Improving customer generation by increasing website performance and integrating IT systems

This paper describes the research into the design of commercial websites. The research will lead to the identification of design elements that may have significant impact on user behaviour. The research will also investigate how these elements could be altered to provide a better browsing experience to users and ultimately increase online conversion and profit. The research focuses on the design of commercial websites. Their goal is to generate sales by selling products and services online or by promoting their products and services online and turning enquiries into later offline sales. The research is using data collected at a SME to determine how changes to website design affect online conversion rate and impact upon Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of online business models. In order to track customer behaviour online, a custom online tracking system was created to monitor how users behave while browsing a website. Google Analytics is also used to collect behavioural data and other statistics. The rest of the sales cycle is tracked through a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, which was customised by implementing extra modules in order to record information at various stages of the sales cycle. The online tracking system is not fully integrated with the CRM system at present. However, it is still possible to build customer profiles across the two systems manually.