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!

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

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.