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 Accountâ€? 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 Payâ€? 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?
Chris Ronan said:
Kurt - your post reminds me of a post I read on the 37signals.com blog recently about how Netflix handles the customer experience across many mediums. I thought it was interesting and your post reminded me of it. Here it is: http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/netflix_nails_it.php
:: 30 Nov 2006 at 5:36 pm ::
Kurt Fisher said:
Chris - I agree, this is a great review of a company that took the time to get the experience right. Obviously the online experience for Netflix is eveything to them, so they really focused on it. Its the companies that offer their online property as a “service” to their offline business that tend to get sloppy. While those companies probably can’t afford to focus on the process like Netflix did, they do need to stop and think and then reciew their process rather than just slapping it up there.
:: 30 Nov 2006 at 6:08 pm ::