Give 'em what they want

Guy Kawasaki, tech evangelist, entrepeneur, venture capitalist, and pretty funny speaker, gave a keynote Thursday evening. The main topic provided guidance on how to innovate; but Guy ended with his "Top 10" complaints about travel booking sites. His gripes ranged from the obvious to the creative. For example:

• Prepopulate the 'return' date with a date equal to or later than the 'departure' date;
• Allow an e-mail address to function as user-name;
• Allow user to have boarding pass faxed to his/her location during on-line checkin.

We can think of many online sites that already address many of Guy's complaints, but obviously Guy is not using those - - or maybe he could use some tutoring. While Guy apologized for ending his talk with a big complaint session, he shouldn't have. Rather, the audience should thank him for one final, important lesson.

Suppliers need to talk to their customers! Find out why consumers like (or dislike!) their online experience at various online sites. Get it right and you're golden. Get it wrong, and best case the customer will call the contact center or shift to an indirect channel; worst case they'll try a competitor.

To that end, one of the most interesting groups we saw at ResExpo (although we also saw them at the FFP Conference in Vancouver in Feb.) was a company called VisionCritical. Most companies just scatter-shot surveys to customers and hope for the best. However, VisionCritical has software that allows you to form a dedicated panel of your customers, send out a surveys to them, and then interact with them as often as you want. The key here is that you can follow-up with your customers online and really drill down on their thoughts and preferences - imagine what you can do with that:

• "This set of customers expressed frustration with our website, what exactly did they not like?"
• "This set of customers are our business customers, what would enhance their experience?"
• "These customers fly a lot, but never use on-line check-in, why?"

For airlines this is ideal. First, they already have good information about their customers (and their booking habits) through frequent flier information to form a solid panel. Second, they readily have a cheap reward system for customers to participate (miles). And of course - they really really need help in figuring out what their customers want.