Lots of companies make the mistake of believing that just creating an online version of your services is enough to minimize costs, increase ROI and expand your market share.  What they forget is that bad implemented solutions (or weakly integrated channels) can hurt the customer experience more than the lack of service in the first place.

Today I experienced an attempt from American Taxi (americantaxi.com) to offer an online service with a process so loosely thought out that is leading to the “Perfect Storm” of bad customer experiences.

Being a satisfied American Taxi customer for the past 4 years, I did what I always do when in need to schedule a Taxi to the airport:  I call the number I have stored in my Cell Phone contact list and provide my on-file information to the attendant.  This time a new offering deviated me from my usual process right on the first step…

Here’s a description of what happened:

• I call the number and get a very long automated message announcing the availability of their new online service and  enticing me to use the site instead of the phone to order a taxi.

Hmmm…  Interesting… I didn’t know they had a way to do that online.  It may be useful to have it all set up so I can use it later if needed…  Let’s test it!

• I immediately hang up the phone without hearing any other options and type “www.americantaxi.com” on my browser.

Not very pretty.  Looks kind of amateurish, but the options are clear, no doubt what I need to do… Let’s move on!

• I click on “Order a Taxi” and then “Sign Up“
• I enter my phone number and click “Continue”
• The system shows me my Last name and address and 2 buttons: “This is me” or “This is NOT me“

Not bad…  Very easy and simple to use… The displayed information is a bit weird, part of the address (City, State and Zip Code) is truncated showing only the first letter and my last name is slightly misspelled…  Well,  despite small errors, this is clearly all my information so no big deal, I can always fix the information after I  register…

• I click the “This is me” button
• The systems returns a message “User Already Exists” accompanied by “If you forgot your password, please click here“

OK.  So it’s saying that I already have an online account (despite the fact that I never created one) with no help or hint on how that could have happened.  My only option from this screen is a link to retrieve my password, so let’s try it! (Who knows, maybe they created the account automatically and this is the only way to reset the password for first time users… hmmm…)

• I try the “forgot your password” link
• It leads me to a page asking me for my email

hmmm… How can they have my email if I never registered before.  Well, maybe I provided it over the phone at some point although I can’t remember anything like that.  Well, It won’t hurt to try and now I invested way too much time on this to give up…

At this point it is pretty clear to me that the process is flawed and that they’d probably migrated their call-center database to the internet without considering how the lack of user information in one system would affect the customer experience flow online.  Or, even worse, they created the new feature online and integrated their systems without mapping how their customers would navigate from one channel to the other and how they would interact with the new service for the first time, thus not planning accordingly for it.

Even though I know what is going to happen from this point on, I am now curious to see how far the problem goes, so I shut off my technical side, put my “User Tester” hat and go ahead as a regular internet user would.  I try all my emails and keep getting the same expected answer:  “the email provided could not be found”

OK… Nothing else I can do here.  Better get some help”

• I grab my cell phone and redial American Taxi’s number.
• The automated system AGAIN recommends me to use the website (I’M TRYING!!!!) and instruct me to press 1 to never hear that message again.  I press “1″ immediately and the system forwards me to a live person.
• It takes me a while to explain what’s happenning and even more to understand what the Call-Center rep is saying to me.  He  seems to have no idea the website exists or how to help me.  He gives me the company’s main number (the one I had just called) and asks me to call and press the option to talk to a representative (which is what I had done).

Ok.  They probably outsourced their call center operations to India, since the guy on the other side of the line has an accent so heavy I can hardly understand, but that is not an excuse for not knowing about the service that their own system was trying to sell me…
Disclaimer: I am Brazilian and also have a thick accent that a lot of people have trouble understanding, but then again, I’m not working on a call-center trying to explain to users how to register on my website.

• I decide to test my luck and call again, hoping to get some other person that can help me.
• The automated system YET AGAIN recommends me to use the website and instruct me to press 1 to never hear that message again…  I press 1 AGAIN and once more the system forwards me to a Call-Center representative
• I explain my situation to this new guy (apparently in India again, with a slightly heavier accent than the first one), and he tells me that I am having this problem because I already have an online account that was probably automatically generated at some point by their system, but without any real information besides my last name, phone number and address (which is exactly the information I provide every time I schedule a taxi pick-up).
• I ask if it’s possible to delete this account to create a new one or to provide me with the system generated login and password so I can go online and fix the information myself.
• He says he cannot help me since I am calling from my cell (which is not on file) and asks me to hang up and call again from my HOME phone number (the number on file).

I’m getting tired and very stressed with all these steps…  I can understand the need for security that forces me to call from a number the system can recognize and allow them to accurately identify me before providing access information to the site, but I don’t think any other customer would have tried that hard!!  I’m very persistent…

• I hang up,  grab my home phone and call the number again.
• SURPRISE, SURPRISE! The automated system once more recommends me to use the website and instruct me to press 1 to never hear that message again…  Once more I press 1 and this time, instead of forwarding to a live person, it goes through a never ending stream of options.  I press 7 for help.
• Another guy in India answers with heavy accent (I swear this was the worst one of all) and asks me something I really couldn’t understand.
• After repeating myself a few times (and asking the guy to repeat himself a few more) I was able to explain the situation.
• The guy first recommended me to do what I had already done (try to sign up), then to use the “Forgot your password” (which I couldn’t) and finally asked me to just login because I already had an online account (that’s what I’ve been trying to explain all along!!!).
• After a few more communication misunderstandings, He finally told me that my both my login and password were in fact my phone number

Wait… What???? All this security procedures and hoops they made me jump when their system generated login and password are the dumbest and most unsafe credentials EVER??? I don’t know what to think anymore…

Any perception I had from their 4 years of good service is being quickly erased and it’s all downhill from here.

I take a deep breath and continue…

• I ask him to wait on the line until I try it.
• I try.  It didn’t work…
• The system returns “Invalid Username or Password“
• I tell the guy what happened and ask him if I should maybe add dashes or dots to the number for it to work.
• He says: “hmmm…  Just a moment please…” and HANGS UP!
• My phone goes mute for a second and then I hear the automated system telling me “You’ve. Been. Disconnected…  Goodbye.“

Ok.. Now I really give up!

No need to say that, for all purposes, I am an unsatisfied customer who is never going to use their service again and has vouched to tell everyone how much their service sucks… (even though my problem wasn’t with their core service but with an extra feature I never thought to use until then)

The real issue here is:  By advertising a new (simpler) way to do something at the exact moment I intended to do it, they created both the need and the expectation of the service in the customer’s mind.  From that point on, my experience is defined by their PROMISE of an improved experience and not by any past good experience.

Past good experiences will fill up users’ reservoir of goodwill and allow you to make a few mistakes without jeopardizing the whole experience, but no amount of goodwill lasts forever and badly planned experiences can start a chain of events that will burn your users’ goodwill as fast as a Hummer burns gas.

If you don’t have the budget to correctly plan and implement the user experience, you are better off not offering any new online feature at all.  And if your competitors are starting to do it and you are afraid of being left behind, then MAKE THE BUDGET.   Either they will be successful and increase their market share (at the cost of yours) or they will fail to provide a good experience after creating a new demand and expectation in their customers’ minds.  Either way the bar will be raised…

…Does anyone know a good taxi company to recommend me?

Everything changes all the time; it’s just the nature of our modern world.  The real problem is not how fast things change but how out-of-control we usually feel for not knowing where all these changes will eventually lead. We are all afraid of missing the boat for the next big thing.

Social Media, Netbooks, multi-touch devices, mobiles, streams, waves, web2.0, cloud computing, the Wii and motion detection, not to even mention all the new startups with crazy ideas bringing even more new ways to see and use the internet.  As an early adopter of technology of all kinds, I know more than 90% of those new ideas will be dead in less than a year, but any single one that survives will change how we experience the internet in ways that we cannot even try to predict.

Why does that matter?

Because even though we cannot keep up with technological evolution, we can (and MUST) keep up with users’ expectations and that will give us an insight on developing behaviors.

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine (@ginidietrich) wrote a blog post on the “Death of the Corporate Web site” based on another post from Mashable (Is Social Media Making Corporate Websites Irrelevant?) that created a lot of debate. All of this got me thinking that the key point here is not whether Corporate websites are going to die or not, but how they will need to evolve to catch-up with these new developing user behaviors and expectations.

What WILL change?

1. Information Streams – In the next few years, users’ online behavior will quickly shift from “surfing pages in a website” to “surfing streams of interconnected information.”

It might look like it is the same thing, but it changes drastically how users experience the web and navigate through sites. Traditional information architectures, that guide users through your site’s in an orderly fashion (sequential) will not be capable of predicting or controlling the user’s navigation. Users will come from anywhere and land anywhere in your site.  All pages will be landing pages and will have to fully support the user’s objective, lead them to a call-to-action and, probably, be customized to tell a consistent story every time.

A site will become more than just a collection of pages under a URL. It will encompass every digital manifestation of your brand and services wherever they reside in cyberspace (Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, posts, comments, reviews and maybe even emails if Google has its way with the new “Wave”).  With this behavioral shift, Homepages may lose most, if not all, of their importance.

2. Multi-Touch – Touch-screen wireless devices (including netbooks and tablets) will change the way people interface with the computer, which eventually will change the way people interface with websites.

If you have an iPhone or an iPod Touch, I bet that at least once you accidentally tried to repeat the same gestures/finger movements on a regular phone from a friend out of habit.  After playing a Wii game, you certainly have the sensation being a bit “limited” when you have to use a regular joystick.  The reason for that is simple: whenever you find an easier or more natural way of doing something you adapt to it almost immediately and going back to the old ways is like trying to unlearn how to walk… You just can’t.

In the following years, more and more devices will be touch-sensitive and there are already companies trying to adapt the iPhone “experience” for netbooks, tablets, laptops and even desktops.  Soon, the way we interface with a webpage or navigate through a site will be impacted by the use of such devices and systems.   Users will get used to these experiences and will demand sites to act in a similar way.

3. Augmented Reality – Augmented Reality (or Enhanced Reality) will eventually eliminate the need of physical devices or accessories and the internet will be more ethereal than ever (a real web of dispersed information).

This is not science fiction. A couple of years from now we will be taking pictures by looking at things, receive detailed information about objects (and people) directly from the internet while we handle them, all without looking at a computer or cell-phone screen. There are ongoing studies on how to use the internet to “enhance” our perception of the world around us without the need of physical equipment or accessories.  A group at MIT even created an amazing prototype using readily available materials under $350. When the internet is no longer something you see through a display in some device, today’s website will be seen as just a collection of information about an entity without full context to what you are doing at the moment. At this point, the concept of a website in the way we experience today will become a distant memory of how we did things in the past.

Ok, Now What?

If you ask me how this new website structure or concept will look like in the near (or not so near) future, I’m not certain I know the answer. There are only 3 things I can say for sure:

1. Your customer experience (or at least your user experience) will be fast, ephemeral and dispersed.  People will be (they are already) assaulted by information from all directions presented to them in quick bursts and ever smaller chunks. People will suffer more and more from information overload and the capability of capturing and retaining one specific message will decrease (there are even studies showing how the new generation brains are adapting to handle the speed of the digital life). To stand-out from their stream of information, you will need to have a consistent digital strategy, comprehensive understanding of all your customer touchpoints, strong branding and, above all, be able to CONNECT and ENGAGE with your customers on a personal level.  It is the ultimate one-to-one relationship for mass-consumption.
2. What you see today as your website will become just an end, not the means.  People will get there to consume and convert, not to browse, since its navigation will have no boundaries. It will require a more flexible information architecture where every piece of information (or page for lack of a better term now) can stand alone when pushed into an information stream and still lead the user to other in-context information and call-to-action.
3. No matter how traditional your customers are they will be affected by changes around them at some point and won’t be able to tell you before it happens, because they won’t see it coming themselves.  Survey and Market Researches are useless to predict behavioral shifts because these behavior changes occur on an unconscious level and users only start to rationalize how much their needs and expectations changed a long time after it’s happened. This is why innovative companies like Apple avoid asking their users for what they want in a product; instead they observe their behavior to understand what they need without knowing and only ask their opinion after the product is almost ready to market (e.g., the iPhone).  If you don’t adapt to your users’ future needs and behaviors, your digital strategy is doomed.

——–

So traditional websites (like most corporate sites) WILL die… we just won’t notice!  They will be replaced with something new and better suited for this different perspective and expectation. We will look at them and believe they have adapted and evolved.

Maybe that’s all the same thing anyway…

But the real question here is: will you keep up with times and allow your digital strategy to evolve or will you hang on to what you know today until everything around you has changed? Are you going to keep up with the times or forever chase your own tail while trying to keep up with the Joneses?

It’s totally up to you[r users].

Every once in a while a site comes up with a new UI (User Interface) concept or idea that forever shifts the paradigm of the market and redefines people’s expectations on information architecture and element positioning. In other words: sometimes an unexpected new design element may change the way you see things enough to make you think that was the right way of doing it all along.

On the other hand, some UI patterns and best practices are so ingrained in users’ minds that eventually every site just surrenders to it.

The “Search Box” on the top right of the screen seems to be one of those UI paradigms tested through times and never relenting.  Twitter is the very last example of this that comes to my mind.  In their new design (released couple weeks ago) several modifications were acclaimed by users as a much needed evolution to this emerging tool and, in between all those modifications, one stands out right away: The Search (care to guess where it was placed?).

No big findings, just the subtle fact that most of the time you don’t need to come up with big game changing solutions for everything you do.  Usually, if you already have a good product or service, all you have to do is to keep evolving it by listening to your customer needs and giving what they want through the conscious use of UI best practices. 

See original post at Vox Inc - Customerspective Blog
Follow Luis on Twitter at www.twitter.com/luiserpa

It’s interesting how you can find Customer Experience wisdom in the strangest places. The message I got for this post came in fact from a novel I was reading yesterday (The Dark Tower III, by Stephen King).

In it, two of the main characters were discussing odd human reactions to certain situations when making decisions. 

The dialogue went more or less like this:

That got me thinking immediately on how similar this dialogue could be to any number of companies receiving complains on their Customer Experiences:

The moral of the story here is that nobody should guess Customer Behavior based on what customers “bitch about” when they speak to you.  What you are hearing is how they see and rationalize YOUR problem and not what motivated theirs. Customers are irrational and they don’t really care about what drives them to do something, they just do it.

Real behavioral knowledge comes from observing your customers and understanding their basic fears and motivations. Without a sincere effort to understand Customer Behavior, what you think would be a solution for their grumble might exacerbate the exact problem you are trying to solve.

So it doesn’t matter how many features (doors) you put in front of your customer.  If they don’t know what they are there for and you are not trying to address their real motivations (fear of what’s on the other side), you will end up watching your customer bouncing off the walls, refusing to use the doors and still blame YOU for a lousy customer experience. 

And guess what?  They are absolutely right… 

See original post at Vox Inc – Customerspective Blog

Pew study predicts that most people will be accessing the Internet via mobile/wireless devices (phones, smart-phones, portable computers, etc) by 2020.

The study also has some interesting analysis on the evolution of Privacy, Property Law, Social Tolerance, User Interface Design and the mingling of personal and work time.

See more about the study here

[UPDATE - 03-0302009]: Another research from technology firm In-Stat projects that smartphones will be mainstream by 2013, which would bring the earlier prediction from PEW a good 5 years earlier, at least.

It’s official!  The new generation’s brains REALLY ARE wired to better handle the speed of the digital life (Read the Research).

Problems generated by this change aside (and despite how amazed we can be sometimes with these kids’ feats - see video below), the fact is that people’s way of thinking have adapted to instantly process huge amounts of information and make “go/no-go” actions almost unconscious (such as scanning several links in a Google results page and immediately deciding which ones to click and which ones to ignore).

The effect is strikingly similar to something commonly observed on robotic applications and the study of behavior-based artificial Intelligence, where decisions and reactions are based on many different behavior-based processes all working at the same time and linked in particular ways.  This is called Reactive Reasoning, because it involves actions triggered by reacting to the environment rather than deliberation or cognitive assessment. Basically, it is acting without planning.

The practical aspect of knowledge for your business is that users are even less capable now of rationalizing and explaining why they do what they do, deeming satisfaction surveys and traditional customer interviews even more misleading.  This should reinforce a company’s concerns about understanding the subtle factors that can and will affect their users’ online experience and push their strategies towards more customer-centric designs, achieved through real behavioral and cognitive user tests. 

See original post at Vox Inc.

Just one day after the election, in a discussion group for UX practitioners and Information architects, I saw a post asking people’s take on the U.S. election with respect to UX & Usability.  Specifically, it was asking if either McCain or Obama would provide a better environment for UX to thrive…

Well, my first reaction was to think that the question was a little off-point and that the choice of the U.S. President couldn’t possible affect the UX environment, but then I stopped to really think about it…

It’s interesting to think how a president could positively or negatively affect the UX environment. Particularly, I’d think that the UX environment evolves by the need from users to have more friendly sites/systems and by usual rules of market behind supply and demand, driving companies to look for new and better ways to stand out from the competition.  

Now, Obama proved more than once during his campaign that when used correctly and to its full potential, the online channel can change the way your product is seen and consumed.  He showed that the internet can be a force to reckon when getting people involved and interested in what you have to say.

Obama’s approach and use of all available online resources (from SEO to Social Media to iPhone applications) reinforces that he is already more in tune with the new media and better yet, capable of leveraging new concepts and ideas to bring out-of-the-box solutions that actually work. 

Not even a week has passed since his election and he has already launched a new website that lets people track his decisions, give feedback and offer help: Change.gov .  The website is an example of “by-the-book” UX best practices.  It is simple and effective and will certainly get him one step closer to achieving his goals.

It seems to me that Obama is set to change how the government uses the Internet and he intends to do it with the best available UX standards and techniques.

That alone should give us hope on how he can bring more people to use the internet as a primary communication channel and, by that, raise the competition and the overall need for better UX.

 
 
UPDATE: Here’s some more data on Obama’s innovative use of the Internet: Read it at TechCrunch

I am proud to announce that Vox’s 2007 Automobile Insurance Mind Model Study is now available (this represents a considerable part of my work, so I better be proud :) ). 

Anyway, the study examines the online channel to determine industry-wide norms and discover why companies succeed or fail in attracting and retaining customers.

If you want to know more, take a look on Bill Cusick’s post on Vox Customer Experience Blog.

As expected, what really stands out about the new Apple iPhone isn’t the multitude of features squeezed into it, but rather its usability and the overall Customer Experience provided.

Apple understands the importance of superior usability to enhance the Customer Experience and has done an excellent job of this since rolling out the first Macintosh.  Their approach has created a strong community of believers – and that’s the whole point!  Apple doesn’t have customers, they have Evangelists! When Apple receives a negative review, their customers fight to defend the company and their products.

If this doesn’t prove the importance of Customer Experience I don’t know what does.

Apple’s commitment to Customer Experience is why, on my opinion, their decision to enter the wireless market and partner with AT&T is so risky. I am very curious to see how the marriage between Apple and AT&T will play out from a customer perspective, as both companies seem to have very different ideas about what constitutes a GOOD Customer Experience.  Apple is a shining example of a company that creates passionate users by providing an excellent overall Customer Experience. While AT&T, like the majority of wireless providers I have tested, boasts about their customer service, but often fails to meet even the most basic customer expectations.

Will Apple bring AT&T up to their level or will AT&T’s poor customer service leave a permanent scar on Apple’s Customer Experience reputation?

Only time will tell…
 

Originally published on Vox Customerspective Blog 

Security has always been placed in the opposite side of usability.  By default, when you think about adding security measures to a website, you are talking about creating extra processes or at least adding an extra layer or complexity to existing process, so invariably the site usability suffers.  Several promising researches were conducted in the past few years using graphical passwords, nonverbal memory systems and biometrics, but nothing seemed quite ready for immediate, cost-effective or practical use.

Well, ready or not it seems we are about to witness those solutions coming to market very soon.  Vidoop, a technology innovation company, is rattling the security cage by promising to definitely merge security and usability with their new product, soon to be launched on a Fortune 500 bank website not yet disclosed.  If they deliver what they are promising (and demonstrating on a 12 minutes video presentation), it will surely be a big step on the right direction.

Of course, after seeing the video and testing the Demo, I realize that the solution is not perfect (how could it be?).  Although they’ve probably addressed 9 out of 10 of the common usability problems and close to all - if not all - security known issues, from a customer experience perspective there are still 3 main unaddressed concerns.

Accessibility - I can’t say for sure, but I saw no practical option for users with disabilities (impaired vision).  A work around can be devised, but not without impact to the usability and somehow disregarding the use of images, thus throwing away the main advantages of the solution.

Cross-Channel Consistency – The solution works perfectly for the web channel and could be easily adapted for ATMs and Face-to-Face Interactions, but is moot over the phone.  That means one needs to have different passwords for those channels, so the phone will still be the weakest link of the security chain.  Given the old maxim that a system is only as safe as its weakest link, Vidoop may guarantee a better easier web security process, but not a safer process overall (not to mention the fact that one still have to memorize two sets of passwords for the same bank). 

Password Portability – Graphical passwords are way easier to memorize, even with long gaps between uses, but it is still something one have to commit to memory. If each website adopts a different password process (graphical or not), at some point the users won’t be able to remember all sets of passwords for individual sites and will start writing them down, thus eliminating the point of having a safer/easier to remember password (they are already working with OpenID, which might just be the solution for that).  Anyway, for this to work as projected,  Vidoop’s solution (or OpenID) must become a standard rather quickly, but I don’t think they mind that part.  :)

All in all, it is a great step in the right direction and opens a lot of new possibilities. If Vidoop keeps working on those points and acts quickly on their users’ feedback, they should be able to rapidly change the bank industry scenario.

In my opinion, a little bit of change is always a good thing. 

I recently vacationed at a beach resort in Mexico. Before leaving, I was stressed, tired and a little bored. I didn’t really plan the trip beforehand, so I just hoped to have a clean place to sleep and relax for a whole week.

Once in Cancun, I rented a crappy car and stayed in a crappy hotel. The infra-structure in some places was almost non-existent and the food was often too spicy for my taste. Nevertheless, the car was drivable, the room was clean, the water was clear, the weather was sunny and the nights were warm and full of excitement. I enjoyed every minute of it. I would go back in a heartbeat and I definitely recommend the experience to anyone.

But it’s funny how some people tell me about their really bad experiences in Cancun, under exactly the same conditions. What was different? They had higher expectations! For me, what was just another colorful experience to add to my memoirs was, to those other travelers, a tortured experience to blot from their memory. Because they expected everything about the trip to be great, the actual experience could only disappoint.

Now imagine your boss assigns you an important task. The task is due in five days, but you know you can do it in two. If you just accept the deadline and surprise her by delivering it three days ahead of time, you are remarkable. On the other hand, if you promise to deliver in two days, you reset her expectations, and when you make the shorter deadline, you become just a reliable resource. Now, what would happen if you finished two days before the original due date, but one day after your promised date? That’s right – you fail to meet her new expectations and may be deemed untrustworthy.

In short, to have more you should expect less!

As crazy as it sounds, it is basically true. But let’s rephrase it for the business world: to amaze your customers, you need to set the right expectations. But what is the right expectation? Different people have different expectations in different situations. In some industries, demands and circumstances may lead you to set very high expectations as a baseline (e.g., Target’s motto:“Pay LESS, Expect MORE.”). Even worse, expectations frequently change over time and not everyone will expect the same things from you.

That’s the challenge companies are facing today: How to set the right Customer Expectations. Why are expectations important?  Because:

1. You have to provide a great Customer Experience to maximize customer lifetime value, loyalty and retention.
2. A great Customer Experience is directly dependent on customers’ expectations.
3. Customers will take your company’s promises for granted and you never retain customers by meeting their minimum expectations.
4. To provide the best possible Customer Experience, you have to regularly exceed your customers’ expectations.
5. To exceed customer expectations, you need to set the RIGHT expectations for your product or service.
6. You must promise less than your full capability, but more than the customers’ minimum expectations.
7. Your promises (and your capabilities) must be at least on par with the competition in order to acquire new customers.
8. It’s easier to know you own capabilities (and the competition’s for that matter) than to know your customers’ expectations.
9. What you do today will not be enough tomorrow. Expectations change over time and according to the situation.
10. Your buyers and your users have totally different expectations, even when they are the same person!
11. You can’t afford to not meet your customers’ expectations.
12. If you don’t run some risks, you become stale and predictable, and will eventually fail to meet your customers’ expectations.
13. You can please some people for some of the time, but you can’t please everyone all the time.

So how can you possibly create the right expectations? Here are some guidelines:

• Identify who is (or should be) your customer.
• Get to know your customer and understand their expectations.
• Don’t follow everyone’s expectation! If it’s not your target, it doesn’t matter. It’s just a distraction.
• Don’t play it safe. Maintaining the status quo is the quickest way to become ordinary and one step away from failing to meet ever-changing expectations.
• Define your own Customer Experience metrics and track them.
• Ask for feedback at every opportunity and make it a part of your continuous improvement process.
• Be careful with customer surveys. Most customers will lie to you (even if they don’t mean to).
• Put yourself in your customer’s place. View your product/service from his or her perspective and find what you can do to improve your customers’ experience.
• Apply Usability concepts to all you do. Your buyers will expect to get everything they can - all the bells and whistles, but when they become your users they want simplicity.  Usability will keep your features out of your users’ way.
• When you fail to meet an expectation, turn around and surprise your customers with something that will certainly exceed their expectations

In business, as in life, expectations define a good experience. If you exceed expectations often, people will love you. If you repeatedly fail to meet expectations, they will hate you. Above all, if you are simply meeting all expectations all the time, people will be indifferent. When you never stand out, it is just a matter of time before a competitor acquires your customers.

Here’s a good lesson to everyone that deals with customer experience:

Learn from your mistakes.

I know it seems obvious, but people usually confuse “acknowledge a mistake” with actually learning from them.
Here are some examples:

• The company recognizes that something went wrong but is unable to pinpoint the real problem
• The company recognizes that something went wrong, identifies it, and brushes it under the carpet before anyone in the company can notice
• The company identifies what is wrong, apologizes and/or rectifies the past occurrence, but doesn’t prevent future problems
• The company identifies the problem, apologizes, researches possible permanent solutions and, after facing unclear or too numerous long-term options, gives up and decides on a quick-fix
• The company identifies the problem, apologizes, and researches a permanent solution, but then deems it unachievable or too expensive – and just forgets about it

What should happen: The company recognizes the problem, identifies its cause, apologizes, and immediately corrects the situation. After acting appropriately and getting feedback from its customer base, the company looks for more permanent solutions and quickly implements them. After learning from experience, the company should never again repeat the same mistake (at least not in the same way) again.

It is easy to know that you have a problem, but not so easy to identify where the root of the problem resides. And it’s hard to react well, even harder to correct, and quite unusual to actually prevent the same thing from happening again.

Well… Unusual, but not unheard of. In fact, some companies are not only able to learn from their mistakes but can also benefit from them. Facebook’s recent redesign is an excellent example of this.

Recently, they had a security related problem that actually revealed more personal information than wanted by their users. After getting a negative reaction from hundreds of thousands of their customers, Facebook’s quick response and whole approach to the problem rewarded them with an explosive growth on their membership, jumping from 7.5 million users to 18 million after the crisis.

Facebook’s example proves how valuable (and cost effective) this approach can be, and makes me wonder why most companies still refrain from implementing it every day.

Originally published on Vox Customerspective Blog

Today I’ve learned two important lessons:

1. Some habits are forced upon you and others are very hard to give up.

2. If you are doing something different from everyone else, you are either remarkable or just plain dumb.
 

If I’d knew that this morning, it would have completely changed my day…

Having lived my whole life in a tropical country, I find very difficult to remember to turn on the TV everyday to see the weather forecast before leaving to work.  In my mind, it should be enough to check it once a week.

(Matter of fact, I still have the habit of looking outside the window to “guess” the weather for the day).

Here in Chicago, the forecast was for a huge snowstorm, so unless one had a “life or death” kind of appointment, every wise person stayed at home and waited to see what Mother Nature would decide to throw our way. Well, I didn’t.  Nothing was said about a storm on the day before yesterday’s forecast, and my window guess told me that the snow outside didn’t appear to be that bad, so I ventured out and faced the road.

After driving for 15 minutes, I could already tell that it wasn’t going to be a fun trip. It was slick and slushy, not a single snowplow in sight, and the wind was starting to blow – HARD.  I could see many people turning back, but I am not one to give up easily, so I thought: “Everything will flow after I get to the highway…”

The highway came and the traffic slowed to almost a stop.  Still, not a single snowplower in sight.  The maximum velocity was about 15mph.  The road was extremely slippery and the only way to keep driving straight was to stay precisely on the tracks left by the car before you.

All that white around didn’t help alleviate my feeling of sleep deprivation and anxiety.  I had no idea how long it would take to get to work or if the storm would still go on for hours. Other cars started to stop in the curb or look for the exit to go back.  I kept thinking that everything would be all right if I just insisted for another ten miles and, in the end, I found myself turning back after 2.5 hours without even reaching half way to my office. 

Almost 5 hours after leaving my home, I was back.  I didn’t reach my destination and didn’t accomplish anything at all for first half of my day.  I went on a road trip to nowhere for no apparent reason.  On hindsight, I could have worked from the comfort of my home, attended to any meetings via conference call.  It might not be ideal, but would definitely be a better experience.

Like me in that story, customers sometimes are slow to react to a bad experience.  By pure habit, they hang on to a bad service for longer than anyone would consider possible.  But that’s an illusion!  If you ignore a customer experience problem until your customers start to leave, you may be waiting too long and now the damage may be irreversible, or just too expensive to fix.

Don’t make a habit of overlooking your customers’ complaints and suggestions.  If you ignore the signs around you, chances are that you’re going the wrong way.

By the way, tomorrow morning, before leaving, I plan to open my window, take a good look outside… and turn on the TV!

In my last post (“Welcome Back! Long Time, No See“), I commented on how face-to face interactions are being affected by the reliance on technology, subsequently missing real customer relationship development opportunities. After posting it, I realized that it wasn’t very fair. Technology and CRM tools can be useful for improving the Customer Experience in real world situations with creative implementation. So I decided to devote a few brain cells towards imagining some scenarios that could be implemented with today’s tools and technology.  Here is what I came up.

Grocery Stores:

After a busy day at the office, Beth (our imaginary customer) is driving home when she decides to stop by the store for some groceries.

On entering the store, she goes directly to the first available Customer Service Kiosk and, having forgotten her “Preferred Client” card, uses her index finger to log in. The system shows Beth her current shopping list with her son’s wish list, added earlier at home over the Internet. The system offers Beth some interesting new products fitted to her needs and a list of personalized coupons. She then prints out her shopping list and coupons, sorted by the store’s aisle layout so she won’t have to backtrack.

As she shops, a chip embedded in Beth’s cart stores her information and a wireless device indicates her location in the store.

Beth is speeding through her list until she notices that one item is out of stock. Of course, the list shows several recommended substitutions for the missing item, but Beth is not sure which to choose.  She decides to ask for help and presses a Customer Help button on her shopping cart. A nearby attendant, alerted by an automated text message on his two-way radio, approaches her.

“Good evening, Ms. Johnson, It is good to have you back!” says the attendant.
“Are you by any chance wondering about a substitution?”

“Oh yes, thank you!  I was looking for a dandruff shampoo for my husband, but his favorite brand is out of stock,” she tells him.

“Not a problem!” He swiftly picks up his hand computer and downloads her list and shopping history. “We have several other good brands, but I see here that your husband bought ACME shampoo the last time he was here. Was he happy with that purchase?”

“Yes, I think he said he still preferred the other one, but this brand was ok,” she says.

“If you like, I can get one for you. If not, I personally think this other brand here is very good. It’s a little more expensive, but it is more effective,” he adds.

“Oh, thanks! I will try that one,” Beth decides.

Satisfied with her choice, Beth walks towards the checkout and a small display on her cart indicates which cashier has the shortest line. At the checkout, the smiling cashier greets her with a “Hi Ms. Johnson, did you find everything you needed?” while quickly scanning her purchases. As the cashier thanks her, she adds, “Did you know that you can call us ahead of time and have your whole list ready for you by the time you arrive?”

She didn’t know that, but she is already considering doing that the next time she shops.

. . .

Forget all the Sci-Fi movies’ wildest predictions (although Minority Report has an interesting take on possible future customer experiences), the example here is imagined, but quite feasible with today’s technology. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone is already doing something like it already. 

Are you? 

For the past 4 months I’ve been helping to conduct a study about the Online Customer Experience on the U.S. Banking Industry.  The study is called “Mind Model” and is finally available for free download from Vox Inc at http://www.voxinc.com/banking-mind-model.htm.

The Banking Mind Model Representation is a general analysis of how Banking industry websites are represented and how typical consumer banking customers would recognize and react to some of its distinct characteristics. Customers become used to this convention, deeming bank websites that don’t follow such protocols as “confusing”. While a company’s strategy may purposefully break from this convention, such a break should not be arbitrary. Rather it should be driven by a thorough analysis of the risks and benefits associated with such a divergence.

Below is an example of graph, extracted from the study, showing the Industry Mind Model representation and Allocation Map:

The Banking Mind Model highlights the similarities and differences between various consumer banking website homepages and how consumers, exposed to the online banking competitive landscape, might recognize and react to a site’s distinct characteristics. Vox compared the top 10 U.S. providers and several bank sites from related segments including insurance, financial services and regional banks. Bank sites assessed include:

Allstate Bank3	Merrill Lynch Bank USA4
Bank of America, N.A. 1	State Farm Bank, F.S.B. 3
Citibank, N.A. 1	SunTrust Bank1
Fifth Third Bank2	U.S. Bank N.A. 1
Harris N.A. 2	Wachovia Bank, N.A. 1
HSBC Bank USA, N.A. 1	Washington Mutual Bank1
ING Bank, FSB4	Wells Fargo Bank, N.A. 1
JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. 1	World Savings Bank, FSB1
LaSalle Bank N.A. 2

^{1 Top ten U.S. Bank by assets 2 Regional Bank; 3 Insurance; 4 Financial Services}  

Customer engagement is critical to ensuring strong, long-term relationships. Online banking is one of the most effective offerings for cementing customer loyalty. Given this fact, it’s surprising how many of the major sites don’t prominently feature tutorials for online banking and contextual help. Another area where banks are behind the curve is screen resolution. Most bank sites are optimized for 800×600 displays, ignoring the fact that approximately 75% of today’s customers use larger monitors. Thus, valuable real estate opportunities are being lost.

To know more download the full report. It’s free.