Weathering the Storm

"We've Deputized Our Users"

Weather.com inherited its intense focus on customers from the Weather Channel itself, which has been doing extensive research on its viewers for years. "There's not a company in the world that understands the weather consumer the way we do," says Wilson.

Weather.com divides weather consumers into three basic categories. "Weather enthusiasts" are the sort of folks who refer to the Weather Channel's personalities as OCMs (on-camera meteorologists), who know them all by name, and who even know their specialties. Weather enthusiasts can easily visit a weather.com chat room for a couple of hours to discuss today's rain, last winter's snowfall, or a fear of lightning. Sometimes they study satellite images online in order to produce their own forecasts. "Planners," on the other hand, visit weather.com regularly but don't stick around very long. They only want the forecast as it relates to work, school, travel, or whatever it is that they're planning. Is it going to rain or not? How hot is it going to be? How cold? Whatever the forecast, planners want to make sure that they're prepared. And then there are "commodity users." They have neither an enthusiast's enthusiasm nor a planner's discipline. If it crosses their mind, commodity users might check out an occasional forecast, but in general, they don't think about the weather on a regular basis.

Weather.com staffers are able to know how those customers are feeling at virtually any given moment. The number of page views from the previous day are posted near both entrances to the company's offices, and throughout the day, employees can consult the company's intranet to see which pages are visited most. Wilson says that such instant tracking is a powerful tool in terms of gauging customer satisfaction. "You literally know every day how good a job you did," she says. "I would hate manufacturing a product that sits on a retail shelf and then have to wait three years to find out if anybody used it."

Weather.com users play a crucial role in product development. In the early stages of its redesign, the site asked groups in four cities to prioritize the sort of activities that they planned around weather information. Paula Mossaides, 46, who is the director of site navigation, and her staff learned that while customers said they used weather.com to plan vacations, in reality they didn't do that very often. Gardening and golf, however, were far more likely to drive users to the site. It didn't take long for developers to merge the site's weather data with content related to those pastimes. In the case of golf, product developers are taking the concept one step further by creating a golf algorithm that weighs several factors, including wind and the probability of rain, and then ranks local golf courses in terms of the forecast conditions. This fall, before launching its redesign, weather.com sent about 200,000 emails to its regular visitors, inviting them to explore its beta site and to fill out an online survey. The survey results are helping the company to work out some wrinkles before the official launch of the redesign that's scheduled for this winter.

On a daily basis, weather.com's customers are also its best critics. Nearly every page of the site has a link that reads, "Send us your feedback about this page." This feature is known internally as "fast track," and about 600 users respond every day. Customers point out what they like but, more importantly, what they don't -- such as when information is missing, unclear, or inconsistent. "When you consider all the city pages and maps, we don't have enough eyeballs around here to see everything," says Marshall Massengale, the online customer-service coordinator. "So we've deputized our users. The other day the numbers spiked because a radar wasn't updating in time, and we were about to go in right away and fix the problem."

Before the company purchased software to manage its voluminous feedback, Massengale, 49, handled most of it himself. On a good day, he would write 120 individual replies. Now the process is mostly automated. Two employees categorize incoming messages by content and then key a corresponding code (for instance, "too much text/boring" or "loads too slowly"), which generates an automated acknowledgment. In general, 95% of feedback-related messages get answered within three days.

While criticism may sting, Massengale says it's the ultimate sign of the loyalty and ownership that customers feel. Given his own longtime passions for Levi's jeans and Jeep Wranglers (he has paraphernalia for both in his cubicle), he understands the sentiment. "They care enough to tell us what the problem is," he says. "If they didn't plan to come back, they wouldn't say anything."