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The Basics of Customer Experience
Oct 8, 2004
A recent Wall Street Journal piece [1] talked about the trouble that major wireless carriers are having selling advanced services to their subscribers. Despite adding features to cell phones like messaging, music, and video, companies are finding that most customers just want to make phone calls. The Journal reports that "what is important for users is price, network coverage, simplicity of offers and ease of paying."
There are a lot of customers, and a whole lot of money, waiting for the wireless carrier that learns this lesson: Basics sell. Ironically, it's the less expensive strategy - developing fewer features - that may make more money for the carriers. Of course, knowing which features to develop is the key; and that takes some smart customer research.
This is nothing specific to the wireless industry; many other companies could learn this lesson, too. I remember in the mid-90s when there were at least half a dozen search engine companies vying to be users' first choice in search. Lycos, WebCrawler, Infoseek, AltaVista, HotBot, and Yahoo - and a few others - were all in contention.
At that time I used Yahoo most often, because it loaded quickly, gave me good results quickly, and didn't distract the process with lots of other features. In other words, it provided the basics better than any of the competitors.
To the contrary, other search engines were determined to win the race with technology. HotBot presented a dashboard of menus, checkboxes, and other options; Infoseek offered various search filters; AltaVista made a huge deal about how powerful their servers were, and how many pages were in their database. None of them made it a primary goal to deliver the most basic experience: making it easy for users to search and get good results.
Today it's easy to see how that competition ended up. Yahoo easily pulled ahead of the competitors... that is, until another company started up with an even faster, even easier interface, and with an even more complete commitment to delivering the basics: Google, of course. More recently, new search startups are promising (as are Yahoo and MSN) to make the experience even better. Time will tell which company manages to deliver the best user experience, but rest assured that the basics will be more important than who offers the most high-tech gewgaws.
Why are the basics so important? The simpler an interface is, the more people will be able to use it. And if there's a benefit to using it (such as good search results), then the easier it is to use, the more people will use it. Multiply this by the size of the customer base online, and you have a lever that moves entire industries.
It bears pointing out that the success of the Web itself owes a lot to this principle. Well before Berners-Lee coded his first hyperlink, there was a global network of computers in place - computers which could share text, photos, music, and anything else representable in bits. There were programs to navigate this Net: FTP, Gopher, Telnet, and others. There was just one problem: it was way, way too hard for the average user to use. So practically no one used it. But with Berners-Lee's hyperlinks, suddenly people could traverse the Net with the ease of a mouse-click. One small change in the interface - not the hardware or the underlying network - was the catalyst to the explosive growth that followed. Basics sell.
All this must seem odd to marketers who, in decades past, were taught to create the longest possible list of high-tech features... and then sell those features with lots of happytalk and faux excitement. That's how the wireless carriers still operate, and how the search engine industries used to work, until Yahoo and Google became successful. Without Berners-Lee's hyperlinks, imagine what technologists might be marketing today: the latest Gopher interface, "now with trans-Boolean metafiltering!"
Of course, there is always a market for niche products. These can afford to be too complex for most users, in exchange for giving the niche user more power. But that's rare. Most companies would rather have a large, general customer base than a small core of tech-happy users. It's time for these companies to focus on the basics.
[1] "Cellphone Disconnect: Carriers Offer More, Customers Want Less," by Christopher Rhoads. Wall Street Journal, Sep.29, 2004;p.D5.
Well, I agree with your assessment of Wireless services, with one other addition - cost versus usefulness.
I waited a long time to get a cellphone, and even though my new gadget has a little built in camera, I don't use it much because in order for me to get the pictures out I need to sign up for an additional monthly service so I can email the images. Hmmm... $10 extra a month just to send myself some stupid low quality pictures?
There is a big difference between luxury and necessity - especially when you have to pay extra for it.
It's as Steve Wozniak declared (during a radio interview on KPFK's Digital Village), "The killer application on cell phones is voice!"
I agree wholeheartedly with this. I like things simple and that work as expected when needed! A friend of mine was so anxious to get a flip phone. Insisted I get one too, when I was shopping around for the phone I currently have. Well he finally got his flip phone. It has a nice color screen and all sorts of features. But the reception is terrible, as compared to the phone he used to have.
In my experiences, most of these gee whiz features don't add very much to productivity and are almost never used in the course of regular activitities.
Another analog to this would be the automotive industry. Sure, fancy sound systems and gadgets and chrome plated lunch dispensers (to use an old Mad Magazine reference to this very subject) are all nice, but what people primarily want as a minimum is *reliable transportation in reasonable comfort.* Car companies that provide this can then compete on features. Car companies that don't, no matter the image and extras, don't succeed for long.
This WSJ piece is not surprising. As a market research professional, a lot of bad research has been used to make bad decisions. It has also given researchers a bad reputation. Smart research means focusing on outcomes -- the factors that enter into consumers' decision-making, the jobs they want to accomplish with the product or service and the needs they hope to satisfy. In the case of wireless services, if they ask what features consumers want, they'll end up with more of the same failures. Instead, they need to ask how consumers value the service versus other services, how they apply those values to the decision-making, what outcomes they are seeking and ultimately what they hope to accomplish. From this, they will find the service and/or product gaps and align their offerings with how consumers value them.
I don't think that phone companies have ever recovered from the "good old days" of monopoly pricing. When a telco is pricing a service (like downloading your own photos from your own phone) they appear to ask themselves, "What is the most someone, somewhere will pay for this?" rather than "How many can we sell?".
I've been gradually switching my family's various cell phone services to Virgin pre-paid. For MUCH less money, I get hassle-free phone service. Virgin's one weakness used to be that they wouldn't do automatic credit card charges for the minimum amount (presumably Sprint, their network provider, had "explained" that $50 is more than $20), but recently they saw the light and now allow it -- that is, they gave up some potential revenue per user in exchange for a service that is easier to use, presumably in the hope that they'd get more users.
I think it's too easy to underprice standard telephone companies (true, with a simple service) to use them as a good measure of where people really fall on their preference for features versus simplicity.
Graeme underscore Williams at yahoo dot com
As a marketer, features sell products and services. Isn't the American way to want to get the *most* value, not always the *best*? (Like picking the 24oz steak that's less than the 8oz one.)
Where the wireless companies have gone wrong is making these services cumbersome and expensive to the point of being a disinsentive. Do I want a cell phone with a camera? Yes! Do I want to pay $10 a month more to use it? No!
I totally agree with Marc's comments, but I want to add that on top of it, a good user experience is ABSOLUTELY addictive, thus leading to high customer retention rate... Once you have succeded in this, customers will pay very low attention to your competitors (new) services. Examples of this ? Nokia is quite a good example... If you ask Nokia users if they would switch to another brand, the answer is no, because they know almost all their product have the same type of navigation... It takes then a lot to the competitors to fill the gaps... Users are lazy, and especially the ones that have found the good service or product (why should they change ???).
just yesterday I was reading an article on how iPods have these advanced chips in them that would allow for all kinds of features, enhanced 3d surround sound, equalizers, good quality audio recording, viewing jpgs and even jpg movies... but it kept coming back to the fact that Apple doesn't build firmware to supprot these things... why?
becuase its doing what it does very well, and simply, and the sales are proof that that is working for them, their last quarter earnings where their highest in 9 years.
Secrets of the 4G iPod article: http://www.ipodlounge.com/articles_more.php?id=4603_0_8_0_M