Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Vehicle Pricing Provider Anticipates User Needs with Interactive and Mobile Experiences
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Manufacturing—Automotive & industrial equipment
Customer Profile
Kelley Blue Book is a leading source of new- and used-car values in the United States. The company has 390 employees and is based in Irvine, California.
Business Situation
As a leading Web source of vehicle values, Kelley Blue Book must continually work to provide users with innovative new ways to access and interact with vehicle data.
Solution
By building its Web site using Windows Server® 2003, Microsoft® SQL Server® 2005, the Microsoft .NET Framework, and Microsoft Silverlight™, Kelley Blue Book has been able to deliver both greater levels of interactivity and mobile support.
Benefits
n Rapid delivery of new Web site capabilities and experiences
n Mobile access to vehicle data
n Low total cost of ownership, leaving more money for new product development
n Strong reliability and security / “With our Silverlight-based client, we can approach advertising in an entirely new way. People are engaged for five to seven minutes, which becomesvery attractive to advertisers.”
Justin Yaros, Executive Vice President of Product Design and Development, Kelley Blue Book
Kelley Blue Book is a leading provider for new and used automobile values. The company’s Web site, kbb.com, averages 12 million visits per month. To succeed on the Web, the company needs to provide consumers with reliable, immediate access to car values in new and innovative ways, whether users are sitting in front of their PCs or want information via their mobile phones. The company’s use of Microsoft® software gives Kelley Blue Book a Web presence with which it can easily deliver the innovative experiences that customers demand—in turn, helping Kelley Blue Book differentiate itself from its competition and drive new revenues. Just as important, Kelley Blue Book can maintain a reliable Web presence with minimal costs, making it possible for the company to spend more on new product development.
Situation
Kelley Blue Book has been a leading source of used-car values since 1926, when the company published its first Blue Book of Motor Car Values. For many years, Blue Book® guides were sold mainly to businesses, such as car dealers and financial institutions. However, with the advent of the Internet, Kelley Blue Book saw an opportunity to reach consumers, as well. Today, nearly one out of every three people in the United States who buys a new or used car visits kbb.com. The company also has business-to-business products such as KARPOWER Online®, which is used by automobile dealers and other industry participants.
Since Kelley Blue Book first launched its Web site in 1995, the Internet has fueled the biggest growth in the company’s history. “For many years, our main source of revenue was car dealers, who bought our printed books,” says Justin Yaros, Executive Vice President of Product Design and Development at Kelley Blue Book. “When we first launched kbb.com, we charged $3.95 for a pricing report—but that didn’t go over very well. We pulled the plug on charging a fee for pricing reports after three weeks and began the switch to a business run like radio and television, supported by advertising and partners.”
With the majority of its revenue today derived from advertising and lead generation on kbb.com, the company’s Web site is its crown jewel. Kelley Blue Book must continually work to deliver innovative new Web site capabilities and customer experiences to attract and retain users, win over advertisers, and compete for visitors with other Web sites. “Our data is syndicated to other Web sites, as well, so how users can interact with the data on kbb.com is just as important as the data itself,” says Yaros. “Consumers want instant access to car values, whether they’re just starting the research process and are sitting at home in front of their PCs or are at a car dealer and need instant information via their mobile phone. Our internal conversations are always about the customer experience, and our focus today is all about making the site more interactive and accessible in new ways.”
To retain this focus on new customer experiences, Kelley Blue Book must work to minimize the cost of running its Web site. “When it comes to my IT budget, we need operational costs to remain low,” says Yaros. “I want to spend money on developing new products that will drive additional revenues, not on keeping our existing servers up and running.”
Kelley Blue Book must also ensure that its Web site delivers a consistent, reliable customer experience, even during peak traffic times. “We receive more than 12 million visits a month, so the reliability of our Web site is just as important as the accuracy of our data,” says Yaros. “If someone has a bad experience on our site, that’s likely a user that we’ve lost to the competition.”
Solution
Kelley Blue Book is meeting all the above business needs using Microsoft® software, including the Windows Server® 2003 operating system, Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 database management software, and the Microsoft .NET Framework. “We may be able to develop interesting products with any technology, but only Microsoft gives us what we need to run the entire business,” says Yaros. “The depth and breadth of Microsoft software—and the Windows® ecosystem—gives us a great advantage, in that we know a solution can always be found.”
Kbb.com, the company’s “flagship” product, is based on Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0, with an upgrade to ASP.NET 3.5 in the works. The site uses Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) programming techniques to reduce the number of roundtrips required between users’ Web browsers and the Web site—inturn, leading to increased responsiveness as users interact with the content on Web pages. Software development is done using the Microsoft Visual Studio® 2008 Professional development system, and Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server is usedas a source code control and build environment.
“Kelley Blue Book is very much a software development company, with about half of all IT resources devoted to product development,” says Lapin. “I’m a developer at heart, and my personal opinion is that Microsoft development tools such as Visual Studio 2008 and Team Foundation Server provide a huge benefit over other platforms. Developer productivity on Windows is, without a doubt, head and shoulders above that for Linux.”
Integrated IT Infrastructure
The Web servers that host kbb.com are Dell PowerEdge 1950 systems that run the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition, and each is configured with one processor and 8 gigabytes of RAM. The database servers are Dell PowerEdge 2950 systems that run 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2003 Standard or Enterprise, along with 64-bit versions of either SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition or Enterprise Edition.
The kbb.com Web site and all other products are supported by a single, integrated data pipeline. Kelley Blue Book receives data on vehicle transactions from all over the United States, from many different sources, ranging from dealer management systems to Microsoft Office Excel® spreadsheets that are filled out and submitted by employees in the field. The company uses SQL Server 2005 Integration Services to transform the data and load it into a SQL Server 2005 relational database, and then uses SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services and business analytics software from SAS to analyze the data and predict residual values.
Processed vehicle value data is accessed by kbb.com and the company’s other products through a service-oriented architecture that Kelley Blue Book developed using Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0. “A service-oriented architecture enables us to quickly and easily get Kelley Blue Book data from where it originates out to our many products,” says Andy Lapin, Director of Architecture for Kelley Blue Book. “And it enables all those products to access the data in a consistent manner, whether they are business-to-consumer products like kbb.com, business-to-business products like KARPOWER Online, or feeds to other Web sites that syndicate our data.”
New Levels of Interactivity
With its current IT infrastructure, Kelley Blue Book can easily execute on its number-one priority: continually delivering new products and customer experiences. One recent such project was the delivery of a highly interactive “Perfect Car Finder® Photo Edition” experience on kbb.com, which the company delivered using the Microsoft Silverlight™ browser plug-in. The project was conceived in mid-2008, when Yaros’s team was having one of its frequent discussions on how the company could further differentiate kbb.com from competing Web sites.
“Someone had stumbled across the HardRock.com Web site, which uses the Deep Zoom technology in Silverlight 2 to let users visually explore, and we realized that we could do something similar with cars,” recalls Yaros. “Most people who come to kbb.com know the make and model of the car they want to research and go from there, primarily getting to the images of a car only after specifying it. Silverlight enabled us to support an entirely new approach in which people can view the images of many cars at once—and interactively adjust which cars are displayed based on characteristics such as body style, price, and mileage.”
From an architectural perspective, the Silverlight-based client is a rich Internet application. It was built by one developer in about eight weeks, with a few hours of assistance from a designer to help with thelook and feel. Deep Zoom is used to intelligently load photos of various resolutions that zoom in and out in real time as the user interacts with the slider bars and other controls in the left pane of the user interface.
Support for Mobile Users
Kelley Blue Book also took advantage of Microsoft software to add support for mobile users—a consumer need that is clearly growing. “We noticed that kbb.com was getting around 200,000 visits per month from mobile Web browsers,” recalls Lapin. “However, where we get an average of 14 page views per visit from desktop browsers, we were getting only 2 or 3 page views from mobile users, which made it clear that people were abandoning the experience before they found the information they wanted.”
Working part-time over a four-month period, Lapin built two mobile versions of kbb.com—one for the Apple iPhone, and one for other mobile Web browsers. “As expected, I was able to reuse the existing service-oriented infrastructure we had built for delivering vehicle data to our products, and merely implement new user interfaces,” says Lapin. “We’ve since mobile-enabled one of our dealer products, and that only took two weeks.”
Benefits
With Microsoft software, Kelley Blue Book is able to successfully run its online business and remain a leader in delivering car-value data and other content on the Web. The company’s choice of software makes it easy to deliver the reliability that users expect, maintain a Web presence with minimal costs, and rapidly deliver new customer experiences that drive Web site traffic and revenues.
“Part of my mandate is to ensure that we continue to innovate so that people take notice and continue to spread the word that kbb.com is the place to go for vehicle values and related content,” says Yaros. “Microsoft software enables us to do just that.”
Rapid Delivery of New Web Site Capabilities and Experiences
Kelley Blue Book can rapidly deliver new experiences that enable users to interact with car-value data and other information in new ways. One such example is Perfect Car Finder Photo Edition, a user experience unlike anything offered by competing Web sites. “The Silverlight-based client has received more positive feedback than any other thing we’ve done, so we’ll definitely continue to enhance the application,” says Yaros. “We’re excited about what else we can do with it, such as providing the ability to compare two cars side by side and synchronously rotate those views. Or, we may use it to provide users with a new way to view dealer inventory, which is a big push for us in 2009. Today, on most Web sites, people are presented with an HTML-based list and have to drill in and back out of that list to explore a dealer’s inventory. With Silverlight, we could deliver a more interactive ‘on the lot’ experience.”
Yaros, who has profit-and-loss responsibility for kbb.com, is also excited about the potential for a different advertising model. “Users look at a standard Web page for approximately 10 seconds, and advertisers know this,” he says. “With our Silverlightbased client, we can approach advertising in an entirely new way. People are engaged for five to seven minutes, which becomes very attractive to advertisers.”
Although the customer experience delivered by the Silverlight-based client is new and innovative from a developer perspective, the technology used to deliver that experience was already familiar. “A C# developer who had never used Silverlight before was able to deliver a mockup in just two days—without learning any new skills or tools—and complete the project in less than two months,” says Lapin. “Perception among some people is that Silverlight is the Microsoft version of Adobe Flash. However, you don’t get Deep Zoom in Flash, and we could never have used Flash to do what we did in only eight weeks.”
Mobile Access to Vehicle Data
Through its mobile Web sites, Kelley Blue Book is meeting user demand for anywhere, anytime access to its data. “In the past, mobile users couldn’t easily get to the information they needed and would give up after 1 or 2 page views,” says Lapin. “Today, our mobile sites receive an average of 7 to 10 page views per visit, which is proof that we’re doing a better job of meeting user needs. Mobile traffic is still a small percentage of total site traffic, but it is increasing in terms of sheer volume and percentage of total traffic. Demand is clearly there, even though we haven’t marketed our mobile capabilities much at all.”
The new mobile sites have yielded advertising benefits, as well. “We sold advertising space for our mobile sites to one company for November and December of 2008, and already have two more advertisers lined up for 2009,” says Yaros. “Not only are we ahead of our competition with respect to the mobile experience we’re able to deliver, but we’ve gained a new source of revenue. Best of all, the investment to begin realizing that new source of revenue was very low because we were able to reuse the infrastructure we already have with very little developer effort required.”