Riding the Storm

At weather.com, getting back to "the basics" is yielding the performance advantage it needs to build customer loyalty

By Justin Kestelyn

Continued from Page 1

IE: Did your experiences at eBay and the Atlanta Olympics influence your decision-making here?

Ryan: Any experience you can get in handling mission-critical, time-sensitive situations helps considerably. Having the world watching while you are getting that experience only makes it more interesting. And in both these experiences, the world was indeed watching.

IE: How important are load and stress testing in managing your infrastructure?

Ryan: We just started load and stress testing last year. As with most other companies, it's very tough for us to simulate the volume of load that we'll have on these high stress dates - an environment in which we can have 18 million page view requests from different portions of our site. Thus, we simulate load using automated tools and then algorithmically project what we believe it will be in practice.

IE: What about personalization? To what extent does it play a role in earning customer trust at weather.com?

Ryan: Personalization is an interesting word; everybody defines it differently. Some folks want to know who e-visitors are at the demographic group level. Other people want to know that you're Bob, that you live on the third house on 14th St., that you watch Barnaby Jones reruns at night, and that those facts make you a valuable customer. I'm sure for some businesses, they do.

However, from our users' viewpoint, we think that the most valuable kind of personalization is at the content level. So, from a personalization perspective, we're very interested in knowing you as a business traveler, as someone who needs pollen count information, or as a golfer or gardener. That's the level of personalization that we "serve" into.

IE: What information do you use as a basis for that personalization, and how do you aggregate and analyze it?

Ryan: We're looking at different approaches for different challenges. For example, one short-term challenge that we have is identifying people quickly enough to do immediate and effective serving of either content or ad inventory. Another main challenge - determining which path that most visitors take to our site - is more of an ongoing, long-term process.

These challenges involve two different sets of analysis. Both of them are very expensive to do in real time. If you have a site that has to scale like ours does, predicting the information you'll need - and the ability to log and react to that information on the fly - becomes very difficult. The log analysis itself will require more capacity than your entire site has just to serve up the content.

IE: What about using a clickstream data warehouse?

Ryan: Yes, we have a set of software that we use to analyze clickstreams or, more specifically, to count them. It's great to find out that the clickstream is XYZ, but what does that really mean? It takes time to analyze that information and then determine the action you should take. Consequently, we're investigating more "intelligent" analytic software tools, if I can use that term loosely, that will tell us what the information means, rather than having to manually sift through massive logs of information.

IE: It sounds like you have a lot in common with transaction-intensive e-commerce portals.

Ryan: We're in two different businesses, but in theory, mine is morphing into theirs.

Let's look at both approaches. In the e-commerce model, somebody comes to a site, they search a database of available products; they put something in their shopping basket; and they go to checkout. During that process, a bunch of transactions kick off: one to get the credit card validated, one to debit the credit card, one that says "Go to the warehouse and tell a picker to put these 17 items on the mail dock, and here's the address to put on them," and so on. And then a response comes back to the user that says, "Thank you for shopping with us, here's your total bill." The whole process is back-end transactional intensive.

Our model is a little bit different. When you come to weather.com, you're looking at latent data. In theory, I could do a push to the site and cache everything. It doesn't really matter if it's five minutes from now or five minutes ago, because the weather forecast will be the same.

When you come to my site, I need to know why you came there in order to provide better value-added service. In the future - at least, in my vi sion - we'll do a transaction to figure out who you are and if we want to track your demographic information. Every time you touch something, we'll do a transaction against your account, a database update that says, "Justin came to the site and looked at Bondi Beach today." The next time you come to weather.com, I can serve you up Bondi Beach information right from the start.

IE: Do you think that your expanded definition of a transaction could influence back-end transactional-intensive businesses, as you call them?

Ryan: Absolutely. Everybody has to get smart really quickly. How often does Amazon.com update the prices on those millions of products? Perhaps only every other day, or once per week. But in my situation, I want to know who you are immediately so I can serve up the content - fast. I'm going to go into the database, see who you are, and then do an update on that information so that I know where you were on my site. That way, I can better serve you the next time you visit weather.com

IE: Will increasing levels of personalization raise e-visitor expectations even higher?

Ryan: In any business, people demand better services and higher levels of quality over time. To the extent that performance and availability become the ante just to get in the game, fast, high-quality content is crucial. To the extent that personalization or profiling, depending on which term you want to use, helps bring more relevant information to customers more quickly, it will also be a big factor in staying competitive.

It's kind of like comparing Lowe's and The Home Depot. If they're both in town, you go to the one that can offer better inventory, better service, and that helps you check in and out more quickly, right? The same thing is going to apply to e-commerce and content sites: Customers will frequent the ones they can quickly get on, that help them easily locate the products they want, and that have the best prices. In that sense, personalization and availability become not only value-added services, but customer retention strategies in themselves.