Website Versus Telephone

Website Versus Telephone

I've been given a couple of examples of website “failures” where transactions got sorted successfully over the telephone. They show obvious possibilities for cost savings on the part of vendors if only the vendors had the wit to see them (and do something about them).

The first concerns Air Fance (again). A friend was trying to book a flight that had morphed from a Flybe flight to an Air France one. Such arrangements between airlines are quite common. The friend tried booking on the Air France site and got lost, not too difficult in our experience. In frustration she phoned Air France to make the booking and talked to a very helpful Air France operative who managed to effect the transaction but only after the operative herself expressed extreme difficulty in using the Air France site. That smacks not only of inadequate user testing but also of inadequate operative training.

The second example, also referred to me by a friend, concerned an attempt at a ferry booking through Ferries Direct. He wanted to book a ferry from France to Corsica and went through all the usual data entry exercises of name of passengers, passport details (what price Schengen?) and payment method before finding that the booking he wanted was already full and therefore not available. Rather than try an alternative, which could have produced the same result, he phoned Ferries Direct and the matter was resolved over the phone, very helpfully.

So what is happening here? Effectively, telephone operatives in Customer Relations or some such department are bailing out the inadequate websites. By continuing with the inadequate websites the organisation is either incurring unnecessary costs or increasing the workload of their telephone operatives or, at worst, losing customers. I'm led to wonder whether there is any internal reporting mechanism to record how many times telephone operatives have to bail out the website and am fairly certain that no such mechanism exists; it's mere existence would suggest that the company had spotted the problem. And, once again, we would point out that any restrictions on a transaction should be stated at the point where a transaction is started rather than when the transaction is about to be completed.

Friend Steve has pointed out to me that some UK government sites list the documents that you will need to hand to complete given transactions. This avoids the frustration you can experience when, in the middle of a transaction, you find you need to search for some information required and the site times out on you while you are searching for it. It's a good example of good practice. In fact, listing that, along with the “what do you want to do” we have suggested earlier would resolve most of the problems we have exposed. Admittedly, the “what do you want to do” is implied by the main selections offered on the front page of sites but they almost all lack the “other” (else clause) possibility that could tell site managers what their site is lacking, if only they had the wit to see it and the willingness to learn.