Liquigas: Missing its own trick

Location finders fail to pick up on best practice close to home.

The Site

Liquigas, Italy’s leading distributor of liquid petroleum gas, has two interactive location finders on its website, one of which delivers information better than the other.

Both finders are part of the site and accessible separately from most pages. ‘Filiali’ uses a regional map of Italy to help customers locate their nearest branch and official stockist. Clicking on a region opens an outline map of the region in the main text area of the page. This has dots to mark locations and sits above a list of postal addresses and telephone/fax numbers, though the two are not correlated (none of the dots is labelled with a town name, for example).

‘Meteo’, the other finder, also opens a regional map, in this case in a pop-up window. Clicking on a region reveals cities and towns; a further click on a name opens a colourful graphic display in an information panel next to the map, showing five-day forecasts for various factors such as temperature, wind and probability of rain.

The Takeaway

Like a two-car family Liquigas has a basic ‘runaround’ model of its location finder and a smarter, more stylish version. Appropriately, the ‘runaround’ is the one it uses to help customers get to the shops. But while this may make sense in terms of family motoring, it has little commercial logic online, where pushing people to an outlet is much more critical than letting them know what the weather will be like on the way. Both the functionality and ease of use of the Meteo finder are a generation ahead of the clunky ‘Filliali’ device and could so easily be adapted to display the stockist data.

Normally, spotting a piece of good practice that could improve your site involves looking beyond your own URL. For Liquigas, it’s a matter of clicking on a different part of the same page. While the two finders come from different providers, that should not be an insurmountable barrier to trading in the ‘runaround’. More likely, the members of the family are not talking to one another regularly over the breakfast table.

First published on 19 July, 2007