Getting the basics right

I always have my eye on the French news and I spotted a report from journaldunet.com on what French customers are looking for from a branded site. I don’t think the French are any different from us when it comes to web surfing so we could probably apply it to the UK as well.

The results on the surface are may seem a touch obvious.

78% of people go to a brand’s site for information on the products and services
54% for the online store
44% to find a nearby outlet
38% for help on how to use the product / service
37% for customer benefits
31% for contact with customer services
30% for information on the brand
10% for games / competitions
9% for advertising
7% to interact with other customers
(several responses are possible)

However, I think in reality this is quite interesting. This survey screams to brand owners that the web experience is first and foremost about information and assistance.

Customers want and expect to find clear information about your products and services . We can wax lyrical about social media and it certainly has its role to play for brands but we must first get the basics right.

Information needs to be set out clearly with easy navigation. An easy-to-use accessible site will give the customer the reassurance that you know what you are doing. If your site is putting obstacles in the way, what does that say about the products or services you are selling and their potential to be outstanding?

A simple test would be to put some of your customers, or even a couple of friends in front of your web site and just watch what they do. It is sometimes hard for us marketers to realise which bits the customer will trip up on. Sometimes it is the most obvious. As I have said before, even the really big brands have some big usability issues making it hard to find simple pieces of information. During the volcanic ash episode, my favourite target the air travel sites, notable Jet2 and easyjet’s informations was extremely poor, confusing and contradictory.

For the next step, you could try setting your customers a couple of really easy tasks to find on your web site and see if they manage. Usability testing doesn’t always have to be hi-tech, this method is possible for any small business.

Make sure access to the customer service line is easy to find and welcoming. If this survey is true, a third of all customers are just looking for some kind of assistance. The customer service experience is a moment of truth, when the customer will make up their mind about your brand. A brand advocate can be created from a great experience, since so many are so poor! Take the opportunity to do it well!

Beaches – which one exactly?

It’s snowing yet again outside and it is definitely the time of year to think about booking the big Summer holiday. Don’t be fooled by the recession, a large % of British people count the annual holiday as a necessity and not a luxury.

Although you still can’t beat a brochure and thousands of trees are destroyed per year just for my pile under the coffee table, a large amount of us will turn to the web to research if not to book our annual summer getaway.

I will say it directly now, I have never found a truly good travel web site. Not one. If you have one to bring to my attention – please do. From the large corporates of Thomson and Thomas Cook to the niche operator, they all work off a similar sort of database that can’t see to cope with a “normal” customer request such as “family room, somewhere with sun, no more than 4 hours of flight, all inclusive with a kids club please”.

You have to know the date you are going and which airport you are going from before you can get any choices. Now. I live in Peterborough so I can go from quite a few airports including most of the London ones, East midlands and Birmingham but the travel site will insist you choose first. At best they propose “all London”. And maybe I don’t know the date I want to go, maybe I just want one of the 6 weeks of school holiday and I’ll have the cheapest one please.

Anyway more specifically, for a luxury option, I tried the Beaches site. The family branch of the better known Sandals Resorts, this is “top of the range” stuff. So surely they have a good approach?

First up, they want exact dates and which airport in Jamaica I want to fly to before offering me hotels. Hang on a minute, isn’t it the hotel that dictates the airport? And then, I get the error message, “nothing for that date, give us a ring”.

No alternative, no suggestion, no results at all, never mind relevant ones, just a great contribution to the “how to annoy your customer best” guide which I am seriously considering writing.

So I tried the “hotel only” option and no soon as I get a price, another big usability “no no”, they want my full details and create a log in and password. Excuse me, I was trying to have a browse.


This is one of the biggest reasons for drop off of customers early on in a journey. Ask for their exact details too early on and they give up with the effort and the nosiness. However if you draw the customer into the site, offering them choice, changes of date, a cheaper price, a different airport, a different hotel that is £200 more but with a special facility you might like, you engage the customer and they gain in confidence and interest.

It is proven that customers need to feel in control and love flexibility. Not to be confused with complexity.

Anyway, the Beaches deluxe holiday was just a pipe dream so back to battling with the Going Places web site and the search for a box for four in Benidorm….

Wijet

On the day when British Airways announces it is likely to make a record loss this financial year, it is always reassuring and really quite exciting to see new entrants into the airline market.

You might think that this would just about be the worst environment ever to launch an airline but a good idea is always a good idea , regardless of the economic climate. And if that idea is about offering a service that is luxury but cheaper, that is perfect for today’ world.

That’s why I am really liking the idea of Wijet, a French company that aims to make private jet travel more accessible. Laugh out loud you may - private jets when companies are cutting back to the bone? But actually this concept is quite clever and is based, I believe, on real customer insight.

There is apparently, a trend towards the day trip for businesses when top management would like to visit multi sites at a time and in a way that is convenient to them. Private jets provide more confidentiality and less of the formalities of the big airports. Imagine, the team can have a management meeting in the sky and visit 3 clients all in one day, saving one of the most valuable commodities of execs: time.

It’s not stupidly expensive either. According to Corentin Denoeud and Alexandre Azouley, the two start up’s founders, Wijet is less expensive for 25 European destinations, flying from Paris than the total of business class tickets, when 3 or 4 execs are flying.

The price is fixed at 2200 euros (£1900) per flying hour which compares to their rival Netjet who sells a 25 hour package for the modest sum of 110 000 euros (£95 800) which works out at 4720 euros (£4110) per flying hour.

Wijet flies from the small Parisian airport of Le Bourget, closer to the centre of Paris than the main airport of Roissy Charles de Gaulle.

Not content with offering business travel, Wijet are also aiming their service at day shoppers. Quick shoe trip to Milan anyone?

I think these guys are brave, innovative and have spotted a gap in the market. If their customer experience is top notch, and they can keep their cost base under control, they could do really well.

Cast your vote: British Airways or Ryanair as worst airline?

I can’t decide which air company I like less. They are both really trying their best to convince me that they are the worst air company in the world but the decision is really very difficult.

Hidden charges and seats like a slab of concrete or staff that look at you like they want to spit at you and try to ruin your holiday by striking? Mmmm….strong competition.

Airlines have already been in crisis for a few years now. Ever since Ryanair and Easyjet put the cat amongst the pigeons with an entirely new lean business model with low running costs and low fares, the older established companies have struggled. For a while, before the “Great Recession” BA seemed to have found a bit of a niche with business travel charging companies extortionate amounts of money to get horizontal on a plane. But then budget cuts came and profits plunged. BA had never really tackled their enormous cost base they have been carrying since the glory days.

With fresh strikes announced for February, looks like BA’s reputation with customers will plummet to new lows.

I travelled with BA this Christmas, it was efficient, it was on time, it was roomy but the staff are snotty nosed and condescending. They are actually lucky that they didn’t get lynched by us, the poor customers, who nearly missed out on spending Christmas with relatives abroad.

But the fact that the cabin crew would rather see the company go bankrupt than take a change in working conditions, that even their colleagues in Gatwick have accepted (and frankly on the face of it, I can’t see the problem?), begs a fundamental question to me.

The BA staff aren’t living the brand are they?

They clearly don’t feel part of the future of the company or even its present. The cabin crew are the face of the company. They are the front line, the people that we, as customers, deal with. We don’t meet the marketing department, we don’t see the pilot, we see a bit too much of Willie Walsh apologising on TV but we don’t know him, a large part of the way we view the company is based on the check in staff and cabin crew.

Whatever the master plan is, whatever changes are needed in the company, and whatever the final vision is, BA must start communicating it better to their frontline staff before us the customers. If the staff don’t believe then the customers won’t. Striking staff is totally disengaged staff who don’t give a stuff about the consequences.

Here’s a company that needs a huge internal marketing job. We talk a lot about external marketing but internal marketing in an organisation of this size and with significant changes to be made, is essential. If staff don’t understand the change, they won’t support it.

So back to Ryanair. So the seats are rubbish, the staff don’t care, Michael O’Leary doesn’t care, but it’s cheap. I can live with that, it’s refreshingly honest. Where it goes wrong for me, is then ruining that clear approach with hidden charges. Bag charges, credit card charges, mysterious “expenses” lumped in with airport tax and impossibility to check in children online which means an obligatory £8 charge to check in at a desk (each). If your proposition is basic but cheap you actually do need to be cheap. And you need to be honest about the prices. I’m not saying that Ryanair won’t still be a success because they have a monopoly on certain routes and if you want cheaper, you’ll choose them, but I think that the low cost proposition is a clear one and there is just no need to wind up your own customers.

So have you made your decision? I am still debating myself….