“Improvements to our booking engine have quickly resulted in very positive impact on our digital sales and customer satisfaction.“
-ILARI POHJOLA, SENIOR MANAGER, ECOMMERCE SALES & DEVELOPMENT
introduction
For the digital leaders in their fields, an effortless buying experience of a service or a product is an essential part of a modern customer experience. Together with Aurinkomatkat (Suntours) we wanted to lift the customer satisfaction even to new heights, so that the trip booking would easy, fast and effortless - no matter if you are a first timer or an experienced veteran.
insights
the service concept creation
digital aurinko service concept workshop
The aim of the concept workshop was to gather all the insights and valuable ideas from the key stakeholders and envision together what Digital Aurinko customer experience would be in the future. The outcome of the concept workshop was a holistic service vision that would serve as basis for future service creation and roadmapping.
insights
the customer lifecycle
the customer lifecycle & booking
The primary focus area and the key objective for the service design was the enhancement of the trip booking experience of Aurinkomatkat.fi. As trip booking as an experience usually involves a good amount of dreaming & planning before the actual booking takes place, there was a need for booking to support especially planning as a behaviour pattern. In addition, it was clear from the beginning that the behaviour patterns for dreaming and planning are nonlinear and vary from customer to customer, so the booking engine concept needed to serve very different angles of customer needs not falling into the trap of serving only one single customer journey track.
insights
what is dreaming?
Eventually almost every booked trip starts from a dreaming phase of some sort. Dreaming as a behaviour is not tied to certain location or time and can happen on a jogging trail or at the workplace in a front of a computer. The dreaming phase typically precedes personal travelling intervals. When dreaming phase has attached itself a certain level of reality, and on the top of that some concrete customer actions to make the actual dreams happen, the dreaming then turns to planning.
insights
what is planning?
Trip planning is an iterative and loopy process including mainly destination, hotel and price comparison, as well as pondering personal preferences. In planning phase customers typically keep certain options open for comparison, seek new candidates and abandon not suitable alternatives. The end of the successful planning phase is typically measured by the possible candidates limiting to one. The green flag in the end is then the entry point for actual booking.
the service concept
the service concept fundamentals
the service concept
the funnel model for booking flow
the new service concept for booking flow
The result of the concepting was a funnel model booking flow where the emphasis is on easy planning and fast booking. When seeking destinations and hotels, the concept would be adaptive fitting in multitude of personal preferences. This required right tools for filtering, sorting, and comparison so that the planning phase would be pleasant & effective and customers would reach their end goal easily.
the craftmanship
the ux concept
ux concept fundamentals
The UX concept was solely built around the customers and their wide and unpredictable range of preferences. All the necessary information required for making a booking was unified and gathered around the funnel-type UX flow, where the filtering and sorting of information played a key role. Booking could so be done effortlessly regardless of the vast amount of content and options to choose from. In practise UX concept would function so that finding your preferences would require just few clicks.
Multidestination search (high-level search)
The renewed destination search makes possible for the users to search trip options from multiple destinations at the same time. With a flexible time scope it also shows the trip availability information in the calendar.
the gain
Search rapidly multiple destinations at the same time and be aware of suitable dates instantly
Filtering, sorting & day-picker search (mid- to low-level search)
With the filtering and sorting users can find their personal preferences from the vast amount of options easily. Depending on the variety of personal preferences, users can search with a mid-level search criterias such as price range, rating of the hotel, and alternative trip dates to a low-level search criterias such as pool, wi-fi or a even a microwave oven.
the gain
Be quickly aware of all the suitable options that are matching your personal preferences
Unified UX flow
All the destination information relevant for making a booking was unified with search in order to create an effortless, comfortable and solid UX flow. In practise there wouldn't be scattered booking experience or UX flow exits anymore to reach isolated islands of information.
the gain
All the relevant information for making the booking are at hand
With Aurinkomatkat (Suntours) booking engine, users can easily plan and book their trips by finding their personal preferences from a vast amount of available options.
ServicesService Concept, Design Leadership, UX DesignYear2017Linkwww.aurinkomatkat.fi