Ai Editorial: Reduce Anxiety & Build Trust to step-up Mobile Conversion
Mobile customer experience has a major impact on the conversion rate. Ai Correspondent’s Ritesh Gupta assesses small steps that can help in improving the same
Every minute detail, every second that eventually leads to a transaction via a mobile device is being thoroughly studied by airlines. The level of introspection is getting deeper, owing to the fact that the rate of booking abandonment in the travel e-commerce category is as high as 80%.
So what are key the customer experience-related questions that are being addressed today?
Issues like simplifying data entry, curtailing the time taken or steps toward finishing a transaction, guarantee that the offer is the best possible one (pricing or perceived value being the best) or just ensuring navigation is top-notch take all the attention.
“The most critical issue in the mobile experience today is balancing the efficiency and seamless interaction that customers have come to expect with the security and safety that businesses must provide. Customers abandon transactions for a number of reasons, and if a company’s mobile site or app is plagued with slow load times, a clunky UI, or a labor intensive checkout process, consumers will naturally seek out a competitor who delivers a more convenient and pleasant experience,” says Marc Barach, chief marketing officer at Jumio.
Something as severe as a crash, too, should be avoided.
The most annoying thing is an app crash, especially after a long form is filled in, says Michal Juhas, Asian mobile booking specialist HotelQuickly’s co-founder/ CTO.
“When we were starting with HotelQuickly iOS and Android apps, the team was very small. We faced some production defects every week. But as we grew and set up a proper QA department, we brought the crashes below 0.07%,” shared Juhas.
Brands should look at reducing anxiety and rather building trust at every stage.
Here are some key points that can help in improving upon on these core issues:
- Put yourself into a traveller’ shoes: It is vital for any supplier or intermediary to first strengthen the product itself. For instance, if I don’t like to rush all the time, how can an app go beyond last-minute travel booking option. There are apps that are answering such concerns with “tomorrow booking” feature. Also, as Jumio, points out even till date apps and mobile websites don’t embrace initiatives that don’t let customers to think they are actually trying to complete a booking on a relatively smaller screen. So automatically switching between the alphabetical and numerical keyboards based on what data is being typed is something that would not peeve a user.
A customer shouldn’t be made to think during the booking flow. So one should focus on streamlining the process to whatever extent it is possible.
It should be remembered that overloaded apps can be just as bad as under-featured offerings.
Also, a customer can shuffle between devices for one transaction. As Barach says, today with everything on-demand from the cloud, the transaction is independent of the device. Consumers go back and forth between desktop, mobile, and tablet so frequently that businesses have really begun to realize the importance of responsive design and that their experience feels seamless across each device. When optimizing for different devices, it’s really critical to take into consideration what activities your users are most likely undertaking on that platform and put that functionality front and centre, says Barach.
Airlines need to conduct a variety of tests on the checkout funnel, and opt for an apt variation. Is the shortest path always the best one? Airlines need to assess this in detail.
- Seek constant improvement: This arena is still a work in progress, so there are new solutions that can take care of concerns like security.
For its part, Jumio recently stated that with its computer vision technology, lastminute.com group’s Bravofly.com app users are now be able to book flights in half-a-minute, six times faster than before.
With Jumio’s BAM Checkout, a customer taps the scan button integrated into a mobile checkout form and holds up their credit card and, optionally, back of driver license to their mobile device’s camera. Their personal information and credit card number are auto populated in seconds, eliminating the need for customers to spend about two minutes typing an average of 75 keystrokes to fill in their name, address and payment data
- One final assurance: There is always plenty to learn from the other sectors. I came across a stage where a retailer displayed a particular date rather than number of days after which my order would be delivered. Such message definitely made an impact as I could see myself closer to something I had desired. So travel brands needs to be creative with their images or messages (of course, has to be clutter-free) that can add a tinge of positivity around the transaction.
- Payment option: The choice of offering card schemes or alternative payment option needs to be fully localized. For instance, HotelQuickly assesses the most used payment methods and integrates them if that individual payment method is compatible with its business model. “If a larger provider offers several local alternative payment methods, less used payment methods might also be integrated as there is no additional effort required to offer them. We want to bring enjoyable, stress-less last-minute travelling to as many travellers as possible which includes removing credit card payment barriers,” Mario Peng, co-founder and CFO, HotelQuickly mentioned in a previous article.
- Don’t forget to address fraud: With near constant news around data breaches and hacks, customers expect their transactions and personal information to be handled with the utmost care, and airlines obviously need to ensure that travellers are not just physically safe, but also data safe.Airlines need to ensure that the person making a transaction is who they claim to be and to do it in a way that adds convenience to the process. Jumio’s offering matches the information on the credit card to that on the driver’s license and Netverify offers Face Match technology that compares the customer’s actual face with the photo on their ID and produces a likelihood-of-match score.
According to Adyen, airlines need to selectively apply 3D Secure only to high-risk transactions, based on data customized to the airline. The way to do this is to dynamically assess and rank a transaction’s risk score on a scale from low to high, and then trigger 3D Secure only for the high-risk transactions. This means airlines can avoid routing genuine customers through 3D Secure, ensure a smoother payment flow, and minimize the potential conversion impact. By making 3D Secure a dynamic part of the payment flow, it becomes an asset rather than a conversion killer.
Juhas says mobile companies need to invest into high quality fraud detection software and build a dedicated team to identify and prevent credit card fraud and voucher misuse.
Never lose sight of overall experience
Even as mobile commerce is key to revenue generation, it shouldn’t be forgotten that airlines need to increase engagement with their apps by understanding that their customers want more than a place to look up flight times or status.
“They (travellers) want the holistic travel experience at their fingertips, from convenient ways to check-in, purchase of travel-related services from in-flight entertainment to seat upgrades and the ability to make additional travel accommodations, like United Airline’s integration of Uber into their app. Likewise, UAL’s integration of Jumio into their mobile boarding pass issuance process delivers greater speed and convenience than the old way of obtaining a pass,” says Barach.
The most important thing for airlines to keep in mind is that travel is more than just the flight itself, it’s the entire experience from start to finish, from booking the trip to arriving back home. The airline’s app has the opportunity to become the consumer’s control panel for the entire experience.
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