Stamford General Manager interviewed on Sky Business News
Stamford Interactive Managing Director Craig Kelly is interviewed by Brook Corte from Sky Business News Tech Report about the need for Australian business to better understand their customers needs and design better mobile websites to meet consumer demand. (The text transcript follows, below.)
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Transcript
Brooke Court: More people are now using smart phones and tablets to buy products online, bypassing their personal computers altogether, but a new study by design firm Stamford Interactive is showing that many Australian retailers aren’t aware or even ready for that shift with a majority of their websites still not enabled for mobile browsing. Craig Kelly is the General Manager of Stamford Interactive, and a user design expert. He joins us now in the studio, thanks for coming on Tech Report Craig, appreciated.
Craig Kelly: Thank you Brooke
Brooke Court: Let start with the overall trend first. It’s something that Steve Jobs calls the post PC era, how do you see that play out in your field.
Craig Kelly: Look, definitely Brooke we are now into an era of customers on the go, and customers are telling us that they want to take the internet in their pocket with them, in 12 months or so many reports are saying that people will often access the web more often via their mobile devices than they will via a standard desktop or laptop. The good news is that, for Australian businesses, customer experience is still the key, customer service is still the key. They just need to understand that people are now accessing their websites in a cafe or on a train and not just on their desktops at home or in the office.
Brooke Court: And you did a study in to the state of websites with all of that in mind. What did you actually find in the study?
Craig Kelly: Well look, we’re usability experts at Stamford Interactive and that means we are working with customers all the time and looking at the way they interact with organisations. So we thought we’d have a look at how Australian businesses are travelling with that. Now what we found was 74 pecent of iconic Australian businesses aren’t just mobile enabled, they don’t have mobile friendly sites. Now we actually had a look at retail sites as well Brooke and it actually got a little bit worse. With the decline in sales in Australia, we thought we’d have a look at 100 sites, and 84 percent of those sites aren’t mobile friendly.
Brooke Court: These are the ones that have sites in the first place.
Craig Kelly: Exactly
Broke Court: I mean they all have sites but what are you talking about in terms of usability from customers, when I still go to a David Jones website I think it’s just a waste of time I can’t buy stuff I still have to go into the store, I can’t buy it online.
Craig Kelly: Yep Yep
Brooke Court: So what are you finding are the ones that are online then trying to extend it to mobiles. Is that the ideal scenario that they should do?
Craig Kelly: Absolutely look as I said before people are accessing websites now in a cafe or in a train and they expect to be able to buy your products, buy your services from those places. Now I mean as you just mentioned Brooke with David Jones, the fact of the matter is that these days it is actually easier to buy a pair of jeans online with the new Macy International website than it is with Australian department stores.
Brooke Court: So what are you referring to when you talk about a website being mobile enabled?
Craig Kelly: Yep yep.
Brooke Court: What does that actually mean?
Craig Kelly: Well obviously when we are talking about mobile website we’re talking about a lot smaller real estate for us to do our transactions on, and also we’re using them in a different context we’re not at the office we’re not sitting at home with the keyboard we’ve got a lot smaller space to work with so we might be doing different things. But look we’re talking mobile devices today but really it’s about customer interactions. It’s really very important that Australian businesses are designing the way their customers are receiving their information. A good example of some ordinary design that happen recently Brooke was the Census that happen recently, over 670,000 households forgot to hit the submit button on their screen. Of course that meant that their results weren’t submitted. Now you could imagine if that was a retail store and that submit button was a sale button. So the concepts of design are no different on a mobile device than they are on a larger device.
Brooke Court: So when you said retailers they’re the ones who are really losing business from all of this, so what are you suggesting for better design features for, say, the retailers when it comes to mobile devices, so if I’m on the train looking up wanting to buy something on the mobile, what are you saying I should see so that I actually click though and make the purchase decision.
Craig Kelly: Well it depends, what’s very important is that you understand what your customer’s likely to be doing on their mobile phone. The biggest mistake that organisations make is just duplicate their website on the smaller mobile device, the fact of the matter is you don’t necessarily need all of that information when you are in a mobile situation. So you might be just looking for store location or you may well be just looking at purchasing something. So you really don’t need all of that information, so you must understand what your customer is doing when they’re in that mobile environment.
Brooke Court: So do you find that most of these websites are pushing for people to make a purchase online, or still pushing for them to come in store?
Craig Kelly: Well look it’s a little bit of a mixture, well certainly in Australia we think, when were talking to customers, they’re telling us that they do want to purchase things online and do business online, and quite simply our study showed that they are not currently. Now look, the good news is there are some massive opportunities of course, eBay increased their sales from mobile devices by 146 percent last year so there’s obviously some massive opportunities here for Australian business, they just have to grab it. It all starts with understanding the customer and giving them the right design.
Brooke Court: So if retailers are doing it quite badly from where you’re sitting, who’s doing it well, any particular industries?
Craig Kelly: The best sectors we found are travel, banking is another one. Now if you look at something like banking, the only way you really differentiate your service is though customer service. I think the banking sector gets that, and that’s what they’ve been doing. Travel once again; you know, your mobile is what you need to be able to do, so the travel industry is very good at it as well.
Brooke Court: Fantastic Craig Kelly great to chat to you today. Thanks so much.
Craig Kelly: Thank you Brooke.
Brooke Court: From Stamford Interactive, that is the tech report for now, the latest business headlines up here next on Sky News business.