Customer experience review: Redbox.com

I got a request recently from the team at Redbox.com for a quick customer experience review of their website.

Context

As always, it's important to set some context before diving in. Redbox allows customers to rent DVDs from kiosks, in grocery stores and similar locations, across the US. Customers can later return the DVD to any Redbox kiosk. It's a neat concept - kind of like a quicker, more accessible version of the video rental store - and a rental only costs a dollar per night.

The website, then, isn't essential to the Redbox experience, since customers can rent and drop off DVDs just using the kiosks. However, any customer who goes online should have an even better experience with Redbox - by choosing a movie and a nearby kiosk via the website, making it even easier to pick up the DVD from that kiosk.

This review focuses just on that online experience: exploring how well the Redbox.com website serves an existing customer (who has used a kiosk at least once).

One last note: had I evaluated Redbox's primary experience, via an in-store kiosk, I'm sure I would have had a more positive review. I provide these comments solely as constructive criticism, in the hopes that Redbox can improve its online customer experience, even as it continues delighting customers via its kiosks.

Hook

Here's the hook of my review: while the Redbox website has some strengths, the selection process needs fixing. Doing so would, I predict, immediately increase usage of the site - which should lead to higher retention rates and word-of-mouth from delighted customers.

Explanation

While there are several areas of potential improvement on the Redbox site, by far the most important is the movie-selection process. This is because it's on the critical path - something every customer must go through to complete a transaction - and because, in its current form, it risks turning customers away from the website, and possibly Redbox altogether.

Here are the steps in an online transaction at Redbox.com:

1. Once on the homepage, click to begin the selection process.
2. Browse the available movies, and select one to rent.
3. Find a kiosk (a "redbox") carrying the movie.
4. Complete the payment/checkout process.

On the current Redbox.com site, step 1 is easy. Arguably the most prominent real estate on the homepage shows in bold, red, all-capitals text: "FIND A MOVIE". Good positioning, good wording. Click.

Step 2 is the problem area. After I click to "find a movie," I see a page that has all of ten - ten - movies. And no search function. So finding movies really means clicking the "next" link to see page after page of ten movies each, and then deciding if anything in that long stream of pages was the one you wanted to find.

On a tactical level, since the "next" link appears below the fold at 1024 × 768 resolution, I have to scroll down the page to reveal the link. If I have to scroll anyway (and scrolling isn't a problem, by the way), why not display more movies on each page? At least it would make the selection process faster.

Perhaps the biggest problem, after the lack of a search function, is this: there aren't enough movies. I counted 77 movies total (by scrolling and clicking "next" until the end), a surprisingly low number for a forward-looking movie rental company. I can imagine customers being turned off by this experience - clicking "next" again and again, only to find the list end too quickly - and either not returning to the website, or even telling friends that Redbox has poor selection.

Here's another strange problem: When I moved on to Step 3, to find a kiosk in my area, I viewed the inventory of one particular kiosk and found over 200 movies available. So the homepage leads me to a list of 77 titles, but clicking into the depths of the site, I find a hidden treasure trove of almost three times that number.

My guess is that this discrepancy can be explained by some homepage text that customers won't read. Just under that huge "FIND A MOVIE" link is this text: "See all the new release DVDs available now." I think this may mean that the link leads to a list just of the new releases... not of the full catalog of Redbox titles.

Recommendation

The strategic change I'd recommend, just based on this quick look at the site, could be called something like "Exposing the Goods." No matter what the business model, customers want to see what's available. It's OK to highlight a subset of inventory - like top sellers or new releases - but customers must have a prominent, easy way to browse and search the entire catalog.

Redbox isn't alone on this point, by the way. In our consulting work at Creative Good we've seen this in retailers, newspapers, and other websites. There's a lot of potential improvement in un-hiding your gems for customers.

It's impossible to comment on the Redbox site without mentioning "the elephant in the living room," which is Netflix.com. As an older, online-only business, Netflix can be expected to have a more fully designed website. And indeed, Netflix's Browse DVDs page shows titles, ratings, categories, related picks, genres, and other features. Redbox shouldn't try to launch all of this at once, or perhaps ever - but Netflix's design does give a model for how Redbox can, and should, improve its merchandising for interested customers.

(P.S. If you're interested in improving your organization's customer experience, see what Creative Good offers.)

• Jun 25, 2008
• IN: Customer Experience
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