Archives / November 2006

Geler David Feldt, SVP of Organic, writes a Gootodo testimonial:

Email has become the scourge of my life. I've been dealing with over 100 emails a day in my work life and all I seemed to do is scan / read emails all day long. Then there's the meeting schedule and endless to-dos that need to be managed too.

Along came Gootodo.com to simplify my life. It's an incredibly simple tool that is also incredibly powerful, intuitive and easy to use and it has allowed me to take charge of my inbox, integrate emails, schedule and to-dos into one manageable process and reduce the email clutter. I strongly recommend it!

Thanks, Mark, for giving me back hours in my day and for providing me with a simple means of ensuring that I don't neglect my clients and prospects in my crazy daily schedule.

Look forward to seeing you at Gel 2007!

Try Gootodo.com right now.

Or: Solve your e-mail overload, right now.

Well worth a read: James Surowiecki in the New Yorker argues the same point I do in Uncle Mark 2007: of three major game companies, only Nintendo focuses on making fun games (rather than chasing after market share with high-tech nonsense, as Sony and Microsoft do):

From The New Yorker - In Praise of Third Place:

The Wii has few bells and whistles and much less processing power than its "competitors," and it features less impressive graphics. It's really well suited for just one thing: playing games. But this turns out to be an asset. The Wii's simplicity means that Nintendo can make money selling consoles, while Sony is reportedly losing more than two hundred and forty dollars on each PlayStation 3 it sells - even though they are selling for almost six hundred dollars. Similarly, because Nintendo is not trying to rule the entire industry, it's been able to focus on its core competence, which is making entertaining, innovative games.

The only problem with the piece is the sentence near the end:

Some pundits are now speculating, ironically, that the simplicity of the Wii may make it a huge hit.

There's nothing ironic about it, and there's nothing to speculate about. In a competitive market, simplicity and good experience always create a huge hit.

If you've read my Uncle Mark 2007 Gift Guide, you already know this, but I made a special recommendation for readers not to buy Microsoft's new music player, the Zune.

Yesterday Cory wrote that others are making the same recommendation. From Boing Boing: Zune is a failure:

Writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, Andy Ihnatko unloads on the Zune with both barrels, calling it a "complete, humiliating failure" and a "colossal blunder," because Microsoft has taken the user out of its design considerations and put the music industry (in the person of Universal's Doug Morris, "a big, clueless idiot") in their place.

From a good profile in US News & World Report, Turning the Tide at P&G: A. G. Lafley:

"The consumer is boss," Procter & Gamble Chief Executive A. G. Lafley says simply of the business mantra he endlessly repeats to his employees.

It might seem a fool's errand to try to boil down the marching orders for 138,000 workers in more than 80 countries to a simple cliche. But those four words - which might as well be tattooed on Lafley's forehead - speak volumes about his keep-it-simple strategy for leading the world's largest consumer products company: Find out what the consumer wants, and give it to her.

It's an approach straight from the playbook of Lafley's mentor, Peter Drucker, the late management guru who argued that companies tend to overcomplicate their businesses, creating too many products, hiring too many employees, and generally distracting themselves from what made them successful in the first place: pleasing their customers.

Also worth reading is the profile of Warren Buffett, one of my and Phil's favorite people.

(This is a post by guest blogger Paul Adams, who I introduced here. -mh)

Many cities have bus lanes i.e. traffic lanes that only buses can travel in. This is to quicken the bus journey in times of heavy traffic and promote the bus as an attractive mode of transport. Most bus lanes have hours of operation, usually peak traffic times.

Some frustrated commuters in cars often use the bus lane to take a few minutes off their journey and manoeuvre to the front of the traffic jam. I'm sure we've all seen it!

In Manchester (UK), the local city council installed moving bollards to prevent commuters in cars from using bus lanes. They tried to change people’s behaviour, with catastrophic results:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEbmJi3ROKk

Understanding people’s real behaviour and motivations is crucial to good design. In most cases, good design should support people’s natural behaviour, not try to change it. In other cases, it is important to understand people’s decision making processes. If a police car was parked on the roadside at the end of the bus lane, no commuters in cars would use the bus lane.

(This is a post by guest blogger Paul Adams, who I introduced here. -mh)

Most budget airlines (such as Ryanair and Easyjet in Europe) don’t use airbridges. That is, when you disembark from the aircraft, you must walk down the steep steps, cross the tarmac, and either enter the terminal building or board a bus which will take you to the terminal building.

These airlines don’t use them because they have quick turnaround times (usually under 20 minutes), and it is quicker to dismount the passengers down the steps than manoeuvre the airbridge into place.

This is not a good customer experience. The steps often feel unstable and are relatively difficult to navigate. One must sometimes walk around the aircraft wing and engine (not for the faint-hearted). Being an airport apron, it is almost always windy, and if it is raining, almost all the customers will get wet. (Who carries an umbrella onboard?)

Who is responsible for managing this customer experience? The airline or the airport? Certainly both brands are damaged from the poor customer experience. If customers were given umbrellas as they leave the plane, which they then leave on the bus, would the experience have a positive impact on the brand? Would people be blown away by the umbrellas? Is there a better solution?

(This is a post by guest blogger Paul Adams, who I introduced here. -mh)

Last night I went to see Borat in my local cinema. I booked the tickets over the phone with my credit card. I turned up at the cinema, went to the ticket machine, put my card in the slot, and out popped the tickets. That was it.

Simple and effective.

Compare this to similar activities elsewhere in the world - check-in machines in airports, ticket collection machines in rail stations, car parking machines...

They often have touchscreen keyboards and options and buttons. You often have to enter your name and reference number.

In these environments, reducing complexity creates better customer experiences.

The Times today ran a long piece on the closing of Movie Place, my neighborhood video store. Like La Rosita, our beloved Cuban restaurant that will close next month, Movie Place provides more than a commercial experience. These are the gathering places of the community - not a community center, and not (just) a store - but a place that joins the best of both experiences.

From Lights Out:

But the decline of the video store is more than a story of small merchants undone by technological change. Like movie theaters, and unlike delis or drugstores, video shops in a city as film-saturated and film-savvy as New York emerged as centers of neighborhood life.

Their selections mirror the people they serve, and their proprietors, like Mr. Dennis, can be beloved figures with a deep knowledge not only of local inhabitants' film tastes, but also of other aspects of their lives.

See also: The urban experience and La Rosita

Aww, shucks, mediabistro. Just that thank-you will do fine!

(This is a post by guest blogger Paul Adams, who I introduced here. -mh)

The UK postal service often attempt to deliver things to me when I am not at home. They leave a cardboard slip, which I must take down to my local postal sorting office to reclaim my item. Nine times out of ten, this is my experience of the postal office:

There are no visible staff. So I must ring the bell located on the counter. I hear a bell ringing in the background but receive no other feedback. No staff appear within a minute (a long time to wait behind a counter, especially when you are late for work) and I end up ringing the bell again, and again, until someone appears. They take my slip without uttering any words to me. They disappear behind the wooden panelling in the photo. Sometimes they reappear within a minute. Sometimes they are gone for up to five minutes. They rarely ask me to show them I.D., and then hand me the package without a word.

This is a terrible customer experience because the postal service have forgotten about the basics:

- A waiting customer is more important than any task which is not related to other customers in the office.
- Staff should smile and be courteous and polite.
- Staff should inform customers if there might be a wait: "It might take me a few minutes to find your item, but I'll be as quick as I can".
- Staff should reassure customers that they take their privacy very seriously e.g. by checking that the person collecting the parcel has not found the slip on the street.

These experiences raise some other interesting questions about the postal service:
- Do they properly train their staff?
- Do they care if their staff are happy?
- Do they care about their customers?
- Why do they continually try to deliver things to me when I am not at home?
- Why is the sorting office closed from noon on Saturday to Monday morning?

Speaking of Bank of America's over-aggressive response, take a look at what just happened at UCLA.

From Inside Higher Ed :: Shock and Anger at UCLA:

An incident that lasted only a few minutes Tuesday night in a library at the University of California at Los Angeles is capturing attention worldwide and raising questions about what constitutes legitimate police action on a college campus. In the incident, filmed and distributed online, campus police repeatedly stunned a student with a Taser when he couldn't produce an ID.

Customer experience principles should apply to universities, too...

The Gap launches a new online shoe store. From Zimran's winterspeak.com:

Online companies seem to think that prettyness=a good experience. I'll bet that Zappos customer ratings (focused on fit) and wide selection will do a better job of selling shoes that the pretty Piper Lime.

(This is a post by guest blogger Paul Adams, who I introduced here. -mh)

In commoditised markets, businesses need to compete on an experiential and emotional level. Hence, creating better customer experiences will nearly always provide business growth. To create these better customer experiences, a business can use a process of innovation, or a process of distortion.

I define innovation as creating something new which adds value both to the customer, and to the business.

I define distortion as creating something new which adds value to the business, but does not add actual value to the customer. Rather, it creates a perception of increased value to the customer.

Here are 4 examples of distortion:

1. Some washing machines add a greying dye to the water during washing cycles, making the water appear ‘dirtier’ than it actually is. This could lead to a better customer experience: “Wow, look at all the dirt coming out of my clothes!”

2. Most vacuum cleaners only remove the top 50% of the dirt in your carpet. However, they turn over the carpet fibres, making the carpet look cleaner than it is; which in turn leads to a good customer experience.

3. With goods ‘on sale’, many retailers display tags on the discounted items showing the RRP (recommended retail price) and the ‘sale price’. There is a big difference between the figures, and the customer experience is a good one: “I’m getting a great deal!” However, the deal is distorted, as these items are often for sale at other retail outlets for much lower prices than the RRP displayed on the ‘sale’ tags.

4. Many washing powders contain fluorescent brightening agents to make the washed clothes appear brighter than they actually are. Whether they are actually brighter or not is inconsequential to the customer experience. What matters is whether the customer has a good experience by perceiving to have clean, bright clothes.

Adding real value can be difficult, so creating a perception of added value can often be easier. Hence, distortion is often easier than innovation. And distortion can create good customer experiences. However, I am uneasy creating and designing distorted customer experiences.

There is an argument to say that growing your business through distortion is not a bad thing. The customer has a good experience, and the business is profitable. This may be true, but I think it a risky strategy. One of the most important elements of long-lasting brand-customer relationships is trust. And if the customer starts to see and understand the distortion, the brand relationship could be irreparably damaged.

I've heard of investing in over-investing in logos, but this is really something. From KFC Unveils New Logo:

As part of publicity for the new logo, KFC commissioned a giant, 87,000-square foot version of it that can be seen from space. The massive logo consists of 65,000 1-foot square painted tiles that were laid out in the Nevada desert over 24 days.

(Thanks, Vahe)

For a long time I've been impressed with Re-frame, the blog of London-based Paul Adams. He has a sharp eye for customer experience without getting dragged into the fads and methods that often bog down the discipline.

I've asked Paul to show us what he can do here at Good Experience for a few days - so take it away, Paul!

I'm happy to announce the new Uncle Mark 2007 Gift Guide and Almanac available right now: Download it here.

If you're not familiar with Uncle Mark, here's the deal: I review all the major consumer technology products and give my ONE favorite pick in each category... not the "17 top digital cameras", but the ONE camera that you should buy. The guide concludes with an Almanac section where I say whatever comes to mind, mostly "tips and tricks" that I can't fit anywhere else.

If you have read Uncle Mark in the past (this is the fourth year), I'd encourage you to download the 2007 guide. In a strange alignment of the technology cosmos, everyone seems to be launching new stuff this year...

- new digital cameras
- new personal computers
- new cell phones
- new digital music players
- new video game systems (three of them)
- new online games

...and so almost the entire 2007 guide is newly updated. I've tried my best to untangle the thicket of consumer technology choices and show the way to smart purchases.

Please do share the guide: print it, e-mail it, forward it, and pass it along. If you have a coworker, friend, or loved one who needs a clue about today's technology choices, just hand them Uncle Mark 2007.

Uncle Mark 2007 Gift Guide and Almanac:
http://unclemark.org/unclemark2007.pdf

Let me know what you think.

Following up on the Bank of America post, here's a cover of U2's "One", repurposed as "One Bank", sung at an internal Bank of America meeting about a bank merger.

Watch the video: You Tube: One Bank video

And here are the lyrics written out.

(Thanks, AliceH)

Ze Frank (Gel Gel '03) is mentioned in yesterday's NYTimes Magazine, in The Online Auteurs:

It’s difficult to explain exactly what it is that Frank is doing. Most days he just riffs on the news. Inevitably, though, while he’s talking, something goes wrong, either inside his head or in your attempt to resist the logic of what he’s working toward, so that as you watch, you get the creeping feeling that you’ve just woken up to meet the last sane lunatic alive.

Then he gives his comedy movie picks, along with Will Farrell and other comics. From On a Desert Island...:

Ze Frank (Creator, zefrank.com):
The Party (Peter Sellers, 1968)
The General (Buster Keaton, 1927)
A Day at the Races (Marx Brothers, 1937)
Caddyshack (Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, 1980)
The Perfect Human (Jorgen Leth, 1967)

(Thanks, Al)

The upcoming Uncle Mark 2007 will make mention of Motorola's poor usability. If you have a choice from your cell phone carrier, buy Nokia, not Motorola:

According to a poll by the magazine Mobile, more than three quarters of Motorola mobile phone users would not buy another Motorola handset because they are too difficult to use.

"In the survey of 55 Motorola customers, 78% said they wouldn't buy a Motorola handset again, with the majority citing problems with usability..."

Link (thanks, Henrik)

P.S. Readers at Motorola: Drop me a line if you'd like me to help out... I've been writing about this for years.

In the Washington Post, Steve Pearlstein talks about good experience in business, mentioning Copernican Award winner JetBlue as a case study. It's a nice distillation of the philosophy.

From If You Focus On Customers (Or Voters), You Win:

[W]hether you're talking business or politics, you don't need extensive polling or market research to predict the winners. It's actually pretty simple: Just identify the quality players who are focused on their customers. Which makes it all the more curious why so many people inside politics, and inside business, spend so much time and money making things more complicated than they need to be, even as they ignore the simple things most important to voters and customers.

Businesses, egged on by management consultants and pressured by Wall Street, get caught up in complicated strategies to manipulate customers or markets in ways that have little to do with improving quality, effectively putting their interests at odds with those of their customers...

Consider JetBlue, which in just six short years has become the hands-down favorite U.S. airline among readers of Conde Nast Traveler and Travel & Leisure. How did they do it? Its most important decision was not getting caught up in those clever tactics employed by the traditional airlines to use their far-flung route networks and predatory pricing to drive competition out of their hubs, and then to use their sophisticated reservation systems to squeeze the maximum revenue out of each flight.

Instead, JetBlue's strategy, as its executives explain it, was to "simplify the process" and "bring humanity back" to an industry that had lost focus on the customer experience...

Nice to see the good experience viewpoint getting some ink in Washington!

See also: Cleanliness in passenger airlines

(Thanks, Kevin)

In doing research for my upcoming Uncle Mark 2007 Gift Guide and Almanac I came across David Pogue's review of the Treo 700P, which will be my PDA pick for the year.

I have to hand it to David - he makes great review videos, and this is no exception: David Pogue reviews the Treo 700P.

(In Uncle Mark I'll recommend buying from Amazon.)

I've heard of customer-hostile banks (and have experienced them myself), but this Bank of America story takes the cake.

Matthew Shinnick dropped by a Bank of America branch in San Francisco to make sure a check he was about to deposit wasn't fraudulent. The teller found that the check was fraudulent and told the manager, who then had Shinnick thrown in jail.

Are you getting this right? The customer who wanted to make sure he wasn't about to draw on a fraudulent check, got thrown in jail by Bank of America.

The San Francisco Chronicle ran a story quoting Gel speaker and craigslist founder Craig Newmark, among others. From Check from a scammer bounces victim into jail:

The teller contacted the business and was informed that no check had been written to Shinnick for $2,000 or any other amount. She immediately passed the check to the branch manager. "I saw him talking on the phone and staring at me," Shinnick said. "A few minutes later, four SFPD officers came into the bank. They didn't say a thing. They just kicked my legs apart and handcuffed me behind my back." The police report for Shinnick's arrest says he was taken into custody "for the safety of the bank employees as well as the bank customers."

Shinnick spent several hours in jail, dressed in an orange jumpsuit, before his father posted $4,500 bail. All told Shinnick spent $14,000 to clear his record. Bank of America refused to reimburse him. In response, consumer advocate and radio host Clark Howard started a Bank of America "Money Loss Meter" to show how much money his listeners have withdrawn from BofA as they close their accounts in protest. It's up to $50 million. (There's more on Howard's site.)

And from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Clark Howard takes on B-of-A. For their part, Bank of America denies that customers are closing their accounts as Howard claims.

Bank of America spokespeople point out that the bank was just following California state law, which requires certain reporting of fraudulent activity. But even if they had to throw Shinnick in jail (which I doubt), they could still show their opposition to such a strange and hostile law. Imagine if they paid part of Shinnick's legal expenses, or even advocated a change in the law; think how much better Bank of America would look in that case.

Companies have a responsibility to do right by their customers. I'm not even making a moral case, though I think there is one; here I'm just pointing out the financial responsibility. By hurting Matthew Shinnick, and hiding behind a flimsy legal defense, Bank of America hurt its own brand. Many customers left the bank because of this incident, and B of A will have to resort to costly advertising to win back those accounts. A customer-centric response would have been faster, easier, and cheaper; good experience is good business.

Here's a great experience on Manhattan's Upper West Side: quoting curbed.com,

The Movie Place is the quintessential video store with an enormous selection of videos and dvds, including classics, esoterica, foreign films and documentaries, not to mention all seven seasons of 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer.' The staff all seem to be film fanatics, the prices reasonable, and the store delivers and picks of rentals in the neighborhood.

There's only one problem: rising rents are forcing it to close next month, after 23 years of operation. More at Curbed: Movie Place to Shutter.

If this sounds familiar, it's because I recently wrote about the beloved La Rosita's impending closing, too.

With more resources, I might form a holding company for these wonderful local spots - restaurants, bookstores, movie places, and the like - nationwide, and then use the advantage of national reach to benefit these family-owned good experiences.

A New England grocery chain has begun rating the nutritional value in the products it sells. They're apparently committed to being customer-centered; most of the store's own products get low ratings.

Unsurprisingly, some big food marketers aren't happy... seems they have something to lose when customers get better information.

From The Package May Say Healthy, but This Grocer Begs to Differ - New York Times:

At a time when more and more products are being marketed as healthy, the fact that so many items seemed to flunk Hannaford's inspection raises questions about the integrity of the nutrition claims, which are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration - or possibly about whether Hannaford made its standards too prissy or draconian. Either way, the results do seem to confirm the nagging feeling that the benefits promoted by many products have a lot more to do with marketing than nutrition.

Furthermore, the rating system, introduced in September, puts the grocery store in the awkward position of judging the very products it is trying to sell, not to mention the companies that supply the foods. In fact, most of Hannaford's own store-branded products did not get stars.

Worth a look: G., who created the great bugmenot, has created...

RetailMeNot.com - coupon codes for online stores.

A Times piece about woman-oriented marketing leads with Shane Homes, a Canadian homebuilder that emphasizes listening to customers before launching a new design. From What Do Women Want? Just Ask :

Shane Homes, whose revenue doubled in six years, to more than 180 million Canadian dollars in fiscal 2005-06, also went beyond listening. It asked women in the groups to design two homes, both named after Ms. Yaccato. Those and other suggestions were incorporated into the design of a house called the Yaccato 2... Mr. Wenzel says that Shane Homes now takes about five times longer to design a home than it did just a few years ago. "It's critiqued once, twice, three times," he said. "It's a longer process, but we end up with better designs."

(Thanks, Alice S)