|
Brief
BT Business operates in an aggressive marketplace. As a supplier of broadband and other commercial communications solutions, they struggle with differentiating their service offering from that of consumer products. This is particularly hard in terms of reaching small businesses – one-man bands, home-based companies – the 99% of UK businesses that count as small-to-medium-sized enterprises (SME’s).
In an effort to get closer to SMEs, BT created Tradespace in 2007. BT Tradespace was a small business directory augmented with an online community – a digital space that allowed any small business to set up their own website. Tradespace allowed BT to get closer to their SME customers, to learn more about how they can be supported in their daily lives, and find out what services they think would benefit their businesses. It gave BT a toe-hold into that customer space and a glimpse of what could be possible.
It was quickly apparent however that the directory model was limitative. SMEs wanted more than a simple listing; they wanted the tools to really grow their business online, to make it worth their while. BT wanted the opportunity to engage deeply with SMEs, they wanted to have more interaction points at their disposal.
BT gave LBi the mission to re-think the proposition, to re-invent and build a new BT Tradespace. The new platform needed to be an important new online channel for SMEs by providing them with the right tools to truly engage and transact with their audience. In return, BT wanted the opportunity to get the conversation going again with real reasons to re-engage with its base and attract new users.
The new BT Tradespace needed to overcome a lot of issues related to unstable platforms and scattered directories. It needed to be a lot simpler to use, and safe for consumers. It needed to allow business owners to focus on what they do best: running their business.
Strategy
The strategy was to build a social commerce platform based on the core assumption that your online network and your reputation will help you transact more on the web. Every new tool would allow SMEs to promote, connect, network, and trade – and help their customers find their products and services.
In a BT Business sense, BT Tradespace is a way of reaching and cultivating a relationship with smaller businesses. The new BT Tradespace concept rested on three pillars: the creation of a social community space, the provision of good and free advice, and the provision of a simple way of building websites.
About 50 per cent of SME’s in the UK have a website. The other half doesn’t. So why is it that these companies don’t offer their products and services online? Because they worry about the cost of getting set up on the Internet. Because they don’t really know what should go on the website. Because they don’t think going online would make a difference to the bottom line.
But it really does, and BT Tradespace is a simple and free way of making it possible for these businesses to get a web presence, while starting to educate their customer base, reach out to new markets, learn about other people’s businesses, meet other business owners, and ultimately find new customers.
By offering all of these in one service, they hoped to engage in long-term conversations
with their customers, while attaching new products and services to the platform.
A Facebook for small businesses
BT Tradespace is a Facebook for small businesses. A unique social e-commerce platform, bringing together customers and small businesses in a community environment to network and trade. To develop the previous analogy, think Facebook meets LinkedIn, with the additional ingredient of e-commerce. By creating BT Tradespace, the online world immediately becomes an accessible and highly effective channel for the small business.
The target audience is entrepreneurs that perhaps feel they might be too small for BT to have an interest in them. Whilst there is an e-commerce element, a significant number of service businesses is engaged in the community.
The vision is to build the best platform for the people running these businesses to meet, communicate and trade with customers and other small-and-medium-sized companies. A digital market space that allows for anyone to set up their own website in a few minutes, and that brings free support for the thousands of small businesses around the UK who need
an online presence without the hassle. BT Tradespace allows them to buy, sell, and
connect, and helps their customers find their products and services, while engaging with
an active community.
Execution
Creatively, the challenge was to build an online community of businesses and customers who
like to buy from and sell to people they know and trust. This is a way for BT to reach out to
small-and-medium-sized businesses with a big need for an online presence and very little
time and money to use on websites. If you run a light haulage company in Essex together with your husband, sharing your office with your two daughters, eight cats and a Rottweiler, the last thing you want to have to deal with is your online presence. You just want a website in a box.
If you’re in Lancashire, and you sell children’s clothes made from organic cotton, you don’t want to go through the hassle of hiring a web designer to set up a website for you. You just want people to be able to find you online and buy your organic toddler clothing and your unique baby gifts.
And if you run a company selling stylish radiators at competitive prices, you don’t want to waste time and money in meetings with web shop developers. You’ve got ten employees, and you need to sell feature radiators to be able to keep them on. You just want a simple and effective way of making sure hundreds of happy customers find you online and then travel from far and wide to buy your antique-style heaters.
BT Tradespace is an online community that takes care of all of this.
From a process point of view, the project was approached using an innovative Agile methodology (Scrum) that eschews traditional project methods of heavy technical documentation, engaging the team in a process of telling ‘stories’ about how functionality should be represented to users. Customer engagement was part of the production from the outset of the planning process. This platform was defined by it’s users to the very last detail.
Key site members (advocates) formed a consultative board, which defined how the service and functionality should evolve. This was further extended to wider audience groups from BT Tradespace, which were invited to view and test the website throughout development.
The massive migration
There were major challenges to overcome in migrating the existing users of the platform,
due to fragmented and inconsistent data. This meant a huge amount of work spent creating
a single, consistent set of data with which to populate the new website. LBi migrated
more than 250,000 business profiles to the new platform.
Equally, this was balanced with the introduction of new features and removal/modification of old ones. This involved not only an extensive data management programme, but also a huge customer relationship management (CRM) initiative to educate the base and encourage them to engage with the new platform. A carefully selected set of key performance indicators
(KPI’s) was implemented, and is used as a reinforcement mechanism to continually measure BT Tradespace’s success.
Extending the themes of inclusion of the community members in the development of the site, we sought to engage the community in the same way with the launch CRM programme and communications.
Traffic is driven through natural search (optimisation of search on the website), pay-per-click search, and through affiliates.
The new BT Tradespace overcomes a lot of issues related to unstable platforms and
scattered directories, delivering a service that embraces the main advantages of open source
software. Connecting to several in-house BT teams, as well as more than 23 third-party
solutions, and with a BT-hired product owner being constantly based in the LBi offices, the
project is an exercise in team blending, and testament to the strength both of the Scrum
methodology in general, and to the efforts of the blended project team. In designing BT
Tradespace, the project itself relied on creating its own community, connecting BT’s business
with a huge online network of partners and developers.
Results
An amazing outcome – the project was delivered on budget. The user research, user experience, and design and build – plus the CRM programme. This was for an 11-month design-and-build process.
The Tradespace community now numbers more than 350,000 businesses, representing
probably the largest online community for SME’s in the UK. This deserves to be recognised
as a significant and innovative achievement in the online community space.
BT Tradespace businesses can now add keywords to their profile, enriching their
profile’s facets for natural search, and directly resulting in almost three times more traffic by
volume than before. Is this traffic of quality? Businesses that added video saw 59% of their
prospective customers stay five minutes or longer on their profile compared to 15% on
the old platform. The majority of the top 50 BT Tradespace profiles now have at least two
different content types. Newly engaged users, businesses, and consumers are joining the
new platform at a vastly improved pace. The inclusion of profiling questions in the sign-up journey has contributed to an increase in weekly revenue of 24 per cent since launch
versus the three-month period prior to launch.
The new community platform has also led to BT successfully extending its reach as a
brand – more than 40 per cent of registered businesses are entirely new to BT. Thus, BT
Tradespace acts as a fantastic tool for finding new customers and developing relationships
with them.
Three months into the process, it is really too early to report on the return on investment. The overall ROI on Tradespace will be measured over a 12 to 24-month period, given that this has been such a significant and large-scale re-platform project. However, the following statistics give an indication of the website’s success to date:
The business model is to use BT Tradespace as a means of reaching customers who would
either traditionally not associate themselves with BT for whatever reason, or would instead
choose their Consumer products rather than picking out BT’s more premium priced
Business services for broadband, and so forth. Our research showed that over 40 per cent
of customers who register with Tradespace are in fact non-BT customers. Therefore, BT
Tradespace acts as a significant driver for new business.
Main revenue streams come in from Premium services and attachment of BT Business’s
products, such as calling packages, hosting, websites, and, in particular, broadband. In
terms of revenue, the weekly turnover for BT Tradespace has increased from a three-month
pre-launch to post-launch increase of 26 per cent. Projecting similar growth into the future, we expect that the platform will have paid for itself just before reaching six months of age. There has been no other incremental spend on marketing to achieve this – no banner campaigns, acquisition communications, or price promotions. The only factors contributing to the change are increased registrations via natural search.
Getting BT closer to its customers
BT Tradespace gives businesses a range of easy-to-use services – galleries, shops, videos,
and news feeds – to promote their enterprises. There are appointment booking services
that enable businesses to take bookings online. There are community forums for
discussions and for finding suitable partners and suppliers. And automatically, there’s an
added benefit in the improved search engine performance that comes with being part of
the BT Tradespace community. Moreover, the network effect (allowing businesses to link
not only with customers as fans, but with one another) is a truly unique paradigm in today’s
social communities.
And for BT, it’s a way of getting closer to their customers, learning more about how they can
be supported in their daily lives, and finding out what services they think would benefit
their businesses. Building strong relationships with a core audience by allowing them to
stop worrying about their online presence and focus on what they do best: running their
businesses.
BT Tradespace represents a unique online service not just in the UK, but globally. It’s the
only website that blends online services in this way for small-to-medium-sized enterprises,
giving them the opportunity to set up and grow their businesses online – free of charge.
|