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~ Finding, formulating and solving life's frustrations.

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Monthly Archives: November 2013

The Opportunity of Disaster

30 Saturday Nov 2013

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Customer experience, customer service, UX

 

 

 

 

After moving from Westchester County New York to the San Diego area, we were asleep (again) on an air mattress awaiting almost all of our material possessions to arrive the next day.  We were awakened by a call from our moving company that our things would not be arriving tomorrow morning as promised.  Or ever.  Indeed, our furniture, clothes, electronics, papers, photographs, paintings, kitchenware, bedding, etc. had all been destroyed in a truck fire near Albuquerque, New Mexico.  This was something of a disaster for us, and, from a positive “customer experience” standpoint, a disaster for the moving company.

But the point of this post is to point out that in this disaster, there is an opportunity for the moving company to be proactive and excellent and greatly ameliorate or even turn around this customer service disaster. They could, for example, send us a personal apology.  They could be in constant contact about the status of any remains.   They could arrange for us to visit the site of the fire at their expense.  They could arrange to quickly reimburse us at least for the full amount of our insurance with the moving company so that we could get on with our lives as best we could.  Obviously, photo albums, the drawings of my children, letters from friends, my grandfather’s paintings, and souvenirs from a lifetime of travel could not really be replaced.  But what *could* be replaced needed to be so quickly.  And, given that we were in a somewhat vulnerable state, this disaster really offered an opportunity for the company to provide the very best customer service they possibly could under the circumstances. 

That was the opportunity.  What did they do instead?  They basically refused to communicate with us.  At every opportunity, they balked; did not answer emails; did not answer phone calls; did not offer reimbursement.  As we found out later, they did not even pay the towing company who moved their van off the Interstate.  Instead, they focused on how to limit their potential liability by withholding as much information as humanly possible.  They refused to let us even come to the site and examine our stuff.  We found out the day before, thanks to our insurance company, that we would be able to see our stuff on Friday if we flew to Albuquerque and rented a car to drive to Continental Divide.  There we discovered the charred remains of our things.  And, we discovered that nothing had been done for an entire month to protect our things (or those of the other two ex-patrons who shared the misfortune of choosing this moving company).  What was left of our clothes, photos, furniture, etc. was all open to rain, wind, and passersby for over a month.  

Continental Divide is a fitting metaphor for the choice that a company faces when they make a BIG mistake.  They can admit the mistake and do everything in their power to make it right to the customer.  Or, they can do everything in their power to continue to screw the customer in order to save costs, face, and limit liability.  

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Where is the door?

30 Saturday Nov 2013

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A Pattern Language., architecture, Christopher Alexander., Customer experience, UX

Symmetry is often a really nice thing.  I like snowflakes as much as anyone.  So long as no more than three gather at any one time.

And, I suppose that making a building with four identical sides probably saves marginally on costs.  Maybe.  

But if you really care about the “customer experience” wouldn’t it be nice if the customer can figure out how to enter your building? I mean, enter it without walking the perimeter a few times.  Especially if it is raining, or sleeting, or boiling hot, or dark.  There is a variant on this which is popular with convention centers.  They are required by law I guess to have approximately 480 doors or more.  However, typically, all but one or two of these are locked.   

Perhaps an argument could be made that making the entrance to a building difficult to detect adds to security.  I seriously doubt it.  A determined burglar could find out by trial and error or observation where the door is.   That burglar has plenty of time because you see, being a burglar is how they make their living.  But not so your customer.  Much as you would love to *think* that your customer has nothing better to do than circle your establishment trying to find a way in, they do, in reality, have better things to do.  

Recently, I had occasion to visit Paris.  Do you have any trouble finding the doors in the building shown?  Last year was the 850th birthday for Notre Dame.  So, having an entrance which is distinctly visible from a distance as an entrance, we would have to say is a *solved problem*, n’est pas?  Check out Pattern 110, Main Entrance, in Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language.

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Customer Experience does not equal Website Design

25 Monday Nov 2013

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Business, Customer, Customer experience, Design, Pen, problem formulation, User (computing), Web design, Website

Website design is important.  Let there be no mistake about that.  That is an interesting and fascinating topic in its own right.  What I am talking about though is much broader.  You can have a very cool looking website; you can make it easy to navigate within that web site, but still make your overall customer experience totally SUCK!   In fact, that seems to be pretty much the norm.

I am a customer.  Let’s say I want to buy a pen on-line.  Is it really necessary for me to create an account?  Do I have to give you my e-mail and make up a user name?  I can just about guarantee that the first N names I choose will already be taken.  So I end up with some impossible to recall username like, PTERESWOODIRON465.   Sure, I will write it down.  Along with 43,235,309 OTHER user names I have.  Then, of course, I need a password.  Of course, I could make up something simple and easy to remember like PEN or even PENPASSWORD.  How secure is that?  Or, I could pick a password that I use on other sites.  Even worse.  Or, I can make up something really hard to crack and marginally hard to remember like trumpetpalmcandle.  But I’ll probably still have to write it down because it will be YEARS before I go your site to buy another pen.  Meanwhile, if you really suck, you are going to ask for demographic information as well.

Now, before we get stuck in the details of what the screen looks like that asks me for this information and whether to use a scroll down list for the state name, can we go back and ask WHY I really need an “account” to order a frigging pen?  Of course, the dream of the site owners is that once I have an account and keep getting unsolicited email from them about all the wonderful deals they have on pens, I will be unable to control myself and buy another pen several times a day.  NOT LIKELY!  Extremely Unlikely, in fact.  Here is my overwhelmingly normal pen buying behavior.  I DON’T.  I go stay at the Motel Six where they leave the light on for me and I take their pen.  It doesn’t bother me in the least that it says MOTEL SIX on it.  If it writes, I use it.  This is not going to change because of your wonderful website design even if it is relatively simple to put in my username and password and then give the details of my upbringing.  What I AM going to do is get so PO’d at the idea of yet another web account that I am not going to buy a pen at your site at all.   I am going to go to Amazon where I already have an account and buy it there.   If I’m really PO’d, I may even tell my friends what an idiotic company PEN INC (fictional name, I think) is for forcing me to create an account just to buy a pen for my nephew’s birthday.  Even sadder is the fact that no-one in PEN INC will ever have the slightest idea that they not only lost a sale but created a really bad customer experience.  — !PSI

Introducing Peter S Ironwood

24 Sunday Nov 2013

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Aunt Rennie, customer service, human factors, user experience

I’m not the kind of guy who likes to talk much about me.  That’s not the point.  It doesn’t matter much that when I was five, both my parents abandoned me or why.   Doesn’t matter I spent most of my childhood in the San Diego area being gawked at for my tall skinny frame and unruly blond hair and steel grey eyes. What does matter is that know I am on the lookout.  For what? For things that are WRONG in this world.  We need to get another thing straight. I do this for ME, not for you, though you can certainly benefit. And, when I say “wrong” I don’t mean things that are evil, though God knows there is plenty of that too.  No, what I am talking about is plain simple stupidity.  People make a product or sell you some so-called “service” and it sucks.  And why does it suck?  Because they are not satisfied to make a billion dollars by selling a shipload of vacuum cleaners or cameras or software systems that actually work.  No.  Instead, they want to make 1,000,020,000 bucks by not spending 20K to bring me in and see whether their blasted microwave or or digital watch or whatever actually works for human beings.  And, do you want to know what’s *really* frigging stupid?  They don’t make their stupid billion dollars anyway?  Why?  Because they end up spending millions of dollars on help lines and millions more on TV ads that show some sexy, tight-skirted, plump-lipped open mouth girl seeming to have a big O just from using their vacuum cleaner.  At least those ads I like even though it isn’t going to get me to buy their vacuum cleaner.  But what is with these ads showing people being completely idiotic and pointless.  If the girl air-brushed into that desperate anorexic twitch isn’t going to make me buy their machine, why is some bumble-headed fat guy walking into a wall going to do the trick?  

Case in point: Telephone menu systems that have no obvious option for talking with a human being.  Have you ever run into one of those?  “Please listen to the following menu items and choose the one that describes your car.  Press 1 for black car.  Press 2 for a convertible.  Press 3 for a hummer.  Press four to hear these options again.” WHAT???!!   I own a white BMW sedan.  The Greeks had an interesting word: “hubris” to describe self-defeating pride.  First of all, nobody thinks of all the possible things you might want from this “service” number ahead of time.  Nobody.  So, there should ALWAYS be a choice for talking with an operator.  Do you really need a Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford to know this?  Wouldn’t just living on the planet for six or seven years do the trick?  More later.  I have to go try to glue the fragments of my phone back together before Aunt Rennie gets here.  She gets freaked out by my temper.

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