitive.

Co-Hosting This was more expensive than shared hosting. It was chosen anyway because security and availability are critical for a financial-services site.

Q2

Stock Alerts These were added based on extensive customer demand. Customers want these services and tend to trade first with the service provider.

Price Incentives

(Volume Discounts) Volume discounts encourage more trading and trading in larger blocks. They also bring in new customers.

Discussion Board

(Moderated) The discussion board gives users a sense of community. By moderating the discussions, Primus maintains visibility, is able gather marketing data, and is able to influence the quality of discussions.

Q3

Email Advice

(Paid) This is another customer research service. Making this a paid service helps cover the costs of providing it. It improves the quality of the dialog between the advisor and the customer, and more often leads to transactions than free advice.

Live Chat

(Weekly) This is another way to provide access to expert services. Weekly chat was chosen over daily chat because of budget constraints.

Webcasts This is relatively new. Not many Web sites offer it yet because of bandwidth constraints. It was chosen to draw more customers to the Web site and to help differentiate the Primus service package.

Table 1

Human Resources Investment

No services were selected or rejected based on labor costs, however careful consideration was given to whether to build needed professional talent in-house or to instead outsource.

The services Primus decided to offer are listed in Table 2 with the labor resources required to support them. Consideration was made as to whether to hire in-house or to outsource based on opportunities for shared costs and frequency of use. No labor costs were associated with the offer of Price Incentives.

System Administrator

(in-house) Maintenance Programmer

(in-house) Webmaster

(in-house) Editor

(outsource) Graphic Designer

(outsource)

Ticker x x x

News/Views x x x x x

Portfolio Tracker x x x

Co-Hosting x

Stock Alerts x x x

Price Incentives - - - - -

Discussion Board x x x

Email Advice x x x x

Live Chat x x x

Webcasts x x x

Table 2

The System Administrator, Maintenance Programmer and Webmaster were required for just about every service. Since these professionals were tightly tied to the day-to-day operations of the Web site and their costs could be shared across the entire spectrum of services, they were hired as in-house employees.

The Editor is responsible only to format the news-feeds and advice scripts. This was not a full-time job and did not require intimate knowledge of the Primus operations, so the Editing function was outsourced. The Graphic Designer was only required for periodic page-design tasks, so this function was also outsourced.

Custom Advice through E-Mail

We expected free advice to draw more customers to the Web site. Based on the assumption that increased traffic would lead to higher transaction-volume, we expected free advice to generate more revenue than paid advice. We were partly right. The hits/sticks statistics were better for free advice, but the revenues and profitability were not. The lack of profitability was not especially surprising.