Archives / February 2010

Interesting couple of situations with employees engaging directly with customers. In both cases the employee is perhaps acknowledging the employer's shortcoming - but in the process creating a good customer experience. In each case, a difficult truth is the springboard into good experience. The employer's response is telling.

1. A Bank of America employee describes how she shows mercy to credit card customers who can't pay the many extra fees... and she gets fired. From The Daily Show:

2. Oracle employee Chris Warticki posts on Twitter "So, what to do if you're the 'online customer presence' and your own leadership wants to censor your posts and comments?", resulting in his Oracle support blog being terminated. More info here.

What's the role of a social media representative - to repeat the press releases on Twitter? Or to engage with customers who have unpleasant feedback to share? Something in the middle?

I don't think one answer suits all companies - every culture is different - but I have to imagine that any company employing an "online customer presence," using social media, should be ready to accommodate and engage negative feedback - even from the social media rep.

Fun with packaging. Which of these brands is truly trying to improve the customer experience?

• Cigarette makers change their packaging to satisfy a new law against selling "light" brands - but the colors of the packaging still signal the same old ruse: NYT story

• Campbell's uses neuromarketing to create packaging that sells more cans of soup. They're not actually improving the soup, just tweaking the packaging: WSJ story

• Tropicana halted a redesign of its orange juice packaging because it made the varieties much harder to distinguish: Khoi's roundup (from 2009). See also Jamy Ian Swiss's Gel Video which touched on the same topic.

• See also this post on Pirate's Booty packaging.

Packaging is by definition a separate part of the experience from the product inside, be it poison, soup, orange juice, or snack chemicals. And to some extent the packaging has to use metaphor, or fantasy, perhaps even deception, to sell the product. But even deception can be a good thing (see Deception considered helpful). It all depends on what your longer-term aim is... or what the long-term effects of the product are.

I have to admit something strange: I'm amused by poorly designed websites. The worse the better. Much like some people "love to hate" movie villains, I get a peculiar satisfaction from finding myself completely lost in an ill-conceived, over-designed, steaming pile of a website.

And it happens all the time. With a few notable exceptions, almost any major site, brand, or company I visit online is at least mildly frustrating - and surprisingly often I find high-profile sites that are nearly impossible to use from the first page or two, leaving me astounded at the supreme waste of time and money they represent.

And I love to hate it - the juicy ridiculousness of it all - millions of dollars poured into something that is so obviously a wreck. I think I have to enjoy it on some level, given my role as a customer experience consultant; otherwise work would be pretty difficult (see also: doctors who can't stand the sight of blood).

I'm guessing you've had a similar experience of being frustrated by a large company's website. You go online to accomplish simple task X, or shop for product Y, or browse through information Z - and the site gives you swooping graphics and miniscule text from the designers, excited (not exciting) promotions from the marketing team, and features from the geeks that act as grand staircases to nowhere... but not the thing you were looking for.

At this moment, your reaction is probably similar to mine, those four well-known words: what were they thinking?!

The solution seems so simple. Why don't these companies experience their website from the perspective of a user so that they can see what's so obvious to us? If they'd just take an outside perspective, it would be easy for them to clean up the design, simplify the paths through the site, and generally orient their offering for the benefit of the user, rather than for short-sighted, self-serving aims. The company would save money in development and maintenance, and make more money from customers, and customers would be more likely to recommend the site to others. Slam dunk, case closed. Right?

I thought so at first. When I started Creative Good in 1997, offering to help companies do just this, I figured it would be an easy sale. After all, what company wouldn't immediately see the value in listening to customers? Surely I could have an impact on enough major sites that users would generally have a less frustrating experience online by, say, the year 2000.

But a funny thing happened on the way to solving the problem: only a few companies paid attention. Instead... well, here's an example. In one of my favorite stories from the early days, I found myself, in 1998, sitting in the office of a VP of Marketing for a top-20 website, pitching him the idea I described above: listen to users, make some simple changes, and start reaping the benefits immediately.

In the middle of my pitch I noticed he wasn't paying attention. "Hey, look," he said while still checking his computer screen, "our stock is up two points today."

Needless to say, I didn't get the job. The site never improved. And today, it's no longer a significant player in its market.

It's rarely that stark, though. In lots of cases my team or I have met an enthusiastic stakeholder within the company who buys into the customer experience idea, understands the problems on the site, and wants to improve. But they're stymied by other parts of the organization who are affected by inertia, bureaucratic process, short-term thinking, turf wars, inefficiency and distraction due to information overload, and a host of other issues. There are often too many concerns inside the organization to properly focus on who's outside the organization: the customers. And so the customer experience doesn't improve, despite how obvious the need (and potential gain) may be to objective observers like you and me. Actually getting a change made is really hard.

About a year ago a talented young Web designer named Dustin Curtis posted a rant railing against American Airlines for its poor website design and suggesting a clean and attractive alternative. Mr. Curtis's frustration - rage, really - came through in his letter, in which he "vowed never to fly your airline again." All I could think was "ahh, youth." It's easy to find the problems out there but much, much harder to push through an improvement. Suggesting an improved design - as Curtis expertly did - is a tiny step in the process.

Maybe another time I'll say more about how to make improvements to a customer experience. For now, let's acknowledge that many, many high-profile websites are wasteful and way too difficult to use. And probably always will be. Let's salute those people - inside and outside those companies - who are taking on the very difficult task of doing something about it.

- - -

See also:

• The most important user experience method (written in 2003, still applicable today)

• Creative Good (my company, 13 years old, still focused on improving customer experience)

Which would you rather do...

• create a experience that, even if you don't particularly care for it yourself, becomes wildly popular and puts your name on the map?

• ...or... create an experience you firmly believe in, no matter how popular (or not) it becomes?

Here I'm talking about any experience. You could be creating websites or software, or writing books, or designing products, or teaching classes, or producing events, or seeing patients. Whatever the case, what would you rather result from that experience: to be popular, or to create something that you yourself would be happy to receive?

Of course we'd like to do both. Many lucky souls manage to achieve both, and I'm always happy to meet them - and strive to be one myself with my own projects. But there's often a tradeoff between the two.

Let me put it another way. How far are you willing to defend the idea that "the customer is always right"? Let's say you've figured out that consumers absolutely love lemon-scented pork rinds, and you have the ability to bring them to market, but you happen to detest pork rinds. Is it worth it to you to get out on the street and spend a chunk of your professional life popularizing a food product you wouldn't yourself eat?

I've been fascinated by this question for most of my career - you might, in fact, say that engaging the question helped launch Creative Good and this very newsletter. Because here's the thing: the larger culture can't decide which to value. Sometimes a "good experience" is the thing that makes a boatload of money, because it serves some consumer desire, no matter the intrinsic value or integrity - "the customer is always right." And if enough people buy it, it makes for good copy.

On the other hand, sometimes the "good experience" is the thing that is most authentic, and often popular to a small minority. The scrappy restaurant with cuisine for the foodie palate, the indie film refusing to dumb down its plot or characters, the neighborhood or book or community "keeping it real" - it's practically a cliche, given how obsessed the culture is sometimes with finding the real or authentic thing.

And to say it again, of course there are people and products and brands that straddle both cases. And there's a spectrum in between. Still, it's worth considering the extremes.

This tradeoff came to mind recently when I read a profile of the author James Patterson in the New York Times magazine - well worth a read, if you haven't taken a look (read it here).

Patterson, if you're not familiar, sells more books than John Grisham, Stephen King, and Dan Brown - combined. Combined! There are popular authors, and then there's Patterson. Wow.

Not having ever read a Patterson novel, I can't comment on the quality of the writing, though Patterson himself says in the Times piece that that's not his main concern.

Patterson, instead, is very interested in sales. It's no coincidence that before becoming an author, he was a successful advertising executive: the man knows how to SELL.

And in the Times piece, Patterson gives a pithy explanation of how to sell books:

If you want to write for yourself, get a diary. If you want to write for a few friends, get a blog. But if you want to write for a lot of people, think about them a little bit. What do they like? What are their needs? A lot of people in this country go through their days numb. They need to be entertained. They need to feel something.

In other words, the customer is always right. If you want to sell books to lots of people, find out what lots of people want to read. (Rule of thumb: people who sell a lot of any particular thing - books or music or tickets or whatever - tend to be good at selling.)

In the case of Patterson, that means - to take an example from the article - looking at sales numbers of his books versus a competitor, and, well, just take a look:

When sales figures showed that he and John Grisham were running nearly neck and neck on the East Coast but that Grisham had a big lead out West, Patterson set his second thriller series, "The Women's Murder Club," about a group of women who solve murder mysteries, in San Francisco.

And that, my friends, is what it takes to write books that SELL. Find out what the customer wants, and deliver it.

Contrast that with the approach taken by the late J.D. Salinger, who took some pains to write authentically, as described by this New Yorker profile.

Salinger was generous with writers he admired, but he was unsparing about those who had what he called "disguises." He was hard on Kenneth Tynan. "No matter how he stuffs his readers with verbiage, it never amounts to a core of truth," he said. Tynan bent too much to current hip opinion, he thought. "A community of seriously hip observers is a scary and depressing thing," he said. "It takes me at least an hour to warm up when I sit down to work. ... Just taking off my own disguises takes an hour or more."

Which brings me back to my original question: if you had to choose one - and I know you'd probably like to have both - would you create something popular and financially successful in which the intrinsic quality wasn't your main concern... or would you create something you believed in, suffered for, and felt represented your authentic self, even if it didn't rise to the heights of material success?

I'm interested in your answers - post them in the comments.

P.S. I'm out of space but for those readers especially interested to dive in further, compare Patterson's approach to that of Charles Shaw, the maker of the inexpensive "Two Buck Chuck" wine, as profiled in "Drink Up," in the New Yorker, May 2009.

See also:

• Danielle Steel's writing tip

• Secrets of book publishing I wish I had known