Arkema Group : Alerting customers to updates

A well-signposted and indexed SDS resource adds a further, rarer level of support by undertaking to alert customers to updates of sheets used by them.

The Site

Arkema, the chemicals division of French oil company Total, gives access across its site to technical and safety data sheets from a featured, boxed link in the left-hand navigation panel.

The link leads to an index page from where customers can log on to the Safety Data Sheets (SDS) for products marketed in any of 11 countries and, where available, in a choice of language. Clicking any of the nine European country options opens a pop-up window asking users for details of company, name, e-mail address and their customer code. A brief statement explains that the e-mail address allows Arkema to notify customers when a SDS they have previously consulted is updated. Customers can go no further without submitting a correctly completed form.

Whatever the country chosen, this notice is in the set language of the site (French or English).

The Takeaway

Use of a site to provide an accessible library of product specification data is now common among producers of consumer as well as industrial goods, partly because the medium lends itself naturally to such a function, mainly because customers find it of practical value. Arkema’s well-signposted and indexed SDS resource recognises this while using another characteristic of the medium to add a further, rarer level of support by undertaking to alert customers to updates of sheets used by them.

The execution of the system is, however, somewhat heavy-handed. Customers are effectively prevented from getting to the datasheets until they have filled out the alert form and provided their customer code. This seems unnecessarily restrictive, trading longer term benefit for present inconvenience, and is not common practice, so customers may find it altogether unwieldy.

Interestingly, Arkema’s Canadian customers are given the opposite experience – they get taken straight to an index of datasheets but don’t get the chance to sign-up for alerts. Perhaps the group is running a controlled study in user preferences.

First published on 05 May, 2005