Archive for the ‘Required Reading’ Category

Another brilliant piece from Ikea:

It is just staggering to me how many airline execs I talk to will talk all the good talk on customer experience online but don’t seem to have ever intensively used their own sites.

If any Exec at Emirates or Qatar would like to chat, give me a call and I’ll step you through the break-points.

Here are a few highlights from my over two hours trying to book flights on online with both these airlines:

1. No flagging of where flights are unavailable in classes – results in endless loops looking for flights
2. Broken forms for payment with no elegant failure – couldn’t actually book online with Emirates
3. Forms that aren’t persistent – constant refilling where 2) happens
4. Live chat that doesn’t work and constantly adds more wait time
5. No synchronization of web screen with call center
6. Time to failed booking across both sites >50 minutes. Then 25 minutes booking via call center.
7. No price book or reference sync between the online and call center quote. Customers are not interested in the call centre is different to online nonsense. Especially when it is on your site and your call center. This is the post digital era and we are done with the demarcation lines. And when your site simply does not work, its rich to try and charge for a call centre booking.

These sites were built for another error and typical of most bloated, poorly designed Airline sites. Some tips:

1. Information must relate to the intent for which it was requested. Surfacing mindless results unrelated to the intent generate frustration and abandonment. Help the customer on their journey, not your journey.
2. Fail in real-time, inline and suggest the correction. Mindless reloading of forms and data should not be an event on any modern site. One of these sites had two credit card submission zones on top of each other – each requesting entirely different information in the address bar – which didn’t seem to work at all.
3. Indications should always be true. If you say 32 seconds to chat. Don’t reload it at the end of 30 seconds to be 95 seconds. What….?
4. Lead with identity. Capture what you need to complete as soon and as fast as you can and avoid cart failure at the end of the customer journey.

There is so much more. I ran a quick audit of the purchase experience across these sites and identified around 30+ common fails.

Staggering.

What the data tells us:

Still amazed that even with all the research telling us to rest the phone before we rest, we can’t put our phones down before bed, during the night, in the morning… pretty much anytime…

1. Nearly one-third of teens take their phones to bed, per new research from Common Sense Media.
2. One in four parents wake up to check their phones at least once per night.
3. 61% of parents and 70% of teens check their phones in the half hour before bed, despite plenty of evidence suggesting that’s a terrible idea
4. At night, parents say they keep their device within reach of the bed (62%). While at a lower rate than parents, many children also say they have their device within reach of their bed (39%), but they are more than twice as likely as their parent to have it in the bed with them (29%). Girls tend to sleep with their mobile devices more than boys (33% of girls vs. 26% of boys).
5. In 2017, sleep aids generated $69.5 billion in revenue, and they’re on track to tally $101.9 billion by 2023.

So why aren’t any of those makers of highly addictive apps (that’s pretty much all of them) incentivizing sleep? Turns out one is.

Pokémon Sleep, announced in Tokyo Tuesday and set to launch next year, will turn players’ sleep habits into parts of Pokémon games – rewarding users for “good sleep habits.” Using data – like how long you slept – will impact your gameplay. Their aspiration is to turn sleep into entertainment… Yeah, Ok… But a start at least…

Quote of the week from Jim Balsillie:

Data at the micro-personal level gives technology unprecedented power to influence. Data is not the new oil – it’s the new plutonium. Amazingly powerful, dangerous when it spreads, difficult to clean up and with serious consequences when improperly used. […]

And:

Social media’s toxicity is not a bug – it’s a feature… The online advertisement-driven business model subverts choice and represents a foundational threat to markets, election integrity, and democracy itself