WebPeel - Customer Loyalty and Online User Experience

How Bing Can Leverage Social Media to Keep People Engaged and Grow Share

As many of you know, I am a huge proponent of designing user experiences that make customers come back. Even if your product is something that is only purchased once every 10 years (e.g. a home, a car) there are many ways to keep customers coming back to your site. Social media has created the opportunity  for people who share a common interest to come together and discuss their passion.  Even when people disagree it is amazing how many people will join into a discussion to debate their point. Just look at any popular video on YouTube or a CNN article to see how many people comment on a particular story. So when I visited Bing today to do a search I was suddenly hit with the idea... Bing needs to provide the ability to add comments about the homepage image.

 
  

I have always been a big fan of the photos on Bing (yes, because I have some affiliation), but more because I am a big fan of photography. When I saw the photo of Palm Jumeirah  I was inspired to visit the official web site and learn more even though I had already seen many documentaries and other articles on this "master planned" community. As an engineer by training, to call it a master planned community is really an insult; this creation is truly awe inspiring. It was at that instant that I wanted to communicate with anyone who had actually gone there or better yet, lives there.  Here is where Bing has a huge opportunity to actually have people gather on their homepage just to discuss various unique places. Imagine people getting pinged by their friends on Facebook to take a peak at some exotic location on Bing and then having that person visit the homepage to discuss and find out more about traveling there. This would enable people who had no intention of doing a search on Bing that day to all of a sudden find themselves in a deep conversation on the culture of a particular place. 

Keeping people coming back and keeping people engaged on your site is Web Marketing 101. I hope Bing takes my advice and gets this implemented quick. Now, if I could just get the $3M to buy a property there.

 

Picking Theater Seats versus Airline Seats

Anyone who knows me, knows that I despise flying and the airlines that provide this service. The list of reasons is long and really for another day. However, there is one aspect of booking a flight online that I must give the airlines kudos for and that's the seat selection feature. While this feature has been around for quite some time, I realized that this ability to select my specific seats on a flight is something that is lacking in the online theater reservation space. It is a perfect example of a small change in user experience making a big difference in customer satisfaction. When you're on a 5-hour flight from California to New York, making sure you're not sitting next to the bathroom can be a big CSAT issue for you. The biggest problem with airline travel is the user's feeling of a lack of control over everything: the bag check fees, the security checkpoint, the waiting on the tarmac for 2-hours, etc. Selecting your seats give you a small piece of that control back.

Last weekend, I bought my son tickets to go see the Nick Jr. Live show with Dora, The Backyardigans, and a host of other characters at the Paramount in Seattle. Many of the ticket sites have a big problem with ticket scalpers and so you have only a few minutes to purchase your tickets. During the process you are presented with pre-selected seats based on a general area you want to sit in. This black box process gives you no control of seeing exactly what's available in the entire theater. If you don't like your seats, your only option is to restart the process and hope you get a better selection. It reminds me of picking a new telephone number when you move. My wife will sit on the phone with the telephone company until a number she likes comes up. Wouldn't it be better if you could select your number online from a list? In any event (pun intended), the theater companies usually have detailed seating charts of their theater; it's just a matter of mapping these charts up to something similar to what the airlines use. While this sounds easy enough to implement, I am sure there are financial reasons for keeping what seats are taken in a black box to consumers. This allows theaters to hold seats and probably do other practices that are hidden from the common theater goer. If theaters really wanted to get fancy they could have a virtual seating chart - when you select your seats, you could then actually see how the stage appears from the seats you selected. The possibilities are endless and adds just one more reason for a customer to want to patronize a particular venue. In the meantime, I'll just keep picking my window seats on flights when I know I won't be getting up.

Wyndham, Building Trust (Or Not) One Bottled Water at a Time

This is not necessarily an online user experience story, but it does describe an important lesson in building trust with your customers. On a recent trip to Atlanta I stayed at a Wyndham for 5 nights. During my stay I arrived in the hotel pretty late on several nights (i.e. past 12am). At that time of night the store (if that was what you could call it) was not staffed. The cashier that managed this kiosk of water, juice and chips from the dining room was not around so your items had to be paid for at the hotel front desk. On 3 separate nights I bought a bottled water and bag of chips to take to my room. On the first 2 nights the hotel desk clerk simply asked for my room number (and only my room number) and I proceeded upstairs. This would show on my hotel bill at checkout. On the 3rd night, there was no one immediately available at the front desk. After waiting a few minutes someone appeared and I asked to add my bag of chips and water to my hotel room. I politely gave my number and she said thank you and I proceeded to walk off. As I was two steps away from the desk, she called out, "What's the name on the room?" I immediately suspected that she thought I gave her a random room number so as to not have to pay for the items. I was slightly offended, but gave her my last name without any fuss. The number matched the last name I gave her and I proceeded upstairs. 

While this incident is not big deal, it is a perfect example of little things making a big difference. Observation 1: the first two clerks (who were different each night) both trusted me and did not ask for my last name. Whether it was lack of training or trust is hard to tell, but a consistent experience is what customers want. If I had been asked for my name and number all 3 nights I wouldn't be writing this blog. Observation 2: the clerk on the 3rd night second-guessed me. Saying okay, then stopping me as I began to walk off, did not leave a good impression which was not worth the $2.25 they would have lost if I had been lying.  I am not ready to boycott Wyndham just yet, but unfortunately, the experience is now noted in my head. 

What Goes Around... 

Wyndham ended up losing $2.25 anyway. During checkout I noticed that the clerk had mistakenly put a parking fee of $2.25 on my bill even though I took a taxi to the hotel. Now obviously this was the water and chips from the first night and he must have hit the wrong key. I could have paid it and went on my merry way, but instead I told them to remove the charge because it was filed incorrectly. They promptly did and that was that. Between the bottled water incident and their internet access being down for a day and a half, I didn't feel bad.