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Continued from previous page
If Lohse has a message for retailers who are spending
hundreds of thousands of dollars on jazzing up their web sites,
it is this: Keep it simple. “No amount of ‘sparkle’ in
the presentation of products can compensate for poor
design features,” he says.
Customer Satisfaction
A well-designed site can attract large volumes of customer
traffic. But how satisfied are those buyers, and how would
they compare one web-based retailer to its rivals?
The drive to answer these questions inspired the June
1996 launch of Binary Compass Enterprises, a company
that wants to be “the Internet leader in monitoring customer
satisfaction.” Headed by Farhad Mohit, the company
publishes the BizRate Guide, a report that ranks the best
merchants in terms of customer satisfaction, based on more
than 12,000 buyer surveys. In July, for example, Crutchfield,
a Virginia-based retailer of consumer electronics
products, topped that list.
Mohit, an entrepreneurial management major
who had earlier worked for Andersen Consulting,
says he “saw the web crawl up” while he was
at Wharton and decided that he wanted to work
in this field. By September 1995, he had joined a
group of fellow students and faculty members to start an
Internet research firm. Their original idea was that Binary
Compass could do e-commerce research and give that
away, while collecting ad revenues for BizRate. As often
happens with Internet-inspired
ideas, exactly the opposite has
occurred. “Our business model has
been reversed on its head,” Mohit
says. “We don’t take any advertising
for BizRate, and we sell
research to the merchants.”
While Mohit caters to merchants,
Jeffrey Hyman works
with corporate recruiters as CEO of
Career Central, an online recruitment
firm. While he was at
Wharton, he realized that cor
porate recruiting — making
connections between candidates
and companies — was a highly
inefficient process. Companies
spent more than $5 billion on
executive search firms and $5
billion more on newspaper classifieds to hire people.
“Ten years ago I didn’t know how to make the market
efficient,” he says.
After a stint with Black & Decker, Hyman earned
his MBA at Kellogg, eager, when he graduated, to hook
up with a high-tech company. Unfortunately, few
such companies came to Northwestern to recruit.
After flying frequently to the West Coast at his own
expense, Hyman landed a job at Intuit, the Mountain View,
Calif., company that makes Quicken software.
During that time, Hyman saw that the Internet offered
him a way to overcome the inefficiency of the recruiting
market. Research showed that he was not alone in the
predicament he had been through; dozens of MBAs had
experienced trouble finding jobs they liked. In June 1996,
Hyman formed MBA Central, a firm that used the Internet
to connect MBAs with prospective employers. During the
last few months, the company expanded its recruiting to
include software professionals, and changed its name to
Career Central to reflect that addition.
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