Blog homeBefore I explain what I mean, first a little history.
7 years ago a few of us set up a small tour operator. We took reservations online - but only in a very simple way - people had to download a PDF form, complete it, then send us their document with their deposit payment. Simple - but it worked.
We didn’t have a big budget for marketing - and sales started to flow in very very slowly. Actually it was too slow - but that is a discussion for another day. As a result, every time we got a sale we got very excited. We poured over the customer’s data - Mr & Mrs so and so from Hampshire going to Egypt…. the news travelled around the office a few times - and much like UK politics - the same sale was announced several times - just to make us feel better.
A few months later and sales were up. We didn’t get excited by an individual sale anymore. Instead we began to group similar customers together by product. Comments still went around the office like “Ah - another sale to Egypt” or “This customer comes from Alaska”. We didn’t know the customer names anymore but we could still identify them by their individual needs.
A few years later I was working for a dot com. We were doing a couple of thousand bookings a day. We had no connection with the customers at all. Customers were numbers on a spreadsheet.
However, there was one thing that was in place that did try to address this balance. We had an information radiator.
Next to the coffee machine (it was a 10,000 USD coffee machine - remember this was a dot com) was a computer screen that updated every 5 minutes or so. It would provide a daily count of bookings - as well as a “month to date”. This was all broken down by booking source - agents, partners, affiliates etc…. Every time any member of staff had a coffee we all had a look and informed ourselves about how sales were going on.
I have also seen information radiators run on whiteboards - where you show the number of site visitors, number of bookings (and therefore conversion). The key is that it is updated at least on a daily basis.
These radiators really help everyone in a company focus on the performance of your website (or other booking channels). Information will be “osmotically” distributed - staff will know how things are working and whether this month is a good month or not…
From my experience I have found this very useful and ensures that people remain focussed….
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