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Blimp Backers Design a New Travel Experience; Retailers Fight ‘Item Not Received’ Fraud; VW Names a CXO
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Welcome back. A company trying to bring back travel by blimp is leaning on experience touches to make passengers feel safer. Retailers are adding friction to their return procedures to counter rising fraud. And Volkswagen named its first chief experience officer, part of its plan to refashion itself as what it calls a software-driven mobility provider.
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EquiRatings Hurdles Pandemic Challenges With Fan App
When the pandemic threatened the global equine industry, EquiRatings took to the apps, creating a simulated experience tool that kept the sport alive, despite COVID-19 restrictions.
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OceanSky Cruises’ expedition to the North Pole is conceived initially as a luxury airborne experience. PHOTO: HYBRID AIR VEHICLES LTD/DESIGN Q
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Blimps in recent decades have been most conspicuous as floating billboards. But a handful of companies are engineering their wider use, with some reappraising the airship as a travel experience, Katie Deighton writes for the Experience Report.
OceanSky Cruises, a Swedish aviation company, plans to be flying guests from Norway to the Arctic and back in a luxury aircraft buoyed by helium sometime between 2024 and 2025. The company says modern airships are less cramped, noisy and stressful than your best experience on a plane, and emit less carbon per passenger, too.
But persuading people that an airship is safe to board may prove challenging: Footage of the Hindenburg disaster remains vivid in the collective memory, said Gonzalo Gimeno, a marketing adviser to OceanSky Cruises.
The company is designing a website that will explain why its craft is safer than those of the 1930s, and adding interior design features like handrails and seat belts to boost passengers’ sense of familiarity and safety.
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United Parcel Service says it uses software to determine vehicle location to verify package delivery. PHOTO: JOHN MINCHILLO/ASSOCIATED PRESS
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Retailers are trying a little friction, normally a bad thing in customer experience, to counter an increase in “item not received” fraud, in which customers seek refunds by falsely claiming that e-commerce orders never arrived, Suzanne Kapner reports.
The chains can’t afford to chase away legitimate customers with restrictive return policies. But the scam can be costly, partly because it is relatively new and there isn’t much technology in place to prevent it, said Karisse Hendrick, founder of fraud-prevention company Chargelytics Consulting.
Retailers including Finish Line and Under Armour now make customers fill out affidavits when items don’t arrive. The forms ask questions such as whether customers checked with their neighbors to ensure the package wasn’t mistakenly dropped off at the wrong address.
The goal is to slow down the refund process and deter bad actors, the retailers said.
Finish Line and Under Armour don’t call the forms affidavits to customers, to avoid scaring them off. At Finish Line, it is a return refund form and at Under Armour it is called certification of nondelivery.
Still, some chains are considering going a step further, by having customers fill out a police report for missing items.
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Markus Kleimann, Volkswagen's newly appointed chief experience officer, was previously in charge of the car maker's G3 series of mid- and full-size cars. PHOTO: VOLKSWAGEN AG
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Volkswagen picked a company veteran to run a new user-experience division as the car maker aims to step up its engagement with customers while navigating sweeping changes in the auto industry, Katie Deighton reports.
Markus Kleimann, who has worked at Volkswagen since 2000, will be responsible for the management and development of the car maker’s customer interfaces, leading a newly created team of around 40 that will work across all of Volkwagen’s divisions and markets, the company said. The unit might develop tools that let customers customize and buy a car online, make it easier to charge an electric vehicle or improve the experience of calling a service hotline, for example.
More automotive companies are investing in experience, in part because they are interacting with customers much more than they did before, said Christophe Castagnera, head of strategy for the U.K. and the Middle East at Imagination Group, an experience design agency specializing in the automotive industry.
Car buying has become a total experience from research to trade-in, “and the more sophisticated and digital vehicles become, the more companies are going to want to control every part of that experience,” rather than relying on technology companies to fill in the blanks, he said.
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“Because it has the shape of a person, people expect the intelligence of a human. The level of the technology completely falls short of that. It’s like the difference between a toy car and an actual car.”
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— Takayuki Furuta, head of the Future Robotics Technology Center at Chiba Institute of Technology, on Pepper, the humanoid robot that SoftBank has taken out of production for lack of demand. Pepper would have raised expectations less if it looked like a dog or stuffed animal, he said.
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Gaby Deimeke, left, and Alexandra Voelkers, right, became friends after meeting on Bumble. PHOTO: ILANA PANICH-LINSMAN FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
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Younger people are turning to dating apps to find new friends (without benefits.) [WSJ]
TikTok rolled out a feature that lets people apply for jobs on its app. [The Verge]
Apple Pay is working with Goldman Sachs to develop a “buy now, pay later” service. [Bloomberg]
Mail.ru, a Russian internet company, introduced a smart speaker that smiles and frowns. [Design Week]
There are alternatives to those frustrating disabled buttons, which appear to app and website users even though they can’t be clicked. [Justine Win Stories]
Bloomingdale’s is rolling out a small-scale version of its department store in Virginia. [WWD]
A New York developer turned a giant sidewalk construction shed into a citrus-themed fantasia for pedestrians. [Fast Company]
Dropbox reopened many of its offices, which have been redesigned and rebranded as “studios.” [Protocol]
McDonald’s is adding benefits like emergency child care to lure in new hires. [WSJ]
Healthcare companies are developing breathalyzer-style Covid tests. [NYT]
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