Standing Out From The Crowd

Apple’s finest moment leads to big mistakes.

From a totally neutral perspective, Apple appears to believe that “the customer is always right,” adapting to their customers’ needs and attempting to accommodate every request. Apple’s desire to appease their most loyal customers, however, may come too late. The company has received multitudes of negative press since the iPhone launch, disappointing many loyal Mac addicts.

As I mentioned in a recent article, Apple is famous for developing and marketing stylish and useful products for a very specific (and passionate) public. Apple Evangelists are some of the most loyal customers around. They yearn for innovation and inventiveness, long for something special and different and, more than anything, love Apple for being the technology industry underdog that beats big corporations at their own game.

When Apple decided to enter the cell phone market, they had it made: a promising product, winning usability concepts to shake the wireless status quo, and millions of customers willing to buy - at ANY price.

Unfortunately, the wireless industry is dominated by what Apple customers call “the big bad corporations,” and to make the iPhone dream even possible, Steve Jobs cut a deal with one of the big players. Many Apple enthusiasts viewed this as selling out. That alone, however, was not enough to shake devoted Apple followers’ faith in their beloved company. The general consensus was that eventually the iPhone would be available on other networks and then all would be swell. Until then, thousands of early adopters were willing to cope with the “evil” AT&T as long as they could have the great gadget before everyone else. However, in their quest to enter a new market, Apple has taken their customers for a wild ride.

1. Apple announces iPhone’s price tag.
   • Yes, it seemed too high for a just a phone, and the tech community flooded the Internet with analysis of the iPhone’s shortcomings, but Apple’s early adopters were willing to pay to be the first to have the new gizmo. For true Apple fans, logic doesn’t play a role, and technical limitations are just, well, technicalities.
2. The actual launch day reveals all the shocking differences on each side of Apple’s arranged marriage with AT&T.
   • Everyone knew that Apple and AT&T were incompatible, but no one expected to see it play out so quickly. Even so, stores are flooded with customers, and iPhone sales exceed analysts’ expectations. Nevertheless, Apple advocates start to feel troubled and worry their beloved underdog is becoming too “corporate.”
3. Pressed by customers’ complaints and words from the competition, Apple capitulates and cuts iPhone prices by $200.
   • Let’s face it; the original price was a bit unreasonable. The 4G version was a lame duck, but if there is a company known for placing high bets and sticking with them until the end, it’s Apple. Customers and early adopters who bought the 4G version in the first day were left with an expensive discontinued product with virtually no commercial value a mere 2 months after its release. Angry discussions run amok over the Internet, and the once euphoric Apple customer experience is replaced with feelings of betrayal and deception. Lawsuits start to pour in.
4. Realizing that they were alienating their most loyal customer base, Apple attempts to correct their mistake by issuing a $100 credit to all early adopters. The Mea Culpa was published in a Letter to all customers.
   • The letter is honest and recognizes mistakes while promising to do better. However, for many it’s “too little too late.” Those who waited all night to get their iPhone on the first day at a premium price wanted status and recognition. The credit was half the price cut and seen by many as “hush money” or pocket change. But customers were not as offended by the price cut as by the value cut.
   • Apple could have easily corrected the situation (or avoided it altogether) by giving early adopters something of equal value, like a limited-edition accessory, exclusive membership to a community with benefits, exclusive ring tones or even just a stylish T-shirt saying “I was one of the first to have an iPhone” signed by Steve Jobs. Practically anything that gave a sense of being special or unique would have been more appealing than money.
5. Even before things started to cool down, the technical community hacked the iPhone, opening it up to third-party applications and use on any network. This means users now have the freedom to choose their provider and download new applications a good two years before Apple’s exclusive AT&T contract expires.
   • Hacking the iPhone takes skill. While a few power users unlocked their phones, the great majority were happy to keep the service they signed up for. Apple, however, not being accustomed to such treatment, didn’t take news of the hacks well. Concerned with potential future problems and the buzz around these issues, Apple posted a news release perceived by many as a preemptive attack against Apple Modders.
6. Apple runs to release a major update that “fixes” security issues, preventing iPhone owners from using other networks and locking out third- party applications. The problem is that the release also completely locks some devices, turning them into expensive, unusable gadgets, regardless of if they were hacked in the first place or not.
   • This was a real blow. The battered Apple Evangelist is appalled by the finger pointing and recklessness. Moreover, Apple’s fight hurt standard customers who can’t use their “factory fresh” iPhones anymore.
   • Perhaps Apple was pressured by their exclusive partner (AT&T) to produce an update before it was sufficiently tested. One of Apple’s brand promises is to have a well-built solution, free of bugs and upgrade problems (or don’t you remember all those cool TV Commercials?) Is Apple yielding to market pressure and releasing untested updates that cause their devices to crash? How very Microsoft of them.
7. Despite efforts to block the tech community from opening the iPhone, several new hacks were quickly available promising to open the new updated devices and even unlock the “bricked” ones.
   • What can I say? It’s a losing battle Apple may not be equipped to fight. Apple is accustomed to being loved and having a large fan base so it comes as a shock now that those same loyal users are speaking out against the company they helped make great.
8. Apple recently announced they will open the iPhone for third-party development.
   • Again, while I praise their responsiveness and willingness to comply with customers’ wishes, it just doesn’t feel very genuine or like the old Apple I knew and loved. It seems like they are being forced to react rather than doing so willingly and, believe me, customers can tell the difference.

All in all, Apple is still a strong company with loyal customers and supporters. They’ve undoubtedly made some mistakes while attempting to break into a new field. However, I still believe the iPhone is a great achievement and Apple brings some much needed fresh air to an otherwise stale and saturated market.

Apple’s recent follies teach us two very important Customer Experience lessons: First, when it comes to customer approval, you cannot rely solely on past deeds and reputation. In fact, a good reputation only raises the bar, forcing customers to hold you to a much higher standard. Second, you need to know and understand your customers’ needs and motives and consider them before you make decisions.

See Also: Even Mr. Popular Needs to Focus on Retention
Originally published at Vox Inc Customer Experience Articles

Sometimes companies will bend backwards, and spend a lot of money, creating ad concepts that will highlight how great their Customer Experience is, but no matter how much one invests on marketing campaigns, if the ACTUAL experience doesn’t correspond to what you’re promising, the message you send to your customers will be completely different.

One of those situations just happened to UPS and is quickly propagating through the internet (thanks to Jason Harle for pointing it out to me):

Step 1 - Take a look at this flash banner ad (It was originally found at The UPS Store website)

Step 2 – Watch this video (available at YouTube and at The Consumerist)

Step 3 – Repeat and laugh…

…

Now, do you think anyone, after seeing this, will believe the ad? Yeah, definitely a market budget “well” spent!

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.

Stop right there!

If you were looking for some “how to improve your love life” article, you came to the wrong place. Rather, I would like to explore how the emotions involved in customer relationships are strangely similar to those you have with your loved ones.
…
Well, customers may be willing to share the object of their affection with a couple million other people, but the difference ends there… Like in romances, customers will become jealous if you favor others over them. If your company sees more value in acquiring new customers than in keeping a current one, the current one will leave.

Take for example wireless companies. To get into the proverbial bed with you, they lie and say they’ll treat you right. They offer you free phones, cash back, gifts and promise to take care of you and make you happy forever after. However, as soon as the sun comes up, or you’ve signed a two-year contract, you are tossed aside and simply added to the list of their many conquests. You, as an individual customer, don’t matter anymore.

Being treated this way is bad enough but then, adding insult to injury, the company continues to flirt with others right in front of you; making the same empty promises they made to you.

If your girlfriend or boyfriend treated you this way, how would you respond? Exactly!
Now, how do you think your customers will respond?

Oh sure, you may be able to fool a few and keep them with you for a while. But, as soon as the competition starts making its move and offering better perks, your customers are as good as gone.

Long romance or one-night stand?

Does offering all these perks to attract new customers really pay off when you treat them like that and they leave you in two years? Why not reward loyal current customers by giving them special offers or at least the same advantages as new customers when they renew their contracts. Better yet, why not offer them incremental benefits throughout the years?

It costs six times more to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one.¹

So, investing in customer retention not only saves your company money, it also leads to loyal, life-long customers and a higher return on investment.

In simple language: Set the right expectations, and be ready to invest as much in retention as you do in acquisition!

After all, one of the most basic rules of relationships is that if you are happy with what you have, you will be less tempted or willing to risk your relationship for instant gratification.

Is it time to break-up?

SPRINT has taken a somewhat unique approach to the customer relationship; they’ve flipped the table and are dumping their unhappy customers, (SPRINT is starting to cancel customers’ contracts when they call customer service too often).

I wrote an article about this topic last year (Bad, Bad Customer… No Soup for You!), explaining how companies were starting to identify customers who don’t measure up or are deemed too high maintenance.

I am not taking sides on this matter², but you can bet that outraged high maintenance customer is going to tell everyone she knows about your service and your company has a lot more to lose in brand awareness and public image than she does.

Having said all this, I ask again: Is it worth losing the one you’re with?

^{1 - Stevens, M. Extreme Management: What They Teach At Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Program. Warner Business Books, March, 2002.
2 - You can read views of both sides on Seth Godin’s Blog “Treating different customers differently” and “The first thing“, and also at the consumerist.com.}

Originally published at Vox Inc Customer Experience Articles

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!

Everyone around me is overwhelmed by information and I am no exception.

My desk is overflowing with invoices, statements, memos, meeting minutes, reports, articles and books. Post-its® decorate my computer at work and at home. Somewhere in there, I have a paper calendar that I stopped updating long ago. I try to concentrate on the electronic part of my life, hoping that my computer’s processor will magically sort out this mess for me…

Not a chance! My desktop background is hidden behind an army of icons, shortcuts, gadgets, widgets, and, of course, digital Post-its®. Microsoft Outlook practically attacks me with meeting alarms every time I open it; my inbox now has 86 new emails (not counting the already filtered spam and junk mail) and at least the same amount of old emails that I should answer, but I know I am not. On top of that, I’m stacking up more than a thousand unread feeds from my favorite news websites and blogs.

All my potentially good ideas seem to be adrift in this vast virtual pool of information. They are just there, below the surface, waiting for some essential fact to jumpstart my brain into a feverish state of creativity.

Just within my sight, but still beyond my grasp, I can identify a few good candidates for inspiration:

• Jacob Nielsen’s “Seniors Usability Study” stares at me everyday when I come to the office. Unlike the half-read and overlooked “Intranet Design Annual Report” from 2006, this one still acts as if it could draw me to it by sheer force. 
• Tom Vander Wells post from last week has some compelling links and examples that I believe relate to one of my previous blog posts.
• I am still hoping to read the report “Mouse Rage,” released last month by the Social Issues Research Centre and available at Rackspace.com.
• I definitely need to know more about Illinois’ teen-driving reform act, since it may affect some of my client projects.
• And of course, Seth Godin and Scott Adams are still there, sending their everyday drop of wisdom, wit or contradiction to feed my hungry mind.

After all, if I don’t read other people’s works and opinions, how can I write my own?

If a solution for my problem is available anywhere out there, I haven’t found it yet. It is probably in article number 875 in the list of blog posts I will never read, or chapter 11 in the 100th book from my Amazon wish list.

The real problem is that I am already so numb from information overload that I don’t realize I have a problem (and I am supposed to evaluate processes and usability in my job!). I have some vague notion that I need to do something about it some day, but the endless list of tight deadlines keeps pushing it down the priority list.

And it all gets worse. One issue of the New York Times now contains more information than a 17th century man or woman would have encountered in a lifetime. In the last 30 years, humanity has produced more information than in the previous 5,000. The world’s produced information is increasing at a rate of 30% per year, and it doesn’t show any sign of slowing down. 

Now you would say, “Yeah, that’s pretty interesting, but what does it have to do with customer experience?”

Well, imagine that your customer is most probably suffering from the same predicament. What can you do to make your products or services stand out and emerge above all others?

You will find at least 6,020,000 “answers” to that question in Google.

Now, if you excuse me, my brain just froze and I need to reboot.