Don't roadblock your customers online!

Fedex are a huge company with some 280,000 employees and a revenue of some 40 billion per year. I do not much like their website.. it is not pretty. It's left aligned and has some 'changing world' global experience thingy they want me to use on their homepage.

But what I love about Fedex is that I can take a tracking number, Google "Fedex", land on their homepage, paste in my number.. with spaces or not.. and hey presto, I have the details of my shipment! They make it easy for me. They don't ask me to login to an account or set one up before I can see the order. As if someone cares about my order and that hiding it will make it any safer. If someone managed to get my tracking number all they would see is my name, the route it took, destination city and parcel size. My name and address are in the phone book, how is this different?

When Fonterra decommissioned their old Intranet in 2008, it had some 15,000 pages. (Actually, they stopped counting at 15,000.) Employees hated it and seldom used it because it was too hard. Today, Fonterra's Intranet is a portal which routes employees to other systems. The Intranet portal itself contains nothing but a directory, main menu, quick-links, news, key company info about the likes of Health & Safety and a poll. It has aprox 40 static content pages. The Intranet homepage automatically comes up on every employee's screen when they start up their computers on the network. No login. This, while a seemingly easy thing to do, is rare.

Previously Fonterra management believed they needed employees to login for 'security' reasons. Once they realised anyone motivated enough could get company information via various other means, and that logging in would not help the uptake of their new Intranet, the problem disappeared. The exposure to employees of the Intranet homepage was prolific and profound. Omitting a simple "Login" made a massive difference to thousands of employees. From subsequent surveys, employees gained a lot more confidence in their company ... and trusted the content they were reading more than ever.

(See below for details)

Do you really want to help your customers (employees are customers too)? Make life easy for them. Remove the "roadblocks" and bring what's most important (to them) to the front!

Fonterra Survey results

First survey : four months after launch

• 895 responses
• 49% “definitely” find things more easily on new Milkyway, 42% “sometimes”
• 90% said not having to log in saves them time - “This is a massive improvement, thanks”
• 95% said it helps them feel more informed about Fonterra
• 74% trust the information on Milkyway
• 77% said they use new Milkyway more than they used old Milkyway

Second survey : ten months after launch (questions changed slightly)

• 1495 responses – up 67% on first survey!
• Can you get most things you need from Milkyway? Answer “no” down from 14% to 5%
• 99% (up from 95%) said they feel more informed about Fonterra
• Do you trust the information on Milkyway is up to date? Answer “no/don’t know” down 16%