Is your website part of your team?
What work could it handle, and where should it involve a person?
If your website had a role on your team, what would you ask it to take responsibility for? Perhaps it would prepare new inquiries for review, help customers find the right resources or collect the information needed to begin a project. Giving it a defined job changes the questions we ask when designing it.
I begin by looking at the work people repeat. An owner may explain the same service several times a week. A coordinator may chase missing details before scheduling a meeting. A sales representative may spend the first conversation establishing facts that the customer could have provided beforehand. These tasks help identify where a website could make a useful contribution.
Consider a business receiving requests from several types of customer. Its website could ask what each person needs and present the relevant follow-up questions. The answers could arrive as a structured brief, with the customer’s goal and any documents they chose to share. The person responding would have a more useful starting point.
Connecting that process to a customer relationship management system can carry the information further. For example, HubSpot documents workflows that enrol contacts after a form submission and assign them to a user. The wider design question is what your team needs to receive, who should receive it and how they will know it needs attention.
Source: HubSpot — Create workflows
That handoff deserves as much thought as the visible interface. Someone needs to own the next action. The process needs to account for incomplete requests, failed deliveries and customers who would prefer to speak to a person. A useful website should make those routes clear.
Where AI is appropriate, I define its purpose and the knowledge it can use, then test how it responds to both expected and difficult situations. An agent answering questions about a service needs approved information and clear limits on the commitments it can make. Questions requiring professional judgment should reach the relevant person with their context intact.
We can then review whether the arrangement helps. Are briefs more complete? Is the team spending less time gathering basic information? Are customers receiving a clearer next step? These observations tell us where to improve the process.
Choose one recurring task you would like your website to help with. Tell me how it works today, who handles it and where it becomes difficult. That gives us a practical starting point for designing your website’s role on the team.
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