Top servers

Leading performance in serving key stakeholder groups

Additional commentary and analysis are contained in the booklet produced to accompany the Index. You can download the PDF booklet: FT Bowen Craggs Index 2009 or order by post. You will need to sign up to download the PDF version (you will be taken directly to the document after signing up). If you would like to receive a a hard copy of the booklet by post please e-mail your name and postal address to Dan Drury

Serving society

Reputation management is a big issue for many companies, and several have realised that their website is a good place to tackle it. They have two main audiences: the general public and the burgeoning social responsibility profession, which is looking to compare performance against set standards.

There has been a strong trend towards use of the corporate website to show the company as socially responsible. See the new Johnson & Johnson home page videos or the heavy ‘responsibility’ slant on the relaunched PepsiCo site. Pharmaceutical groups do well in this metric, with increasingly strong material on issues such as animal testing. But the companies that try hardest are in oil: they take the top three slots. Shell ’s new site has Responsible Energy as one of its four main sections, using multimedia, stories and a blog to get its points across.

Hewlett-Packard stands out among its IT peers with impressive attempts to build a responsible image – the global citizenship blog is an innovation.

Video is used increasingly to tell CSR stories. StatoilHydro has excellent clips following its sponsored artists, while Rio Tinto has an impressive collective of videos that are also on YouTube.

Reporting of performance and CSR management systems continues to be patchy. A few companies provide the kind of information and tools they would to financial analysts – BP, ENI and Shell are notable examples. But while many more are now mapping their reporting against the de facto standard of the Global Reporting Initiative index, navigation is not a strong point of such presentations. The same could have been said last year about the treatment of corporate governance, but such as Chevron and E.ON are no longer alone in using the medium to increase the transparency of their reporting.

Serving investors

Investors remain the most important target group for many large companies. It may be only a handful of people – analysts and fund managers – they need to impress, but they are worth thousands of ‘ordinary’ people. Some companies, though still too few, have realised that private shareholders should also be served, both to treat them better and to save administrative costs.

We segment investor relations (IR) customers into three: analysts/ investors who follow the company; analysts/ investors wanting to research it; and private shareholders. It makes sense to think of the needs of these groups and give them what they want – companies at the top of the list take them all into account.

IT and mobile communications companies understand this particularly well: they take six of the 10 top slots. US IT companies are notably analyst-friendly: Cisco provides a battery of easily accessible data while, for people researching the company, Intel ’s Analyst Center provides a rich seam of documentation and its Education Center a useful set of films. Verizon has innovative and useful tools to help private shareholders manage their holdings.

BP has a strong service for individuals, as part of a section that provides a well-balanced service. Experienced analysts have been given a revamped quarterly results archive, providing quick access to a deep database of numbers, while researching analysts can exploit the impressive strategy section, as well as tools such a the Statistical Review of World Energy. Impressive use of web technology.

At the other end, a surprising number of revamped sites still provide a poor service; they include PepsiCo and Russia’s Sberbank. AIG is another to lag, but that is because its revamp seems to have run out of steam.

Serving the media

As last year, this is overall the poorest-scoring of the ‘serving’ metrics, and there has been no improvement in the average. Sadly, many press offices simply do not see the web as an important part of their service.

Not all journalists want to be spoon-fed. They do, however, want to be able to find announcements as quickly as possible. Verizon ’s news archive, which can be filtered by subject, US and world regions, is a model; so is the powerful Siemens archive. This year we have seen a genuine move forward: press releases that do not just reproduce a print document, but use the web to add value. Some of Roche ’s releases include video and detailed photographs – excellent for explaining complex issues to journalists.

Some companies use their sites to build and sustain a close relationship with the specialist press and push the technological boundaries to do so. IT companies are best placed for this, because of the natural ‘wiredness’ of their community. This year Cisco has added to the podcasts and videos it promoted last year with links on the News@Cisco home page to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and – more surprisingly – SMS text messaging.

A service that some companies are building up is the image and video library – it saves them money as well as improving the service to media organisations. High-tech companies provide a particularly good service here, though Sanofi-Aventis ’ well-organised library is also worth checking out.

Serving jobseekers

Jobseekers are still one of the largest visitor groups to company websites. Our metrics look at three aspects of online recruitment: the company-wide job search and application system; information for college leavers; and ‘value added content’ – how engagingly it sells itself as a place to work.

On the vacancies side search tools, CV/resume filing, online applications processes and e-mail alerts are now standard parts of the service for most. The critical question is becoming less ‘if’ and more ‘how well’ they are provided. Both BHP Billiton and Roche set a sophisticated benchmark in this respect; the latter has even managed to show it is possible to revamp a site and enhance an already-impressive effort – its job offers map is an innovation.

IBM has leapt forward with the introduction of a multi-lingual one-stop vacancy search. Equally interesting, though, is its apparent simultaneous retreat from the cutting edge of added value: its skills challenge in Second Life is no longer visible and seems, like the student portal where it was promoted, to have been abandoned. There are sign that others are also downshifting to a more pragmatic offering and it will be interesting to see if the sellers’ market mentally catches hold as the current recession plays out. Two companies it would be a surprise to see moving in that direction are those at the top of our jobseeker ratings: Intel and Microsoft. The latter has maintained its consistent all-round excellence and mixes ‘straight’ information with accomplished new media features. Intel has made incremental improvements in all areas and is an accomplished user of video.

Serving customers

Some companies are not trying to use their corporate site to help customers. This can make sense. China Mobile has its own consumer sites; the one we look at is mainly for investors. It is hard to see too many customers coming to Gazprom, the Russian gas giant, through its site. But it is strange that companies using an intuitive web address, such as Allianz.com, are not using their site to steer customers to information on products and services, for many will certainly come looking for them.

At the top of the list are companies that most decidedly are putting their customers first, sometimes at the expense of other groups. Cisco, Microsoft and Apple all provide a terrific service for their customers, even though their sites are confusing for other groups (See the Construction metric).

We test the sites by creating a small selection of ‘journeys’ and seeing how easy it is to complete them, how good the information and if it is clear what to do next. Cisco provides routes to specific product and more general information, depending on whether customers know exactly what they want or not. Routes are also given by product name or sector. Then customers are bombarded with help: comparison tools, video, FAQs, product demonstrations, even online training seminars.

Schlumberger is impressive in a different way. The oil services group provides its B2B customers with exactly what they want, but does it in a way that does not compromise other journeys. If you want a well-built customer-focused site, this is hard to beat.

Themes and trends