Archives / August 2004

They say that moving is one of the most stressful events in life. Having just completed a move, I can attest to this fact; but not from the exertion of packing and unpacking boxes. Despite the many boxes, the physical move was a breeze, compared to the customer experience of setting up the technology in the new apartment.

Lots of people have stories like these. But today I include a couple of my more colorful vignettes only because I want to ask: is this the best we can do?

First, a positive note: ConEd, the power and gas utility here in New York, worked flawlessly. It took a single five-minute phone call to set up the account, and there have been no problems since. Here's a note to service companies: no news is good news. If it's working so well that no one thinks about it much, that's probably a good thing.

Now on to the not-so-positive:

1. Verizon. One would think that it's easy to flip the switch to turn on DSL, since the apartment is already wired for it. To the contrary. After two missed turn-on dates, I spent an hour speaking to five different people - each handing me off to the next - in a single phone call with Verizon. Individually, the reps were polite and did their best to help; it was the Kafka-esque process that was so irritating.

It went something like this.

Rep 1: "Uhh, Mr. Hurst, looks like there's a wiring issue. I'll connect you with the DSL Office." (put on hold)

Rep 2: "No, it's not a wiring issue. The problem is that there's someone else's name on your account, and we have to reset your entire account to clear it. I'll connect you with someone who'll do that for you." (put on hold)

Rep 3: "I have no idea what they're talking about. 'Reset your entire account' - what did they mean by that? I'm going to put you on hold..."

At some point during the interminable hold, the call was dropped (either by Verizon or my AT&T-powered cell phone) and I called back, starting over again. I explained my issue to the new rep (#4), and asked to speak to a manager. She agreed, and sent me to... a brand new service rep (#5), not a manager, who delivered the punch line: "I'm sorry, we have no record of your phone number."

I'm guessing someone had reset the line, because within the hour the DSL was finally on. All's well that ends well, but must it require such confusion to flip a switch? C'mon, Verizon.

(Though come to think of it, even in this age of competition, is there a better provider of DSL and phone?)

2. Time Warner. I challenge you, dear readers, to go to www.timewarnercable.com and try to order new cable service. Don't worry, you won't accidentally order a new account you don't want... because YOU CAN'T. In fact, I dare you to find any information about signing up for Time Warner basic cable service in New York City.

Promotions and tag lines they have aplenty. Colors, stock graphics, logos, and corporate happytalk they do not lack. It is information about signing up for their most common service - cable - that seems to have been omitted. Oops. If the site manager is reading this, I can deliver good news: the $10 million you spent on the colorful redesign is a sunk cost. Don't worry - just fix it. For much less than a million, a good customer experience firm could improve the site by about a googol percent.

Incidentally, I did find a Contact Us form on the site, and I submitted all my information. The website promised someone from Time Warner Cable would get back to me within 24 hours. That was a week ago.

3. PC Richard & Son. The product I bought from this New York-area appliance retailer - a Frigidaire Gallery - is a fine refrigerator, one I would recommend. It's the retailer I would take issue with... who promised delivery in a four-hour window and was late, and then attempted to deliver a damaged fridge; whose store manager told me over the phone that being late was OK, because "this is Manhattan"; whose second delivery, guaranteed to be on time, was even later than the first; and whose purported mail-in rebate was nowhere to be found. (For its part, Frigidaire only took eleven days to answer my question submitted via its Contact Us form. The fridge is better than the website.)

I'll end on a positive note. In addition to ConEd, there's one other company that has delivered on each and every promise: TiVo. The website made it super easy to order. When I called the 800 number with a question, the customer service was polite, fast, and effective. The unit itself was delivered quicker than I expected. And I'm sure that the TiVo service itself will be spectacular, once Time Warner deigns to take my money.

My conclusion is simple. If your company is in a crowded market and you want to stand out, just deliver the basics of a good customer experience:

1. A quick and easy website that gives information on your basic service, and allows customers to place an order or sign up. Easily.

2. A call center run by people who will either answer the question, or will stay on the line until someone picks up who can answer it. And an e-mail support team that replies within a day.

3. Fulfilled promises. This means deliver on time, and apologize immediately for any mistakes.

Just delivering the basics can propel your company to the top of your space. Can you imagine if there was a phone company - or cable company - or appliance retailer - known for its speedy, polite, effective customer experience? For its easy website and its quick phone support?

Such basic improvements to the experience are inexpensive, especially when compared to the cost of customers abandoning the business (from a bad website) or of customers calling the call center again... and again... and again... just to get service turned on.

- - -

P.S. Speaking of TiVo, here's a This Is Broken post linking to a quick review of a competing DVR.

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Job Opening: Eddiebauer.com
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Company: Eddiebauer.com
Title: Usability Analyst
Location: Redmond, WA

Deliver on the Brand's mission by providing expert knowledge and
insight into Eddie Bauer's online business and the e-commerce
marketplace. Develop recommendations to grow the business by
measuring and analyzing site usability and monitoring the customer's
experience. Serve as the customer's advocate.

To respond, e-mail your resume to: karen.hiller@eddiebauer.com

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Job Opening: Burlington Coat Factory
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Company: Burlington Coat Factory
Title: Director, Online Marketing
Location: Burlington, NJ

We seek an experienced Online Marketer with excellent hands-on and
project management skills to develop & manage all aspects of online
marketing & strategy. Min 7 yrs retail marketing exp with 3 yrs online
req. MBA pref. Reports to the VP of E-commerce.

To apply, email your resume to e-commerce.jobs@coat.com, Sub: GE-MK

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Job Opening: Burlington Coat Factory
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Company: Burlington Coat Factory
Title: Director, Online Merchandising & Planning
Location: Burlington, NJ

We seek an experienced merchant to manage online merchandising &
planning of all product categories incl. apparel & a wide selection
of home & baby goods. Min 5 yrs sr. merchandise buying / planning in
e-commerce bus. & 3 yrs team mgmt. exp. req. Exceptional
quantitative, analytical, & strategic thinking skills are essential.

To apply, email your resume to e-commerce.jobs@coat.com, Sub: GE-ME

OK, here's the scenario. You're observing a day of customer research - listening labs, usability tests, focus groups - and taking notes. By the end of the day, having watched several users muddle through your company's service, you have a long list of ideas for improvement. The discussion with your coworkers at the end of the day gives you even more items for the list.

What happens then?

In the worst case, nothing happens - except that people go back to their cubicles feeling that their own pet peeves about the site were proven right. Day-to-day business takes over, and the long list of improvements never gets implemented. Soon enough, management discovers that the site still isn't performing, and the development team begins scheduling the next round of customer research.

In a better case, the development team assigns action items to various people, and over the next few weeks, several of the tactical improvements make their way onto the site. A few minor problems are solved, management notices a slight rise in "the numbers," and the project is deemed a success.

Indeed, the team in the second case might be deemed "customer champions," because they observed customers, acted on the findings, and created a slight - but still measurable - improvement. What could possibly be better?

Actually, there's a MUCH better way.

It's not that the second team did anything wrong; it's that they left out a main piece of customer experience work: thinking strategically. Simply going through a "laundry list" of tactical improvements is bound to lead to small, incremental, tactical improvements in the business.

It's also hard, when working from a long list of improvements, to prioritize the changes. The development team has 42 ideas of things to fix, and time enough to fix five of them. Which five will it be? Who makes the decision, and what's the basis for the decision?

All of these issues are solved by thinking strategically. Direct customer research should be followed by a phase [see below*] in which the team creates a customer experience strategy which organizes all the findings of the labs - and creates, holistically, a much bigger and stronger vision of the improvements to the service.

Creating the strategy can start during the labs, as the stakeholders observing customers discuss, after each session, what they saw. Throughout the discussions, the stakeholders begin to form a consensus about what the customers' unmet needs are, where the site's strengths and weaknesses are, and about the new or surprising findings arising from the customer lab sessions.

When labs are complete, the observers - development team, stakeholders, executives - should have the basis for a customer experience strategy: an initial idea about how to conceptualize it, and the beginnings of the consensus needed to support it.

Here's a less boring way to put it. If you observe customers carefully, and participate in the discussions afterwards - you might begin to see the outlines of "the elephant in the living room." It may be a bodacious "gotcha"; it may be a radically simple transformation of the site that no one thought of before; it may be a corporate taboo that you couldn't voice until the customers voiced it just then in the labs.

Keep in mind that customers' behavior and actions during labs merely set the context for the strategy. This is an important point: observing customers is essential to forming a strategy, but the customers themselves don't create the strategy. Just try asking customers during labs: "What's the strategic transformation of this site that will best improve the business metrics?" No. But from watching several customers throughout labs, you can begin to form a strategy, based on what they're doing, or not doing; where they're succeeding or failing; what they say or don't say. There are no hard-and-fast rules except to keep your eyes and ears open.

Perhaps not surprisingly, we find that it's the senior executives who "get it" the most as they observe listening labs. Junior staffers might latch onto their pet peeves - tactics about links or colors - but the VP of Marketing, or the CEO, will take in the larger picture about how customers are interacting with the business.

Don't misunderstand: Listening labs do create a list of tactical changes. Yes, it's all there for the designers and information architects to dig into (as they should): navigation changes, link colors, you name it. And we do recommend that the tactics be fixed. But THE TACTICS ARE SECONDARY - we focus primarily on getting that customer experience strategy created.

I recommend officially creating the strategy after the labs, once you've had time to digest what happened and to analyze the lab results. This also gives you a chance to bring the observers together again and get their buy-in on the strategy. Gaining that consensus, the nod to go forward with the strategy, is THE most effective way to ensure that meaningful changes will occur on the site. It's also quite easy to get the nod, if the stakeholders were present at the labs.

I'll finish with a personal experience, the most recent set of listening labs I attended - earlier this week, in fact. The stakeholders of this informational site came into labs with some ideas about tactics that needed to be fixed. By the end of the labs, most of the tactics were validated by customers; the stakeholders guesses were right. But that was secondary. What the client found most useful was the new strategy that emerged: a transformation of the site, which no one could have predicted, which stemmed from observing customer behavior, and which finally came to fruition by the collective efforts and discussion of the observers.

* Creative Good's Customer Experience Method (CEM) uses this terminology: After the direct customer research in Phase 2, listening labs, Phase 3 creates the customer experience strategy. Read the CEM whitepaper for more.