Writing about Smart Ticketing

In my recent LinkedIn article “The 6 things they should tellabout smart ticketing and don’t” I cover some essential information that I would have found useful before entering into the world of ITSO Smart ticketing.

In this article I mention how: the industry if full of acronyms, Smart ticketing doesn’t necessarily mean smart customers (straight away), the benefits of combining smart ticketing with a decent online proposition, how you shouldn't stop improving the holistic user experience, testing and smart ticketing technical architecture.

This post has turned out to be my most successful article so far, with a large number of views and a few comments too. It has clearly proved to be interesting and engaging. Which is exactly why I wrote it.

Serious About Channel Shift?

The whole topic of Channel Shift is something that is being discussed in most businesses. Yet very few organisations I speak with actually have a documented strategy of how this shift will be realised.

Firstly, what do I mean by the term?
In my opinion... Channel Shift is the managed process of migrating customers to self-service channels (typically digital ones) to reduce cost and increase availability of service.

Reduced cost:
Back a few decades, it was humans that were cheap and computers that were expensive. Now, computers (or more specifically: computing power) is cheap compared to the cost of a person. Using self-service functionality via websites and mobile applications has a much lower cost-to-serve than a trained person, even a lower paid one in an off-shore outsourced contact center.

Increased availability:
The web never sleeps and your customers expect that they can now access your site at a time that suits them, not your company. Whereas a decade or so ago you may have had a telephone line staffed to deal with purchases, amends and refunds... not most of this functionality has now moved to a 24/7 online presence. In fact, as far as seasonal eCommerce goes, some of the most high volume times are public holidays (e.g. Black Friday and Christmas & Boxing Day) - days when most staff are either on holiday or otherwise unavailable.

So if your organisation is serious about Channel Shift, what should it do?

The first thing, as I mentioned in my opening paragraph is to have a written strategy. This needs to clearly document:

1. Who are your user & customers?
   Think you know who your customers are? Think you know what motivates them to engage with your organisation and purchase from it? Think all your customers are the same and have the same needs? Think again! 
2. What are the user tasks your want to move to lower cost channels?
   It may be easy to say "all of them", but in reality this may be either too much to do at once, or there may be business rules & restrictions that stop you from doing this. It may therefore by better to prioritise and understand the dependencies between these tasks first.
3. What channels do your customers use?
   This may not be as simple as you think. Different customers may use a specific mix of channels to: build awareness, inform & educate themselves, transact and then carry out subsequent self-service tasks. 
4. What are your actual current cost-to-serve figures?
   For example, what does it actually cost to serve your customers via each of your channels

This is the easy part... once you have this, the hard part is then working out what you want these customers to do in the future and what channels you actually can manage them to.

UX actions to do BEFORE you redesign your website - part 1

Before you dive into a full creative redesign of your next website project, here's six user experience tasks I recommend you carry out.

1. Understand who your customers are:
Some of the biggest mistakes I've seen on sites are when they assume who the customer is... without actually find out the trust and validating that assumption. I'm sure we've all seen or heard of the exec who comes along at the beginning of a new digital project and says "I know who our customer is, I don't need to research them" or something similar.
Action:
Dip into your site's analytic package and see if this provides any insight into who your current visitors are (just don't assume this will be the same going forwards or that the same type of visitors all convert in the same way).
Note: If this doesn't tell you much, then carry out whatever research you can (Alexa demographic figures, online survey, site registration details, etc.)

2. Create customer personas
Personas are simply a way of describing the attributes, qualities and required outcomes of your key customer types. I believe that the aim here is not to be too descriptive about who they are (e.g. what income they have or what car they drive) but to describe their online needs (e.g. what they specifically want from your website).
Action:
Jakob Neilson says that you only need to test with 5 users to get the best from your usability tests [link] and I also think the same is true of personas. In other words, I recommend creating more than a couple but don't create too many.

3. Review your current site(s)
"Our site is rubbish, I want something entirely new" said the business stakeholder to me on a recent website redesign project. To which I replied... "that rubbish site is currently making millions of £'s worth of revenue for you each year, it must be doing something right!"
Yes, sure sites can always be improved... but just to slate everything about the current one without actually know what is working well (and conversely what is not) is of vital importance to ensure that you do not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Action:
Carry out a set of user test on your website to see what users like & don't, plus where they incur obvious struggle in completing their goals.
Note: A few tests using a tool such as whatusersdo.com will highlight key user issues and also provide a permanent record of just how 'rubbish' your site is or isn't. 

Poor customer satisfaction with social media sites

Customer satisfaction with social media sites is poor according to the E-Business Report 2010 from the ACSI (American Customer Satisfaction Index).
http://www.foreseeresults.com/research-white-papers/ACSI-e-business-report-2010.shtml

It apparently has the lowest industry aggregate score of any of the e-business or e-retail industries measured, with Wikipedia leading the pack.

Although this report is from the USA, it does show that these global sites need to consider their users first and their functionality & revenue generations second.

The Customer is now Social

Hasn't you customer grown up? Haven't they learnt to ask each other for opinion and to trust each other?

Yup!

Never before have people started trusting each other and I'll once-again refer to the Universal Mccanns study on' When did we start trusting strangers?'

Universal Mccanns When Did We Start Trusting Strangers

View more presentations from mickstravellin.

And as customers get more social, they need new ways of interacting with companies.
So, just like CRM, that gave companies a segmented view of their customer-base, VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) allows customers the tools for engaging with vendors.

Could companies be realising that their customers' view of them is not the same as their own? Surely not?

In a crisis, remember your customers

I can't really let the financial events of the last few days pass without saying something. But rather than tell you what bank I'm not going to invest in or what mattress my money is hidden under, I'll focus on customer communications happening with Online Bank Icesave (http://www.icesave.co.uk/)

I guess there's a tendancy to forget about customers when you're working for a bank that has not only been nationalised, but when the entire country is teetering on bankruptcy. Or should there be?

Is it really enough to place a message up on your homepage for over 24 hours that merely says:

We are not currently processing any deposits or any withdrawal requests through our Icesave internet accounts. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause our customers

Mor recently (today) they have placed a link through tothe UK Govenment's treasury website that explains further the plans to protect UK citizen's savings, but where's the:

1. Regular updates from senior people in Landsbanki (its parent bank - nationalised)
2. Informative statement's from Icelandic Financial Services about the situation
3. Link through to other useful information

Although this bank's fate may be sealed, you wonder what the lack of messaging on other loss-making financial services sites may be doing to easy their customer worries... and therefore what it may be doing to their longer-term reputation.

Customers - a definition of a developing breed

Throughout this blog I refer to 'customers' as the main people that companies should:

• engage with
• worry about
• communicate with
• listen to, etc.

Yes, I could have used others, such as:

• Readers
  (if you have a subscription model that actually works or another model that makes money)
• Staff
  (if your target audience in internal
• Shareholders
• Leads / Prospects
  (if your target is aquisitional)
• and a bunch of others....

But I've use this term mainly because its simple, is the one I use most commonly and also the one you're most likely to try to engage and influence. Also according to last week's IMRG statistics, online sales are still showing double-digit growth, so its probably no a bad thing to give them a high business priority right now.

However, the internet has done more than simply change the way users experience and swap information, its created a new type of customer. To quote Alex Jefferies of Aberdeen Group in his recent report on Customer 2.0:

These customers expect to interact with peers and businesses when they want, how
they want, and in the channel of their choosing.

There's no longer the chance to turn a blind eye to this developing type of consumer. They have: an opinion, a voice and increasingly have the power to wield it. The company that doesn't facilitate and listen to all these touchpoints may find the conversation going on without them.