Internet / Ip Technologies - Otis Elevator Co.'s website

Communications News, Oct, 2001 by Carren Bersch

Elevate e-business knowledge

Otis Elevator Co.'s website, www.otis.com, is available in 26 languages and 51 countries, and receives about 1,800 visits per day. The wholly owned subsidiary of United Technologies Corp. is a global manufacturer, installer and servicer of elevators, escalators, moving walkways and other horizontal transportation systems.

"We are really trying to change the perception of what an elevator company can offer on a website. On ours, customers can enter elevator parameters, submit requests for proposals and plan for future needs," explains Chuck Richards, Otis' IT project manager. CAD drawings of elevators are available on the website. Users can manipulate the drawings on the site to fit their requirements for a particular elevator hoistway. The website program designs the drawings on the fly.

"We're allowing construction builders to design and order elevators over the Net, and we've also just started collecting e-commerce information to track sales revenue," adds Jun Shen, e-business analysis manager at Otis.

"We needed to gather all of the website traffic information so data mining could take place using other analysis tools", says Richards. "NetTracker from Sane Solutions has supplied that missing piece." The Otis Elevator website resides on three clustered Compaq Proliant 6400R servers, and NetTracker resides on its own analysis server.

"Our efforts are to get as close to our customers and what they are doing as possible," says Russ Mitchell, global content manager. "We are using NetTracker to take commerce online, to really service customers--to understand who is visiting the site, if they are registering on the site, how long they are staying, what applications they are using online; to facilitate commerce; and to generate leads for our sales team."

As Mitchell looks to redesign the website, he plans to ensure that it is customer-friendly, based on the information he has retrieved from the software. "We try to make sure that people tell us what kind of user they are--architect, construction, building owner, building manager--and who they are. We also divide them by behavior on the site to make further user deductions," he explains.

If Otis finds that 80% of its visitors are architects, its resources can be put toward creating tools and applications that appeal to architects.

"We rely on salespeople to refer people to the site, but I also check to see if major portals (Yahoo!, etc.) are referring visitors and if our ranking in the search engines is high when particular keywords are used," says Shen. "NetTracker shows referrals and keywords, in addition to the search-engine-ranking software that we use."

Otis also uses search-engine-referral analysis to determine the best strategy for meta tagging and to play the ever-changing ratings game.

www.sane.com Circle 262 for more information from Sane Solutions

--Compiled and edited by Carren Bersch