Banking Review

AMBER grows up

In her second year, AMBER has set her sights on new horizons

BY CHARIS PALMER

The 2010 AMBER Awards have been expanded to encompass a greater range of categories, reflecting the growing interest from consumers, business and government.

“In her second year, AMBER is growing,” says cofounder and awards chair Paul McCarthy. “We’ve stepped up the retail categories being assessed in order to reflect the growth of online retail in Australia.”

To help capture the views of customers across the growing AMBER Awards categories, the group has partnered with leading research firms TNS and Lightspeed.

Executive Director of digital research at TNS Jonathan Sinton says TNS is thrilled to be providing consumer insights for digital behaviour across different industry sectors.

“We focus on the insights behind consumer behaviour in the digital space and look closely at how this behaviour varies across industries such as retail, banking, technology, travel and government,” says Sinton.

“Online transactional services continue to attract significant investment by Australia’s leading companies, as well as new players entering the market,” says AIMIA CEO John Butterworth.

The fourteen AMBER categories for 2010 have been developed in collaboration with industry web usage data and reflect the mainstream services online Australians are using every day.

In Online Retail, the categories were developed in collaboration with the AIMIA Retail Industry Group, which was formed in November last year.

Once again the awards have been designed to capture the people’s view of mainstream web and mobile services. By combining detailed customer experience data from a national survey with lab testing, the AMBER Awards are a reflection of what Australians perceive to be the best service in each of the categories assessed.