Putting the “fun” in “funnel”
My new job has got me thinking about the payment funnel more than I was required to do previously. The trick with the funnel seems to be to never give the customer any reason to leave it.
Proud day
This came to mind today, when I tried to purchase the second fridge freezer I have ever bought. This is an exciting landmark in any life and I was understandably nervous. Rather than forming aesthetic opinions about fridge freezers (surely the path to madness) I decided to let Ethical Consumer dictate which one to buy. However, once I noticed that the prices edged into “new small car” territory, I decided I could perhaps compromise down to around an “8” ethical rating.
I chose to shop at John Lewis for a few reasons:
- Sentimental (my mother loves that shop)
- Socialism (John Lewis staff are called “partners” and share in the profits. I assume they call each other “comrade” behind the scenes)
- Convenience (there’s a big shop in Edinburgh, which is presumably a distribution centre)
- Ethics (John Lewis is not Amazon)
- Lazy (I already have a John Lewis account)
(Just for clarity: this is a different John Lewis from the recently deceased American Senator)
Search filtering
It was really satisfying whittling down the list of fridge freezers to a subset who weren’t manufactured by child soldiers (at least according to Ethical Consumer), then further trimming the list by energy rating. Pretty quickly one fridge stood out. I could have got a much cheaper fridge, but I’d already committed to paying the guilt tax.
Ranking: ★★★★☆ Fun for the whole family
(One star deducted because each time you change the filter parameters, the whole page refreshes and you need to scroll down to the part of the page you were originally at. This made adding every brand name laborious.)
I moved on to the cart page.
Upsell
John (I felt I was on first name terms with John Lewis by now) then did a very clever bit of upsell, by offering to recycle my old fridge freezer for £20. My local council will charge £5 to collected a fridge-freezer, but this will presumably go to landfill, rather than be recycled. Plus getting the old fridge removed at the same time as the new one is delivered saves me a lot of time and admin. I gladly added the option to my cart.
“Uncertain times”
Unfortunately, this purchase was made during the partial lockdown of Scotland, so I immediately had two questions:
- Would I need to get the fridge up to my flat by myself?
- Would I need to get the old fridge down to the curb myself?
This is the point John (Lewis) should have anticipated. I did what John must dread: I opened a new tab and tried to get answers to these questions, before I’d put in my payment details.
I wouldn’t have done this, if there was a little note which read something like:
I see you want your fridge delivered to Edinburgh. We can collect your old fridge from your flat and will take your new fridge into your house, if you like.
But that information wasn’t available. So instead, I was thrown into several labyrinths.
Getting recycling information from the website
On the page which details the nature of the recycling service, there’s a banner which looks like this:
That’s pretty clear: the old fridge would need to be lugged down three flights of stairs and put outside my building. However, following the “Read our service updates” link gave me contradictory information:
We can now bring your delivery to a room of your choice and we will offer to unpack for you. We’ve put a number of measures in place to prioritise your safety and the safety of our Partners.
No mention of what happens to the old fridge, however.
Labyrinth ranking: ★☆☆☆☆ Would not recommend
Labyrinth number 2: the phone system
A few years ago, someone realised that call centres were expensive and that most of the calls to them were for simple queries which could be answered by a frequently asked question page on the website.
So it became common practice to make it really, really hard to reach a phone number, unless you’d navigated through the FAQ pages first.
Here’s my problem with that approach: while the metric for “have we reduced calls to the call centre?” is easy to measure and turn into money by reducing hours of call centre staff, there’s another hidden cost here: what about the lost sales from customers who abandoned their cart because they didn’t get an answer to their question? Without a sophisticated understanding of all of the user’s actions on the site, it’s impossible to know if the savings in one area cancel out the loss of the other.
Anyway, I found the phone number and that whole thing went about as well as expected: I called the main number, waited in a queue for ten minutes then gave up.
Then I found a second number for technical support. I got through after five minutes, the agent got me to describe my problem, put me on hold, then hung up on me.
I even found the phone number of the store in Edinburgh, but this seemed to go to a call centre too, so I gave up.
Labyrinth ranking: ★☆☆☆☆ Would not recommend
Desperation
I was so desperate at this point, I tried to contact John on Twitter. This might have worked in 2010, but these days companies only seem to use Twitter to throw shade using underpaid interns.
Labyrinth ranking: ★☆☆☆☆ Would not recommend
(Update: John got back to me mid-morning, the next working day)
Meatspace
At this point I realised it might have been quicker to walk to the store and ask in person. So I did that, after queuing outside for five minutes. Navigating any shop while maintaining social distancing rapidly becomes a game of Pac-Man, as you swerve into haberdashery to avoid a family of four walking abreast.
I hate Pac-Man.
There, I got my answer: everything is back to normal. My old fridge will be collected from my flat and my new fridge will be carried up the stairs by no more than two delivery personnel. Admittedly, this was not conveyed to me in writing and the partner’s initial answer was the opposite, but luckily she went off to check.
Labyrinth ranking: ★★★☆☆ Scary maze, but got the answer
Proceed to payment
To my astonishment, after all this nonsense, the cart had not timed out and I proceeded to payment. I only hope that the verbal information I was given has also reached the brave folk who will turn up with my new fridge.
I am not normal
Obviously, I am not a normal user. I’m a web developer and apparently pathologically obsessed with buying one particular fridge freezer from one particular seller. Any normal person would have given up and gone to Amazon. But what my new job has given me a new appreciation for is the myriad of tiny choices designers and developers make, which could cost or save hundreds of thousands of pounds per year.
