Business Overview
For more than 10 years, Crystal Decisions ^TM has provided feature-rich analytic solutions, easy-to-use reports and intuitive data visualization capabilities that can be easily distributed to employees, customers and suppliers via the Web. Crystal Enterprise ^TM integrates two of the company's major products: Crystal Reports ^TM and Crystal Analysis ^TM. Crystal Reports delivers content from virtually any data source, publishes it to the Web and integrates it with almost any application, while Crystal Analysis provides interactive reporting for online analytical processing. Crystal Enterprise provides a globally scalable backend for repository management, security, processing and delivery.

With the ability to connect to critical information assets such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), supply chain, e-business and data warehouse applications, Crystal Decisions brings together and makes sense of vast amounts of corporate data and then distributes that information to internal and external stakeholders.

Business Challenge
Crystal Decisions' Web site is mission critical, including an online store where customers can buy software and services, technical support and training to reduce customer support calls and a wide range of resources to help customers select and use products. The site also provides a convenient place for customers to register products, access beta programs, register for seminars and provide resources for partners. With all these customer and prospect touch points, the Web site is an important resource for sales leads.

As the company's Web site gained importance, limitations of the traffic analysis software being used by Crystal Decisions became apparent. As traffic grew, the time needed to import log files and produce reports increased, and the reports from the software being used could not be customized for specific users or accessed over the Web. A change needed to be made. As pioneers of development of tools delivering information to business users in the exact format needed to impact decisions, Crystal employees wanted to ensure that they received the same benefits themselves. Ideally, they wanted to use their own reporting and analysis tools as the front-end to view the reports. They also wanted to access data from other databases in order to perform analysis and write queries on any information channels within the organization.

The WebTrends Solution
"We recognized the need for a more scalable and capable analytics tool," recalls Natalie Spence, e-Business Analyst with Crystal Decisions. Upon evaluation of various alternatives, Crystal Decisions discovered that WebTrends Intelligence Suite met all reporting requirements. "WebTrends was able to prove that they could handle far higher volumes of traffic than we are seeing today on a timely basis and easily integrate with our front-end reporting tools."

WebTrends Intelligence Suite allows organizations to capture data on Web visitor behavior and integrate it with other customer-related data, such as from CRM systems. The results are stored in the WebTrends Warehouse, a scalable data repository that can store Web site customer information in Microsoft ® MS SQL 7.0/2000 and Oracle databases. This makes it possible for organizations to apply data warehousing principles to correlate Web visitor information with other customer data. To measure and manage the success of each campaign, WebTrends Intelligence Suite provides marketing reports offering such vital statistics as cost-per-visit, cost-per-customer, and return on investment. Crystal Reports can extend reporting by providing customizable reports, using data from the WebTrends Warehouse and other data sources.

Results
The ability to easily obtain detailed, nearly instantaneous data on every aspect of Web site traffic has made it possible for Crystal Decisions to substantially improve the site's performance. Major efforts, for example, have been made to improve the company's technical support knowledge base, which consists of more than 5,000 articles. Custom reports are used to identify the most frequently accessed articles and, through a survey provided with each article, determine whether or not the article helped the customer. "By improving the articles that were requested the most, yet were the weakest in terms of solving customers' problems, we increased the overall resolution rate by 20 percent, which over time saves tens of thousands of dollars in reduced load on our call center," explains Pen Clark, Content and Creative Management Team Leader.

The same approach is being used to improve pages showing prospects how Crystal Decisions products can address business information challenges. These pages provide high-level descriptions of the benefits companies receive with Crystal Decisions' information delivery systems. The challenge for the writers is to keep the content interesting and relevant, but there's no way to determine whether the writer has succeeded except by measuring visitors' responses. To evaluate the effectiveness of these pages, the staff reviews the WebTrends Intelligence Suite reports, which display the level of traffic generated by each article. They also measure time spent on pages and how often the reports page is the point from which customers exit. Clark says, "Traffic analysis showed that there written report pages are capturing 15 percent to 20 percent more traffic than before we implemented WebTrends Intelligence Suite, while the number of people exiting from the new pages has been reduced by 20 percent."

WebTrends Intelligence Suite has also provided valuable information to improve marketing campaigns. In one case, marketing personnel were uncertain about a new campaign because it presented a promotional message where visitors were used to receiving technical information. "Rather than settle the issue based on who shouts the loudest, we decided to roll out the campaign and measure the response," Spence says. "We tracked its performance on a daily basis with WebTrends Intelligence Suite. Within a day or two, it was clear that the campaign wasn't working. Besides helping to steer that campaign in a more fruitful direction, the information provided by the reports supplied objective information that we will use in the future." The Crystal Decisions marketing staff has also improved campaign performance by experimenting with different calls to action. Immediate feedback makes it possible to make adjustments on the fly, rather than waiting until the campaign is completed.

Crystal Decisions also uses WebTrends Intelligence Suite to make the Web site a key source for generating sales leads. Web leads account for 57 percent of total lead count, and Web Trends is essential to understanding the Web channel. WebTrends Intelligence Suite provides valuable feedback, such as products that visitors researched on the Web, technical support content they found useful and campaigns to which they responded.

WebTrends Intelligence Suite also provides valuable feedback for the technical staff maintaining company Web sites. For example, they track the browsers used by visitors to guide development efforts. When they discovered a recent increase in the number of visitors using Microsoft Internet Explorer V.6, they responded by allocating development resources towards version 6-specific features. Technical staff also views reports to evaluate visitor trends. These trends are used to plan upgrades by predicting when traffic is expected to exceed the capabilities of existing systems. They also track page errors, which help identify missing links, server outages and other related problems.

The approach to decision-making has shifted with quantitative information available about the Web channel. Management has mandated that future decisions be based on metrics rather than opinions. The result is a dramatic increase in demand for information such as that provided by WebTrends Intelligence Suite reports. In response to this success, Spence has created a series of custom, parameterized reports that access information from WebTrends Warehouse. These reports use parameters that allow users to obtain the exact information they want. This means that in a click, users can obtain near real-time information ranging from a campaign's success to an article's effectiveness.

About WebTrends
WebTrends, e-business intelligence solutions from NetIQ (Nasdaq: NTIQ), offers comprehensive Web analytics and management solutions to help businesses monitor, analyze and act upon data generated by Web site visitors.