Emma Passey, Simon Pearson (National Express East Coast) and Ian
Worley (Flow Interactive) receiving the IT Excellence of the Year Award

On Thursday evening, 19th February 2009, I was privileged to be at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London for the HSBC Rail Business Awards to co-receive the Information Technology Excellence of the Year Award for the new National Express East Coast (NXEC) booking engine and website.

As any of you reading this who have used the NXEC booking engine know, it dramatically simplifies the process of finding and buying rail tickets online...not just on NXEC routes, but for any train in the UK.  We have blogged before about the intuitive user interface and its cutting edge use of AJAX technology as well as the positive customer feedback and improved business results for NXEC before.

We (and NXEC) have also received lots of accolades from customers and the industry about how great the new booking engine is.  So it fills us with a great sense of pride and accomplishment to receive this well-deserved acknowledgement from the Rail Industry for all the creativity and teamwork that went into making it happen.

It has been a long road, but the hard work and effort has paid off, not just because we won this award, but because we succeeded in creating a first-of-its-kind, innovative and successful new booking engine for trains that will set the standard for all that follow, in terms of business performance, ease of use and customer satisfaction. It is also a clear demonstration of how User-Centred Design makes a tangible difference to customers and business.

I just want to take a moment to thank the entire NXEC team from Flow:  Simon Hatch, Alejandra Obregon, Martina Schell and Kelsey Smith; our partners at Splendid: Paul Bishop, Simon Parbutt, Alistair Thomson and Karl Wortmann; the team at Atos Origin who built it:  Graham Bodman, Richard Phillpot, Ian Collier, Eleanor Waldron and Chris Rees; and the team at Tullo Marshall Warren (TMW) for bringing the marketing website together.

But perhaps most importantly, I want to thank Emma Passey and the entire NXEC team for their vision, passion and perseverance.  We couldn't have done it without you!

Congratulations to everyone. A well deserved award!

- Ian Worley, Director of User Experience at Flow Interactive

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Download Case Studies about this project:

• National Express East Coast Booking Engine Case Study (78k .pdf)
• National Express East Coast Website Case Study (92k .pdf)

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I wrote this article about cross-channel ethnography for Internet Retailing Magazine earlier this year. I'll be talking about this topic at the Internet Retailing event in October.

Insight to innovation: The power of cross-channel ethnography

When Bronislaw Malinowski decided to study the habits and culture of the natives of the Trobriand Islands in the South Pacific during his exile in the First World War, little could he have imagined that the techniques he developed to learn about other cultures would be used to revolutionise the marketing and sales of consumer goods and services. However, this is exactly what is happening.

Ethnography, once confined to academic research departments has, over the last 20-30 years, become a widely used and powerful research technique for companies seeking to improve how they market and sell to customers. They have even turned the lens on themselves to improve how they manage their own businesses.

More recently, the desire to provide compelling multi-channel customer experiences that lure customers away from competitors has become the holy grail for many retailers. However, there is a noticeable gap between the precision with which research is used to understand customer behaviour offline and how it is applied in the design of online stores.

This gap is closing, however. As online retailing enters the mainstream, multi-channel retailers are investing more to improve the quality and effectiveness of their online stores. They are also looking for ways to build customer loyalty in a world where technology is making customers more and more promiscuous. Cross-channel ethnography is one of the tools retailers are turning to for insight.

The trouble with websites...

"Well, I can't really tell what the phone looks like from the picture...", said Katie, a participant in a recent usability study for one of the UK's leading mobile operators. "I would go to a shop at this point, before I make a decision".

From a research point of view, this is not surprising behaviour. It has long been understood that customers move fluidly and frequently between online and offline channels a number of times before finally committing to a purchase, especially for high value, feature-rich or lifestyle items. What is surprising, however, is how few retailers actually use customer insights like these to increase sales across both channels. The reality is, more often than not the website and shop are treated as separate businesses, competing for the same customers.

Armed with printouts from multiple providers about the cost of various phones and call plans, Katie later went to that same mobile operator's high street store hoping to buy her new phone. In the store, she was frustrated to learn that the phone she wanted was only available for free (on her chosen plan), if purchased on the website. The shop assistant tried to explain that the website and the store were different businesses and that he was not able to honour what was advertised on the website. As a result, Katie walked down the street to another shop and got a better deal from someone else.

The bottom line is that customers cannot often get a real sense of a product online. In spite of increasingly sophisticated tools for inspecting products (zooming and rotating photos, or seeing the product in different colours, etc.) most people only feel confident about making a purchase once they have had a chance to see and hold the item for real. In addition, in the high street, customers may feel more compelled to purchase because it is less convenient to come back, whereas online they know they can return easily. The problem is that they often don't.

Hindsight vs insight

Unfortunately for this particular mobile operator, these insights came too late. The structure of the business was not likely to change anytime soon. Not recognising the intimate relationship between online and offline shopping behaviour and structuring the business accordingly, meant losing Katie and many other customers like her to competitors.

The irony is, that the use of customer research (in particular ethnography) to understand and influence buying behaviour is probably most thoroughly developed in the bricks-and-mortar retailing industry. However, these same approaches are not often used to design and build online stores, much less getting the two channels to work together.

As online retailing has gained market-share in recent years, customer research has become more commonplace, though often only in the form of focus groups, usability testing or accessibility studies. However, these types of studies rarely identify genuine opportunities for innovation. This is because all of these techniques either focus on optimising the present based on historical best practice or seek out user’s opinions about things which they know and care little about. People are notoriously bad at identifying their own latent unmet needs, particularly where technology is concerned.

The best way to understand customer motivations and draw out insights that can have tangible impact on the bottom line, is to observe customers through the entire purchasing lifecycle; from learning about products, deciding on which ones to buy and ultimately buying and using them. This means using various ethnographic research techniques, from short context studies through to more in-depth longitudinal studies (which occur over a much longer timeframe), to observe customers in the different contexts in which decisions occur, physically, emotionally and socially.

For instance, we know that customers use the internet to shop around and gather information about their available choices before purchasing. In a recent study by Comscore and Google, users visited websites 22 times before making a purchase, with the "winning" site being visited 2.5 times on average. As we saw with Katie in our earlier example, similar patterns of behaviour can be observed across different channels, with customers often finding products online, visiting a store to see the products up close before purchasing, often online. Learning to capitalise on this behaviour can have a huge impact on customer experience and ultimately sales.

It's the little things that count

When a leading educational toy company, decided to overhaul its web presence, they decided to use a customer-centric design approach that combined insights from studies of on and offline customer behaviour. The company knew that they had a winning format with their high street stores. Play areas which allowed kids try out the products (and even let mum do some shopping) were popular with customers, as were the helpful staff and the educational nature of the products. While the online presence provided the facility for customers to purchase all of the same products from the comfort of their own home, it simply wasn't generating the desired sales figures.

In order to understand why the online experience was not living up to the in-store experience, lab-based usability research with the website was combined with short, in-store ethnographic "probes" to observe un-moderated customer shopping behaviour. For the online research, new and existing customers were brought into a lab where they were interviewed and asked to use the website to find products they would be interested in buying. Then, over a three-day period, customers at several stores were observed while they shopped and then interviewed after they had completed their purchases. Staff, too, were observed and interviewed.

The online research indicated that a key barrier to purchase was the customer's lack of confidence in whether they had found the right product. Faced with this uncertainty, the vast majority of customers interviewed indicated that they would go into a high street store to ask for advice. However, the real insight came from observing how customers interacted with the shop assistants once they came into the shop.

"I would like to find something that will help my son develop his creative skills." said Jane, a first-time mother, to one of the shop assistants. "He is two and very active, so I am worried he won't focus on one thing for long. What would you suggest?" The assistant promptly showed Jane a number of different options and, after some discussion and comparison, Jane eventually chose a water-based "magic" drawing mat.

This simple transaction between Jane and the shop assistant revealed something very important about the shopping experience, particularly for this brand of educational toys. Far more than the ability to easily browse or search for products online, what customers needed was assurance that the toy they were buying was going to help their child develop in some important way. It was about being a good parent.

In-store, this problem was solved both by the availability of advice from the shop assistants and through the age and developmental information printed on the packaging. However, this information, which is fundamental to the brand's value proposition, was not being used on the website to help customers find and compare products to buy - yet it was essential if they were to feel confident about their purchase decisions.

The new site was then redesigned with additional age-based navigation, age and development stage search filters, product-level development information and customer reviews. The company also introduced a policy that allowed customers to reserve a product online and then come and pick it up in store, for those who wanted to have a look at it before buying. Simply by changing the website to support customers like Jane, the company was able to increase online sales by 33% in 12 months, with individual customers viewing 21% more toys and spending 19% more per visit.

The future is personal

With online retail sales in the UK growing at a dizzying 40-50% year-on-year (and now accounting for approximately 15% of total retail sales, according to a recent study by CapGemini and the Interactive Media in Retail Group), this is a lesson that many retailers should learn from.

As the internet evolves and becomes more mainstream, it is fundamentally changing how customers interact with businesses both on and offline. At the same time, customers are becoming ever more sophisticated in their buying behaviour and use of technology. As a result, it is important for retailers to continuously engage customers to understand what really matters to them and identify those factors that have a tangible differentiating impact on the customer experience.

In this ever more personalised and competitive environment, cross-channel ethnographic research with customers is an essential tool for any online retailer who wants to continuously leverage the changing behaviour and expectations of their customer base. If the insights gained from this research are then used to enable customers to move seamlessly between online and offline channels to achieve their goals, companies will reap the benefits in sales, customer satisfaction and ultimately, loyalty.

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Ian Worley is Director of User Experience at Flow. We're a leading London-based User-Centred Design consultancy which specializes in using research to empower better and more effective design solutions.