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I recently praised Amazon for its innovative delivery locker, so when my son recently begged me for the next volume in the book series he is currently reading, I thought it would be a perfect occasion to try it. Navigating through the website, I searched for the novel, put it in my basket and went to checkout.

On the basket page I could choose to change the delivery address from the default, taking me to the address book page in my account. Here I could choose a pick up location –a search link took me to the very bottom of the page, where I could search for a locker by landmark, address or postcode.

Here is where it gets interesting: I entered my postcode…and the locker was not there. Oops. I tried the street address, same thing. There is a list, a helpful map, but the locker I have photographed in my local Coop’s window is simply not there.

I can only imagine that it is so new they have not yet updated their list (it has been there a few days though…?) and to be fair, the locker is a new thing, it is not advertised on the home page. I had to search for “locker” on the site to get the information on adding a locker as a delivery address…but still, this shows lack of attention to the user experience which I had not expected from amazon.

Conclusion: being a member of prime, I reverted to using the next day delivery option.

This article, written by John D’Arcy, was originally published on Clickz.com on 02/05/2012 and is republished here with permission.

Dashboards, infographics, and visualisations have been on my mind a lot this year. I’ve always loved turning data into pretty colors and patterns, which is great as the number of dashboard projects for consultants like me has gone through the roof in the past couple of years.

The projects I’ve worked on, even just in 2012, have been at times affirming as an analyst, have driven some key business relationships, but sometimes have been very frustrating. I’ve been made to feel like Leonardo da Vinci when in one project I simply merged two data sets with a customer ID, drew a two axis line chart, and saw the client nearly fall off their chair in amazement. But I’ve also been involved in projects that made me feel like Leonardo the Turtle, wading through a sewer of data and misunderstood objectives.

It’s made me think a lot this year about the responsibilities and checklists from both a client and agency perspective. To get the best out of your dashboard project, whether it has two data sources or 202, here are a few key learnings and things to think about for both sides.

For agencies or those internals teams tasked with building the tool:

• Be a Doubting Thomas and don’t scope out your project until you physically see the data.
  Clients love to say to you, “Here’s my data, I just want you to pop that in a beautifully visualized set of charts.” But under the bonnet of any tool, web analytics, sales, or customer relationship management (CRM) could be a whole mess of data that will take weeks to get to a point where you can easily visualise. This is particularly true of multi-data source dashboards, say ad serving and web analytics data. If you don’t have a long-term relationship with your client and they want you to scope without seeing the data then walk away now.
• Deliver a data audit.
  This should include profiling the data you receive so that you can understand underlying data distributions and also a quality assurance review of calculated metrics. Too often clients believe their data house is in order and when resulting visualisations don’t look the way they want, the person building the dashboard gets blamed.
• Visualisation is less important than data structure.
  Did I really just say that? Stop scratching your head deciding if you agree with Stephen Few about pie charts and start thinking about the database or data tables you are storing your data in. Does it need to be based on a data cube? Are you likely to have to build a gazillion summary tables? Will your dashboard have to read new data sources in the future and is your data layer flexible enough to do that quickly?

Learnings for clients or the teams, like marketing, who are going to be using the tool:

• Beware the funky white elephant.
  “Sex sells” and you want a bit of wow factor to impress your boss. But your company is already littered with reporting packages. Ensure that the visualisation tool that you use can be shared across a number of users and that internal security settings won’t mess up everyone being able to view the pretty Flash charts. To be frank, if you are impressed by a moving chart, then you shouldn’t be the person deciding what software to use.
• The value of the data layer is probably 10 times the value of the dashboard.
  If you are merging multiple data sets and building a multi-channel dashboard, you are very likely to be pooling data that has previously been sat in disparate data silos. If this is the case, the data layer you get built for you, say a SQL database or even a set of Excel workbooks, is going to contain data over and above that which is summarised in your visual layer. You must get ready to mine this data like you would have mined each data source separately. Do you have the people in place to do that?
• Cost of ownership is likely to be way more than cost of development.
  If you haven’t thought yet about who is going to own, run, and analyse your dashboard then stop now.

I haven’t even begun to talk about which is the right visualisation tool or what metrics are the right ones to include. From a structural perspective, data is a messy plate of spaghetti. But if you are prepared to audit properly, spend time developing the right metrics, and ensure there is an after-life for your dashboards then the visual impact will be dwarfed by the business impact from all your hard work.

This is a great example of customer-centric approach to business, and of considering the whole customer journey – not just the digital part. Giant digital retailer Amazon has now created a physical extension to its online stores: a self-service delivery kiosk.

The other day as I walked past my local Coop, my eyes were drawn to a big orange machine set back from the window – that said “Amazon locker”. Having recently been looking at articles about kiosks and self-service, and having also recently missed several Amazon deliveries because no-one was home, I thought I’d look it up.

It turns out Amazon now has a number of “Amazon Lockers” in London (and Seattle and NYC) which are basically self-service delivery kiosks. When you order from Amazon, you choose a locker instead of your home or office address. Amazon emails you a unique code when your parcel has been delivered. You then enter it on the kiosk, and that opens the door to the locker that contains your parcel. The locker location works like any other address in your address book; you can search by postcode, address, or landmark to find the closest one to you at home or at work. Delivery options to a locker are First Class or One-Day delivery (if you are a Prime customer.)

Obviously not all items can go into a locker, and if you have an order that only contains some items that are eligible you will not be able to get that order delivered to your locker (so you’d have to place two orders – which if you are a Prime customer makes no difference in terms of cost, and if you are ordering over a certain amount delivery is free anyway). But overall, this is a godsend: no more trekking to the post office collection office on a Saturday morning to retrieve parcels. No more red “we missed you” cards. Clearly Amazon has been listening to its urban customers, who are often not at home, don’t have a suitable “safe place” where the mailman can leave parcels and who may not be able to receive personal deliveries at work – and yet still want to use Amazon for the convenience, time- and money-saving, breadth of products on offer and so on. I know people who have not been using Amazon precisely because delivery was an issue and who now will do so because the “last mile” has been (at least partially) solved.

My guess is that soon, you will be able to select items from a single order for delivery to different delivery locations including lockers (this is already possible with regular addresses) and use Amazon Lockers for returns…

Great example of customer-centric approach

UPDATE Blog: Perhaps it’s not really Solved after all!

When we talk about digital customer experience it can be easy to get caught up in the minutiae and forget the big picture. Yet “All the world’s a stage”, said the great playwright, and more recently, Martin M. Pegler (expert in visual merchandising) who said “Retail is the stage and men and women are the audience who come to see, to shop and to be entertained.”

This was a useful reminder that much of our lives revolve around telling a story and that shopping is no exception. Here’s a brief overview of the concept in a digital environment.

First you have a landing page (whether online, mobile, or an interactive kiosk): the ‘overture’ for this particular play, as opposed to your brand or organisation. After all, many people would already be familiar with it through other means – previous purchase, reviews, talking to friends, advertising and so on. But there’s no room for complacency: I may have liked Julius Caesar but there’s no guarantee I will like The Tempest – so first impressions still matter. You need that initial vision of the landing page to work for you, to represent your voice, be consistent with your other physical and/or virtual stores and make your products seem exciting, even if familiar (as in “I’ve seen Shakespeare plays before.”)

At the theatre you might buy a programme that describes the plot, the cast, the director: think of your interaction design as the programme. The navigation needs to be clean, the architecture logical, with signposting to special offers, major categories, company info – whatever your customers expect. Think of each area as a scene and offer related content. Each product page is a “star of the show”. It should reflect your understanding of the customer (that you have acquired by doing research into digital behaviour and analysing web analytics) and elements such as customer lifestyle, attitude, requirements and desires. There needs be consistency across the store: this is the story you are telling. It is easier for certain categories of products and services, of course, and some brands take this further than others (here’s a couple of great examples, JPeterman and Pedlars) but many of the most successful organisations today have taken this approach, to the extent that just seeing the name will evoke some sort of emotional response to the implicit story. What comes into your mind when you read the following: Nike, L’Oreal or Tesco? (*)

Ultimately, just as you would expect of the experience at the theatre, it should be easy to find the product, see the product, explore the details of the product, co-ordinate with other products if relevant and of course, buy the product. That includes offering great delivery options, packaging, ease of returns and little extras – things like free fabric shopping bags for orders over a certain amount (they will be seen on the street, on buses, trains or wherever and add to brand awareness), promotion on your next order, post cards, gifts for referring a friend – all equally useful “post-sale” mementoes. Not only do you want (virtual) applause, but you want your audience to come to your next play and recommend it to others – just as you would if you were William Shakespeare.

(*) “Just do it”, “Because I’m worth it”, “Every little counts” !

You may have noticed that data visualisation is an extremely hot topic at the moment. Friends and colleagues are increasingly explaining concepts by linking to infographics on Facebook and other social media platforms. Business proposals might sink or swim depending on whether investors can understand what a chart shows. And when analysts are producing visual reports faster than managers can read them, a new solution is called for: dashboarding.

As a specialist in data extraction, manipulation and visualisation, that’s where I come in. Recently I’ve been thinking about the whole journey from commissioning an information dashboard to signing off the design; a journey which client and consultant undertake together. Until now, I’ve always asked: “What story do you want your dashboard to tell?” Most people have an idea of what data is available and how they already use it. But ask someone: “What is a dashboard?” and it becomes much harder for them to answer. To be honest, while I could produce almost a dozen examples that I have created, I think I would still struggle to rattle off a concise definition.

Is a dashboard the same as a business scorecard, or a Business Intelligence (BI) system? Well, we generally think of a business scorecard as a huge TV up on the wall of a call centre, showing the number of waiting calls and the average queue times. Or we imagine a jagged line charting the rise and fall of shares on a market trader’s monitor. What these two images have in common is that they both provide information but are not interactive. The information on the screens updates in real-time rather than when the user wants. Conversely, BI systems are at the other end of the interactivity scale. They structure access to underlying data, giving users a toolset with which to ask questions. One of these tools will be a series of visualisations that can be combined into a dashboard and will usually be the part of the system that most people see. But those visualisations are incredibly flexible because there is a whole system behind them dedicated to enable end-users (or possibly end-users’ analysts) to slice and dice the data just so.

Certainly, if your dashboard isn’t interactive, I would call it a scorecard instead. A good dashboard will make the best use of available data and enable the user to make connections, gain insights and take operational decisions. It needs to allow the user to ask their questions as well as to interact with the visualisations. But sometimes the limitation of the dashboard might allow those users to ask only those questions that the designer of the dashboard has anticipated. To enable end-users to explore data, they do need a full BI system (and the deep pockets to go with that).

A dashboard is therefore a high-value, low-cost alternative with many business benefits, as long as it has been designed and tailored intelligently. The value in a quality dashboard is baked in during the design process. That’s why it’s my job as a specialist consultant to bring the technical expertise that delivers a dashboard that truly empowers our clients to ask questions they need answers to.

Of course, ensuring our clients understand what a dashboard is (and perhaps just as importantly, what it isn’t) is an important step towards persuading them to invest the time and effort necessary to work with us in ensuring our development yields the high-quality, built-for-purpose dashboard they hope for and that their business will trust.

Following our recent article about customer service using Twitter, here are some key points to have in mind when setting up your account.

• Speed. Customers using Twitter do so to get a quasi-instant response, so that you must have a team in place that is equipped to do so.
• Human. If the customer is complaining about an issue, the reresentatives must be good at empathising and apologising.
• Connect. Some issues will need another channel to be resolved, so providing other contact methods such as phone or email in the bio or elsewhere on the Twitter page is a good idea
• Efficient. A customer care team needs to be in a position to do something about the issues people have (so you need to know what those are – hence analytics)
• Committed. Customers expect follow-up – so if the representative says they will get back to a customer, they need to act on it.
• Real. Customers take to Twitter rather than FAQs because they want to interact with a human being, not a bot. No jargon allowed.
• Go the extra mile. Make the interaction so good that customers will want to use your products and services again rather than switch to a competitor.

Whitepaper: Social media for customer care. Where’s your Twitter team?

We work with all sorts of companies and Foviance – finance, insurance, retail, travel, mobile, gaming – as well as luxury goods: after all, they too have customers. It just so happens that they are a special kind of customer, what you might call the “1%” (or the 5% or 10%, depending on the brand, the product and the segment).

It turns out that understanding these customers presents unique challenges – for starters there are fewer of them, so reaching them to organise user testing or focus groups is more of a challenge. They are not usually members of consumer panels and the way to reach them is through the brand of which they are already a customer. In fact they often already have a “special relationship” with the brand, as being VIP customers they receive exclusive invitations to events and other such perks. This also means that reaching non-customers is particularly difficult.

These are some of the other challenges that are specific to this particular segment of customers, and a few of our solutions.

- Incentives. For millionaires, the usual incentives for spending an hour of their time on the phone talking to a researcher (not to mention travel) don’t apply. What we have found is that they are motivated by access to experiences that money cannot buy, such as:

• A guided tour of a factory or workshop that is closed to the public
• Lunch with the CEO or other company VIP
• An exclusive or limited edition gift – a signed book, print or object

- Scheduling. These people are often very busy and the research session is usually very low on their priority lists. This means extra time has to be factored into the recruiting schedule, as research often needs to be rescheduled. We have found that flexibility is key, as this allows us to make sure the research takes place at a time that is convenient for the participant. Being prepared to do telephone interviews rather than one-on-one interviews can also help.

- Access to behavioural information. Sometimes we need to find out information that defines the segment but that is not readily available, nor can it be openly asked – for instance, are they self-made millionaires or is it inherited wealth? What is their net worth? Yet this is exactly the sort of information that might determine specific features or whether they should receive a certain type of communication, for instance. Foviance interviewers draw on their expertise in interviewing technique to ask subtle questions that will provide indirect answers – but with a little perception these can then be interpreted and the required information deduced.

In spite of these challenges, we have managed to gather a wealth of insight about this segment for some of our clients.

And here’s a nugget: “1% or 99%, humans are equal in their need for a great customer experience.”

A recent study run by Time Inc. with biometric measurement, showed that so-called “Digital Natives” (consumers who grew up with mobile technology as part of their everyday lives) switch their attention between platforms about 27 times per hour.

This becomes less astonishing when you realise that “Device owners in the U.K. also logged heavy usage for tablets (80%) and smartphones (78%) while watching TV (…) Nearly a quarter (24%) of those surveyed claiming to use their device several times a day while watching TV.” After all, if you have your tablet in hand while watching TV, you’d expect attention switching.

Worryingly, an in depth look at what all this digital hopping around is doing to our brains was published last year by Nicholas Carr –The Shallows.  In it he makes the case that human interaction with the Internet is actually changing our brains, and that while we are becoming expert scanners and skimmers we are less and less able to focus, or reflect . This latter also implies a loss of “sense-making” ability, given that our ability to reflect is part of the human learning process identified a long time ago (see Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations)

Closer to us, what does this skimming and hopping mean for customer experience in a B2C environment?

The first thing that comes to mind is that the KIS (Keep It Simple) principle will apply even more than it already does. Convoluted user journeys need not apply: information architecture and navigation must stick to the essentials and be ultra clean, especially on mobile devices. Minimal extra steps, highly efficient error recovery – imagine filling in your details on a Tablet while watching TV: what are the odds that you will make a typo? Text will need to be jargon free, and people will probably not read the small print T&Cs – so that you need to spell out the essentials.

The second thing is that emotional triggers from visual or audio clues might become fundamental on mobile devices, even on smaller devices where screen size limits the impact of visual. And in order to have a good understanding of what those emotional triggers might be for your customers, and what those essentials are, you need some in depth digital customer research.