Customer experience case study: "cars"

Jul 6, 2006

Here's a recent story from my consulting work, with all identifying details changed, of course.

A few months ago I got called in to evaluate a major auto-research website that allows customers to search for prices, reviews, and other data on new or used cars.

The site is free for users, so the business is supported by advertising: graphic and text banners in various places, and most profitably, the "partner links" that send users to specially branded content paid for by advertisers.

The site is about auto research, as I said, but the partner links are only tangentially related. For example, one of the larger partner areas might be about travel - where to drive your new car on road trips, say - and paid for by Travelocity or Expedia. Those areas are designed nicely enough, and the client, the auto-research site, loves those areas because it gets paid a much higher rate on clickthroughs. Advertisers are willing to pay a lot for qualified leads, since users clicking into those areas are much more valuable than a random sampling of Web users viewing a random banner ad.

Seeing the opportunity for much more revenue, the auto-research site - without really acknowledging it, I think - began following a strategy of pursuing those partner deals to the exclusion of other goals. They didn't just sign up more partners, they designed the customer experience around them. Everywhere you look you'd see links to these partner areas - for travel, for accessories, for outdoor adventure, anything you can imagine - all asking users to click away into a partner site. The primary reason customers were coming to the site - to find basic price and review data on cars - was gradually pushed to the background.

The last straw came, I think, when the homepage came up for a redesign and, through whatever design process the company used, the new homepage showed up without any search form, or links to cars, except in some secondary areas in the bottom-right of the page. Everything else on the homepage was given over to partner links and other "monetization" - newsletters, alerts, high-tech doodads, and the like - anything to capture and lock up customers and their attention. Once again, the primary reason customers were coming to the site - to find basic price and review data on cars - was pushed away. This is when the client called me at Creative Good.

When I began my project with the client, evaluating the customer experience and making recommendations for improvement, I quickly determined how much customer research had been conducted in recent redesigns: zero. All the design decisions were being made by executives, with no customer input, and with only a short-term goal of raising their numbers. I could have guessed this by looking at the site - no site gets that bad without actively ignoring customers - but it was good to get the guess validated.

Then when we went into customer research - their first time conducting listening labs in the website's history - the message came back loud and clear (I hesitate to say deafening, but it was close) from the customers: the site irritates them; they don't appreciate the insistent partner links; they can't find what they came for; they would be happy to use a competing site. The executives were aghast - they're good and smart people, after all, just misled by their short-term thinking absent any customer input - and they immediately pledged to change their ways.

The problem came, however, when it was time to make the changes: none of the executives wanted *their* group to be the one to give up screen space. It was a classic case of what we call "pixel politics", each group hanging on to their shred of the page, regardless of what role it might or might not play in the larger strategy of the company. In the end, we were able to lead the company to some improvements in their customer experience; with the politics so intense in the company, it was only through the direct customer research that we had any leverage to convince them to do so.

I tell this story not because it's unusual, but because it is so very common. We've seen the same patterns again and again over the past nine years of consulting:

- Customer experience is primarily an organizational issue. If we had made recommendations without taking the internal politics into account, our report would have gathered digital dust in a "consultant reports" folder on a server somewhere. To make customer experience real, it must be conducted in, with, and for the organization. There is no customer experience improvement without the organization that will implement it.

- Customer experience is strategic. We weren't dealing primarily with tactical positions of navbars and graphics, although they played a (tactical) part in our recommendations; instead, we had to go to the highest level of the organization's thinking to address the problem. There is no long-term improvement without a change in the long-term, strategic thinking of an organization.

- For the customer experience to improve, the organization must base its strategy on direct customer involvement. It simply doesn't work for executives to base their strategy, either actively or by default, on which advertiser pays the most. Customers must play a part in co-creating the strategy that will form their customer experience. To put it another way, what part of "customer experience" do executives not understand?

I'll end with a compliment. As difficult as it was for them to change, it's impressive that this particular company invested in improving their customer experience. Unlike so many companies of comparable size that drop millions on silly ad campaigns or "branding initiatives", this company acknowledged their need for customer-centered practices and took the first step, a Copernican step, in turning around their business. For that one step, they're far ahead of many other organizations.

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Let me (and other Good Experience readers) know your experiences improving your organization's customer experience: add your comment below.

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