OK, I’ve threatened to do this for a long time (old blog entry about Customer Service Guy www.kurtfisher.com/5.html )- time to act.

I invite all to share their customer experiences - both Good and Bad! We will start a new category for this blog called ‘Customer Experience’ and I invite posts and comments related to your experiences. Let us know about companies that provide exceptional customer experiences and ones that miss the mark. It is not important to tell us the name of the company - what is important is to explain what was good or bad about the experience so we can all expand our consciousness about what affects customer experiences.

This awareness will make us better marketing mangers, strategists, designers and developers. Plus, it will be fun hearing the horror stories – some are pretty funny once you get over the urge to throw your computer out the window.

Remember – no company bashing, just sharing of constructive observations.

OK, here’s my latest: I ordered tickets online this morning for a play. I was offered a seating chart to select my seats – Area 1 or area 2. I asked for best available and during checkout was told I was in Section D. ???? What happened to Area 1 and 2? Why wasn’t Section D on the map? I went back to the seating chart to see if I could figure it out - I have no idea where my seats are but because I have been to this play before I will chance it – others might bail on checking out and pick up the phone instead – there go service costs; or worse, lost revenue.

But it is frustrating when labels are not consistent from page to page and step to step. Unfortunately this is a common theme in user experience.

In Dallas, the weather is not very polite. Tonight we are expecting old man winter to break the door down and kick us in the shins with his 40 degree plummet and freezing rain. We’ll see how that goes, but hey…that’s Dallas weather for you.

On that note, here’s a great weather forecast website that you may have seen. There are some cool features that you don’t see at other weather sites…including a (drum roll) BLOG! Plus the design is quite good.

So if you’re in Dallas, pull your coats out and buy some shin guards because old man winter has a warrant and he’s not planning on knocking first.

Today’s world is fast paced, but all businesses need to slow down to understand their customer experience. Before implementing something, put on your customer shoes, glasses or metaphor of choice and go through your customer experience – Does it make sense? Does it work? Is it easy?

Example: I have a new cable company – they recently took over my previous company - so you would think they would be hyper sensitive to all the changes their customers are going thru. So today I received an email saying my monthly bill was ready to review.

The email prompted me to logon to my new account and to check my settings to be able to continue to receive my online bill. The way it was worded I thought I had to do this to continue online bill pay. They provided me a link.

First problem – the link went to the home page rather than a landing page for logging into my account, or a “Welcome to our new Express Pay service, please login to verify your settings.� So I had to read the home page to find something relevant – no “My Account� button, but the Online Bill Payment link was fairly prominent.

So now I’m at a page that describes all the options for online bill payment – Still no navigation to “Verify Your Settings�, or “My Account� and the navigation link to “Pay Your Bill Online� brings me to the same page. So I scan the page again and there is a banner add for Express Pay with “Enter Express Pay� incorporated into the ad – missed it first time I scanned the page for logon boxes, navigation, links and buttons.

Now I get to logon and verify my settings – but there is no section called “Settings� so I review my contact info and I guess everything is fine – so I leave – never had a chance to click a button to “Verify Your Settings�.

So the point here is – if you tell your customer they have to do something, make sure they really have to do it; make it easy and direct; and be consistent with the labels you use so it is easy to recognize where one is supposed to go and what one is supposed to do.

What’s your customer experience like?

There are so many apps that I love, but there are a few that I cannot do without. Funny thing is, that the ones that are most critical to my life, where I feel the most love, don’t even reside on my macbook pro. My software soulmate lives in cyber space. It’s all about collaborative contribution. It’s all about being the life of the party and letting participants frolick around and have a great time. My software soul mate can be a little frisky…it does not like to be categorized as easily in the beginning, but after a little wrestling, my software soulmate is more compliant and organized. My software soulmate need to exercise frequently. If it gets lazy it can put on the pounds, but it only takes a little exercise to keep my software soulmate lean and trim and working in top form.

My software soulmate is our Wiki. It is awesome. I use it all day long. It allows me to collaborate with any members of our team to build proposals, gather thoughts, collaborate on research projects, create to do lists or any other form of documentations. Our Wiki has built in version control and allow us to roll back and run comparisons against any previously saved instance of a document. Our Wiki has watch lists, that allow us to monitor pages that are improtant to us. Or, if we just want to see what’s going on in our Wiki community, we just look at the “recently changed” tab to see what’s been happening.

Our Wiki is my software soulmate. What’s yours?

I am fascinated with what dna 11 is doing to create original art for those who make the purchase. The process is pretty cool too. I think I am going to buy one!

“DNA 11 creates personalized and original abstract art from a sample of your DNA or fingerprints. Each piece is as unique as you. Personal. Beautiful. Absolutely one-of-a-kind. Modern masterpieces that are truly the timeless portraits of this millennium.”

“Most Web 2.0 sites come across as friendly, approachable and small-scale, using subtle design decisions to gain our trust. Gradients, colorful icons, reflections, dropshadows, and large text all got a mention…..”

Interesting read on the color and imagery of the something 2.0 word. Still, its part of our online web society, for now, and it’s seemingly everywhere. Some of you may find this digg enjoyable.

read more | digg story

The first thing I noticed when Chris Griego created our account on FeedBurner was the easy to read and very straight-forward interface. These guys have done a great job of creating a GUI that makes sense and spells out all of the information we care about when using this application. While our application was loading, we were presented with a little interstitial that said something like “it’s so new, we are still playing with the bubble wrap.”

This application gets it. It’s great for syndicating feeds and managing feeds. Now, if you select an RSS feed on RD2, it will redirect you to a FeedBurner page. You will have more options such as “subscribe by email”, etc. You will notice that the rendering of the RSS feed itself is more legible and easy to read.

We just started tonight with this, but are watching closely. We will report back with more soon.

If you’ve listened to any mass media in the last 48 hours, you can’t help but heard the term “Cyber Monday,” a neologism used to describe the Monday following Black Friday which, according to users of the term, is the busiest online shopping day of the year as shoppers return to work and log online to continue the shopping frenzy. But in reality, Cyber Monday is actually nothing more than savvy marketing to promote online holiday shopping.

CNet recently published an article that looks closer at the actual numbers. Historically, so-called Cyber Monday has been no more busy than any other day and the busiest day typically falls between December 5-15. In 2005, the busiest online shopping day was December 5th, according to MasterCard’s worldwide data, a full week after Cyber Monday and Shop.org pinpointed December 12th as the date, two weeks after Cyber Monday.

So who invented this Cyber Monday? It wasn’t the mass media, they’ve just taken the concept and ran with it. Both the term and concept were invented before the 2005 shopping season by Shop.org, not to be confused with Shopping.com, an association of online retailers which include eBay, Amazon.com, Apple, AOL, CompUSA, and more than 600 others.

Business Week Online ran an article in 2005 about the phenomenon, exposing the half-truths and origins of Cyber Monday. Shop.org sent out an email in 2004 to their members, “suggesting that online retailers come up with their own marketing hook to match Black Friday.” In 2005, Shop.org published a press release hyping their new marketing invention of Cyber Monday.

I’ve worked online retail shipping for the 2003 and 2004 holiday seasons, so this information is actually comforting. My employer and I were not missing anything by not noticing these nonexistent trends. The online shopping season hits hard and fast. Your shopping season is shorter than brick & mortar retail due to the overhead of shipping time and you do several times the sales of any one store.

Now, while Cyber Monday is a good name for yet another promotion, it’s likely to become a self-fulfilling prophesy, which is Shop.org’s goal of course. Many online retailers have “Cyber Monday” sales plastered on their home pages today and Shop.org’s own CyberMonday.com is ready to help you find each and every one of them.

Since I purchased an Intel Mac, I am troubled by a memory hungry system. Even with 2 gigs, what’s the dealio? This article sheds a little light on the subject.

read more | digg story

We’re still stoked about our new office space. It seems that since we moved in, it’s just been a blur. But, in the first three weeks, I have taken the camera out once to snap a few pics with my Nikon D50 (shameless plug on my awesome camera that I love). This is a shot looking past my office (on the left) and the conference room (on the right). We’re still unpacking and getting settled in. It’ll probably some time before it really feels broken in. Come on by and pay us a visit!