Archives / September 2011

You probably saw the Netflix news last week: they're going streaming-only, while the DVD business gets shunted off into something called Quikster. All with a price rise and an inauthentic "apology" leading things off.

As for the name, one comment I saw online put it best: they should have named it Quitster.

As bad as the name is, as poorly written as the announcement was, I'm much more surprised by one aspect of the resulting customer experience:

For the first time in history, a major Internet company is voluntarily shrinking its search results.

Think about it. Take an example like Amazon, which for years has been adding products, whole product lines, all in the service of increasing its search results. The bigger the selection, the more likely you are to return to that - exact - search button.

You could make the same case for search engines over the years - Google always increasing what it indexes, and now Bing trying to place second, in large part by growing its index. As someone else said online recently, if it's not indexed online, it may as well not exist at all.

Here's a customer experience tip. Customers like to click Search just once. Increasing the size of your search index improves the customer experience, which improves the business.

In the case of Netfwikster, or whatever name it will soon go by, I'm just flabbergasted that they would voluntarily reduce the number of search results they make available to customers.

Now, plenty of people have weighed in on why Netflix has made A Very Bad Move Indeed - one such analysis coming from David Pogue, who reluctantly points out that it's probably a good business move, as the price rise will vastly outweigh the defection of a million or more customers.

But this misses the point. Customer experience is a long-term game. Netflix took down Blockbuster by giving customers a better experience than the competition - but it took years. Netflix's current moves might make some short-term gains, but if the long-term strategy continues to ignore the customer experience, watch out.

In the long run, given competition, the best customer experience will always win.

For years I've tried to explain to people that I'm not a "Mac fanatic" but rather a fan of good experience, and that Macs have tended to deliver on that the best.

Mat Honan words it pretty much perfectly over on Gizmodo:

I tend to vote for Democrats and buy Apple products. But that's because they tend to support my priorities, not vice-versa. If the Democrats suddenly turned their backs on science, or Apple began pushing out products with buggy cluttered interfaces, I'd look elsewhere. I don't really get those who treat brands like sports teams, offering blind allegiance over self-interest. That's just zealotry. God bless that file system; my platform, right or wrong.

The older I get the less I trust anyone who puts party or platform over the advancement of society.

Amen to that.

Recently while purchasing an item in a store here in Manhattan, the salesperson asked me for my email address - for my receipt, I thought.

A couple of days later, here came two separate promotional emails from the store: SALE! NEW! WOW! BUY!

I contacted customer service and told them that I had never given permission to be on a spam list. 'So sorry, we'll take you off immediately,' came the response.

A few days later, you can guess what arrived: WOW! SURVEY! BUY AGAIN! I contacted customer service again and said "please stop" again.

Here's what they wrote back:

Thanks Mark - that email is tied to your purchase, so we classify that as transactional rather than marketing. ...

What? Who cares how it was classified inside the company - I asked for it to stop.

This is a brilliant encapsulation of what's wrong with so many companies' customer experiences: what the company sees is different from what the customer sees.

Let's take the example above:

• The company sees its own view from the inside: marketing team over here, sending "marketing" emails - promotions for all recent customers. And product team over there, sending "transactional" emails - surveys and promotions related to specific products. If a customer opts out, they just turn off the "marketing" spigot.

• The customer sees a bunch of email spamming his inbox immediately after a purchase. He asks for it to stop, but more comes.

Here's how to solve customer experience problems like this: get the company to see what the customer sees. If the executives inside the company could just "see through the eyes of a customer," it quickly would become clear how to improve the experience.

Building a successful company these days means creating a good experience from the customer's perspective, not from the company's perspective.

And that's why to invest in customer experience. (This is what my company Creative Good does, by the way. Drop us a line.)