Standing Out From The Crowd

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:

^{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. 

I still remember the first time I witnessed a user testing session.  It was a simple project, the type we were recognized for our expertise and could almost consider effortless.  On this one though we were very enthusiastic about some cutting edge functionalities that would, supposedly, make the site at least twice as easier to use.  We entered the session confident, waiting for the user’s reaction and certain compliment.

Well, as you can imagine, the user didn’t even notice the new feature and, after obtaining the same results from all other participants, we ended the test concluding that we had failed and went back to the drawing board.

Two months, much stress, several extra tests, and an oversized budget later, we finally discovered the cause of the problem: users couldn’t understand the terms we used to label the new functions, so they were just ignoring them…  The reason it took us so long to realize this, was that we were so used to those terms that nobody considered it would be incomprehensible for a “newbie”.

In the end, we were able to fix the problem, but our relationship to the client (not to mention our self-confidence) was never the same again.  The most interesting part though is that we didn’t test the project earlier because the client was resolute not to spend his time and budget with tests before the site’s launch.

The whole problem could have been prevented by a simple user testing on an earlier stage of the project. 

In a way, it was a good thing.  Now I avoid being too self-confident or believing that something will work just because everyone in my group thinks so. And, most of all, now I insist on testing everything (or at least ask some newbie friend to give me a fresh perspective).

See below some more information on the subject:

• Beware of design fatigue on long projects
• We are barring many from the web 

With so much talk around Web Usability, it is easy to forget that Usability is a much broader concept and can be applied to almost everything.
 
By definition, Usability is the easy with which people can employ a tool or human made object to achieve a particular goal. 

Lately, this definition has expanded to include the effectiveness and efficiency with which users can achieve tasks in a particular environment.

In other words, you are surrounded by usability examples.  Some as complex as the computer in front of you, some as simple as your coffee mug.  Everything around you can probably be measured for its usability. Most can still be improved.

Signal vs. Noise posted today a very interesting entry about Casino Usability.  Even considering all observed flaws to the posted information (check Hunter’s comment), the discussion itself already makes the point of how usability could and should be applied beyond the internet.