Each year BRS ranks corporate websites by assessing the technical quality of the websites, their usability under scenarios of use, and the ability of the companies to deliver an email response to certain questions - good indicators of the online strategies being pursued by corporates.
The methodology used for the assessment is available at www.100websites.co.za and nominations have been extended until the end of August 2007.
As the Best Corporate Website Awards process for 2006 begins, it looks as if corporates are taking their websites much more seriously. But they could be in for some surprises.
In the 2005 evaluation BRS added a second scenario that assessed what a company was providing in the way of e-recruitment. In other words, how well did the website facilitate recruitment of potential candidates? A third marketing-related scenario was also included - how well did the site convey its areas of business and support doing business if not actually providing for online transactions?
These three scenarios are generic enough to apply to all of the websites assessed and some very interesting trends emerged as a result.
There has been an overlap of some 77 companies between the 2004 and 2005 assessments. The 23 new companies have not skewed the overall results significantly, so the 2005 results reflect, fairly accurately, the state of the top listed companies' websites, according to BRS. In comparing the years the marketing and e-recruitment scenarios and related email scores have been excluded from the 2005 Index.
There have been significant improvements in the quality of websites and email communications from 2004 to 2005 for the investor scenario. Overall, companies have made a 23 point improvement and their scores are less dispersed. This is only, in part, attributable to slight changes in the usability metrics for 2005 in favour of companies.
The biggest improvements have been made in email responses. The number of "no responses" have dropped from 45% to 20% overall. In 2005, slightly more than 50% have scored 65 and higher on the email index, as apposed to only 12% in the previous year. The number of companies replying within one day rose from 14% to 31%. But, website usability scores and website technical quality scores also show significant improvements.
The results for 2005 show that more companies are generally providing more accessible investor relations content and better email responses. This indicates the emergence of considered strategies for online IR.
While the IR results are encouraging, says BRS, evaluating the websites on other equally important scenarios of use reveals less well-developed strategies for most companies, especially when it comes to e-recruitment.
The technical quality is out-ranking all of the usability measures, indicating that the pattern for usability to lag behind technical proficiency of websites is still apparent. This reflects the well-established fact that usability issues are harder to detect and fix.
The companies assessed stretch across a wide range of industries and some, particularly holding companies, are not directly responsible for client or customer interactions. Yet the corporate brand plays an important role in unifying the businesses it incorporates and is often better known than any one of its subsidiaries. As customers increasingly turn to the Internet as a rich source of information and to conduct business, the likelihood of them relying on these qualities of the corporate brand, at least as a starting point, raises the importance of the corporate website and email communications as a means of conveying what the company does (or does not do), if not directing the enquirer to subsidiaries that do have products or services.
It is for these reasons that BRS has included an assessment of the website from the perspective of a customer, prospective customer or, more broadly, someone who is interested in finding out what the company does (as a major player in the South African economy) and whether it is possible to do business with the company (or its subsidiaries).
From the results, two distinct groups of websites can be seen. Only a small group (27%) of the websites has relatively well-developed transactional facilities. Most of these companies come from the financial services sector. The majority of the websites range from 25 to 65 on the index, indicating relative strengths in being able to explain what they do but stopping well short of taking the next step of translating that understanding into a real transaction.
Recruiting candidates through the corporate website has significant advantages. Apart from creating significant process efficiencies, a well worked-out recruitment facility reduces the dependence of companies using the services of more costly personnel agencies.
Furthermore, it leverages and enhances the corporate brand, developing a relationship directly with prospective employees. In the work done by BRS in analysing the candidate pool trends in 130 000 candidate records of 13 companies, provided by specialist e-recruitment consultancy Graylink.biz, it was found that companies can have access to a wide range of reasonable to good quality candidates to supplement, if not replace, their current recruitment practice at a fraction of the cost.
Yet, some 58% of the top corporate websites that were surveyed has no easily identifiable careers or job opportunities' sections. Of those companies that demonstrate some kind of considered e-recruitment strategy, the range in quality of service based on the BRS score card indicates that only 29% score more than 55. Clearly only a small minority are making adequate use of this aspect of their corporate website.
