Archives / June 2003

One of my favorite stories about user experience consulting came from a project Creative Good conducted a couple of years back for a large organization. The project team went through the usual steps - creating a business-focused context, conducting user tests (what we call "listening labs"), and making recommendations for improvement with wireframe diagrams.

With our sponsor excited about the results, all that remained was to take something out to the larger organization, for those executives who hadn't attended our listening labs. So, at the client's request, we combed through the lab videotapes and created a professionally edited video summarizing the results and our suggestions for improvement.

The video was outstanding: a pithy intro, then scenes of users failing on the current site, followed by our list of common-sense improvements to the website that would surely boost the client's business, increasing their profits.

The video never made it out to the larger organization.

As soon as some key people outside our sponsor's group saw it, they halted the video's progress around the company. The word came back: the video was unacceptable because it implied that the website had problems. (!) What they wanted instead was a video that showed how *great* the website was, and what a great job the company was doing overall. In the end, the website did eventually change, but it took careful work with the organization to make it happen.

I bring up this story because it underlines a point that comes up a lot in my conversations with user experience practitioners at conferences and client projects:

    * * Changing the organization * *
    is the most difficult
    and most important part
    of user experience work.

Said another way: you can give the smartest answers in the world, make the most brilliant recommendations; but if the organization doesn't actually change the user experience, it's all worthless. Your final report, nicely printed and bound, with such carefully chosen words, will gather dust in some forgotten pile, forever.

If you really want to become a better user experience practitioner, learn how to work with and change the organization. This is in contrast to most UX books and events, which are endless discussions of *methods*: Card sorting. Remote usability. User profiles (ohh, this industry's obsession with user profiles and personas, ohh my aching head).

Next time you're at an event, check the agenda for sessions on how to measure business results; or how to get Marketing and IT to work together better; or how to present the results of a UX project to a senior VP; or how to build a customer experience team, with a VP of Customer Experience at the helm; how to *change the organization*. Those will serve you much better.

This isn't to belittle traditional UX methods, which of course have their place. Rather, I simply point out that the dialog in our community is so fixated on particular usability methods that we've missed "the elephant in the living room": *none of this matters* if it doesn't result in the organization actually making the improvements.

User experience *only* matters if it has real-world results.

    User experience work
    should be measured only by
    results.

Results only come if the organization is the primary focus of user experience work. And yes, there are some particular methods to organizational work (and, for that matter, measuring results). I'll get to those in a future newsletter.

Forget websites for a minute. Hotels could make a lot more money if they made a small investment in improving their customer experience.

I know this because I travel a lot, and I constantly observe the ways in which hotels - even good or excellent hotels - often ignore their customers' most basic wants.

A good example is the luxury Palace Hotel in downtown San Francisco. I stayed there last week as I spoke at the DUX conference (it was good, btw), and it was a sight. Imagine the Palace's gleaming, soaring lobby. The meticulously dressed, unfailingly friendly bellmen and front desk attendants. The pool. The sushi restaurant. The valet parking. The Palace wants its visitors to know that this is a spectacular place.

One night, in my room at the Palace, I decided to dial up on my Mac to check my e-mail.

Then I saw the hotel's phone charges.

- Local calls were $1.50 per call, with extra charges if the call lasted over an hour.

- Toll-free calls were $2.00 per call, again with extra charges later.

My immediate reaction was irritation at the Palace: they're trying to take advantage of me! Trying to penalize me for making a toll-free call on their precious telephone, eh? Well!

Next morning, as I checked out, I voiced my disappointment to the front desk. The attendant apologetically told me that he hears that complaint all the time; that he has "told management" multiple times; and that they still leave the phone charges unchanged.

The end result is that I won't recommend the Palace to a friend or colleague. It's an excellent hotel otherwise, but telephone extortion is an obvious slap to the customer. The Palace might as well leave a dead fish to in every room, and charge $50 to remove it.

Here's the tally, after my Palace experience:

- $10,000: Approximate lifetime value of a loyal customer (1 night at $200 x 5 nights a year x 10 years)

- $30,000: Approx. lifetime value, counting a customer's referrals to other travelers (assuming just two referrals in 10 years)

- $400: My likely actual lifetime value

- $2: The amount that made the difference. That is, charging an extra $2 for a lousy toll-free phone call may have resulted in a nearly $30,000 loss in my lifetime value to the hotel. Counting the thousands of other Palace guests this phone charge affects, the Palace could be losing millions of dollars - maybe tens of millions - in unrealized lifetime value.

- $0: Approximate amount it would cost the Palace to change the experience. (Sure, re-printing the rate sheets and re-programming phones would take a couple of days, but amortized per visitor, it's next to nothing.)

And now, the final equation, which explains everything:

Investing ($0) in the customer experience (removing the $2 phone charge) generates huge ($5,000,000+) returns.

Invest next to nothing, return millions.

Said another way: INVESTING IN THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE GENERATES HUGE RETURNS.

Customer experience is a long-term investment, and it needs to be applied consistently across the experience. It simply makes no sense to make lots of long-term investments (brass fixtures, downtown real estate, valet parking) and then throw in a short-term shaft (killing visitors on toll-free calls).

It's like opening a four-star restaurant, where everything is excellent - the service, the food, the decor, the live music, everything - and then putting moldy bread on the tables for customers. (Hey, it saves a few bucks not to buy fresh bread every day!)

Be consistent. If you're going to invest in customer experience, go all the way. You can't reduce the gross offenses against your customers to "just one." (More blue-green bread, sir?)

(P.S. Funny, the Palace hotel's Flash intro doesn't mention getting shafted on phone calls.)

-+-

One more quick example. I recently stayed at the Embassy Suites in Austin, Texas. I like Embassy Suites for business travel and have stayed there a lot, but never before in Austin.

I got to the pool around 7 a.m., so I could have a quick swim before breakfast, before I headed to my 9 a.m. meeting.

The pool was locked. Here's what I saw:

Pool Hours, 9 AM - 10 PM

Strangely, the exercise room next door was open from 5 a.m. to 11 p.m. Apparently I'm allowed to run on a treadmill in front of a blaring TV at 7 a.m., but swimming is right out.

It's patently absurd to lock a pool at a business traveler's hotel until 9 a.m. Why invest in an expensive pool, then use it only to taunt your customers, who are locked out?

And why would a pool close at 10 p.m.? Business travelers often go to dinner with the client after work, getting back to the hotel right around around, you guessed it, 10 p.m. Perfect time for a swim (if one is a good lock picker).

To compound the situation, the door to the Embassy Suites pool was combination-locked even when the pool was officially open. That's right: there's a five-button lock that visitors must negotiate even when they visit the pool at 11 a.m.

Since this may be irritating for visitors, the Embassy Suites helpfully posted a sign to show visitors how to open the lock:

To enter pool area, press 1-2-3, then turn knob to the right.

Imagine the functional requirements for the Embassy Suites' pool area:

- Business travelers must be locked out of the pool at all times.

- Non-business travelers must be irritated by a lock every time they enter the pool area.

- There must be no security to keep out unwanted visitors.

Once again, this hotel is not providing a consistently good customer experience. Embassy Suites excels in other areas - good breakfast buffet, large inner atrium, helpful and friendly staff - but this one "dead fish" in the customer experience will likely keep me away from that particular Embassy Suites forever.

-+-

Hotel shots below:

Lovely pool.

Pool, door, and sign.

Pool hours: 9AM - 10PM

Both insecure and irritating to the user: To enter pool area, press 1-2-3, then turn knob to right.

Exercise room: 5AM - 11PM

Unclear evacuation exit sign.