National Express East Coast/GNER
Flow helped GNER (now National Express East Coast) to create a ground-breaking online booking engine. It has driven a 50% increase in conversion rates and set a new standard for the UK rail industry.
The brief: Design an online booking tool to help migrate ticket sales online and build customer loyalty.
A redesigned booking engine was a major element of GNER's web strategy. By replacing their white-label Trainline booking engine with a really innovative and simple new system, they planned to increase online sales and build customer loyalty. So in the summer of 2006, GNER engaged Flow Interactive, Splendid (our favourite design agency) and Atos Origin (for the technical build) to design and deliver a new ticket booking experience.
The new engine needed to:
- Provide a superior search, save and buy experience.
- Migrate sales from costly staff-serviced channels to the online channel.
- Support and build a positive brand experience
- Elegantly handle the complex relationship between fares, services and availability underpinning UK rail ticket sales.
What we did: Design and evaluate a new online booking engine for GNER ready for launch by November 2007.
The project began with a research phase, exploring both business and user needs to ensure any solution would focus on delivering a great customer experience whilst also considering GNER's technological and operational ambitions and constraints.
Informed by this research, Flow created personas and scenarios. These enabled the design team to define to a number of concepts that could satisfy established design goals in different ways.
Early testing revealed which concepts were favoured by users. These were refined through a series of rapid design/evaluation iterations resulting in a high fidelity prototype that demonstrated functional, structural and visual design guidelines ready for development.
The results: A first-of-its-kind, rich internet application which has dramatically increased conversion and customer satisfaction.
By grounding the design in research with real users, the team delivered a booking engine that makes the process of finding and buying a ticket intuitive, simple and pleasurable. And that has generated a substantial sales uplift.
In the first 6 months since the website's launch in November 2007:
- Overall revenue was up 30%
- The conversion rate was over 12% - up 50% from the year before
Because GNER handed over the east cost mainline franchise, the website launched under a National Express East Cost banner. But regardless of branding, the site's customer support team has had a field day with positive feedback. People have enjoyed the intuitive interface which allows them to juggle price and time options while providing instant feedback to help them find the ideal ticket to meet their needs. The Lowest Fare Finder, offering the ability to short-cut directly to the cheapest options for travelling between any two locations on the UK rail network, regardless of franchise, has also proved particularly popular.
The new website and booking engine have also been shortlisted for a number of industry awards.
"The Train Line is a horrid site to use...NXEC's is clean and intuitive"
"In future, I'll be buying all of my advance tickets online from NXEC, as their website is much more intuitive than the others. Good work!"
You can read more about this project on Flow's Think blog.
