Online help two.zero

I went in to my local bank the other day to deposit a cheque. As I walked in a member of staff guided me towards one of their new deposit machines. So instead of depositing my cheque at the counter, they now had a machine that could do the whole process. Seemed fine to me. 

So I happily tried it out. Put my cheque together with the pay-in slip and then fed it into the machine. Everything seemed to work fine. And several days later I saw the amount had been credited to my bank account. 

I’m all for the advancement of technology. But the question I have got to ask myself is this: If you are going to replace people with machines, what’s the point if the machine is going to take longer? At least with a person, there is the potential of a smile and a ‘Have a nice day’.

I recently started using Facebook to keep in touch with friends. I’m definitely not a regular updater and what has been enlightening for me is understanding how not only I but my friends and family use Facebook.

I had my own preconceptions about how it was used and simply whether it had any value or relevance to me. I must admit I am starting to quite like it. I definitely fell into the ‘why would anyone want to know what I am up to and who really cares’ camp. My life isn’t that interesting – mainly made up of running around tidying up after the kids, sitting on the sofa in the evening and promptly falling asleep only to wake up at 1am, wishing I did more with my life. The cycle continues, apart from my time at work, the next day.

I recently received a couple of emails from two people who I have not been in contact with since I lived in Taiwan about 16 years ago. They both found me through Facebook – which I was amazed about. But what was interesting for me was that in both instances they sent a message to me via Facebook and I responded accordingly. But I was expecting then to keep in touch with them via email. The emails never came. What they did do was keep their Facebook page updated by adding one or two comments a day.

So I learnt that once that initial contact had been made by email or a Facebook message, that we would keep in touch by simply following each others updates, posting comments if we  had something to say (or a photo), or adding more info about ourselves. 

This whole approach is new to me. I’m used to using emails which are specific to a time, an action, a place, whereas Facebook is more like an ongoing conversation that goes at whatever speed you want it to. 

Anyway, this got me thinking, that it’s crucial to understand the platform that not only you are using, but that your customers are using. And once you understand the platform, to ask yourself, is it a relevant platform on which to communicate with my customers and if so, what type of communication should I be doing. You’ve still got to understand your customers and put together something relevant to converse with them about. But at least it’s a start.

I was on a two day course last week and stayed overnight in a strictly average hotel. I checked-in at reception when I got there in the morning, was given directions to the room, but couldn’t actually go to my room because it was still being cleaned. I didn’t pay much attention to the directions I was given, because I knew my room was still being cleaned. All I remember was that the room was up two flights of stairs.

I didn’t actually pick up my keys until about 6pm. My room number was 240. 

I went up the first set of stairs and at the top I was faced with three signs: Rooms 118-142 to the right, and to the left rooms 152-178 and 240-241.

I naturally go towards the sign showing 240. I go through a set of doors and am faced with a further two signs this time with doors going off in different directions. Unfortunately, neither sign has 240 on it. I try the left hand door first, no luck. So faced with the only alternative left I go through the door to the right. After a few steps I find a sign for room 240, indicating that I have to go up another flight of stairs and at the top is room 240. 

The question I asked myself is this: Why hold my hand so far, only to let it go when it matters? Where’s the logic in that?

It was the end of the day for me, and the last thing I wanted was to have to think where my room might be. I am a customer. I’m stupid at the best of times (but that doesn’t mean you can patronise me). Please think for me. Don’t ask me or expect me to think, especially if you have started leading the way. Please make sure the experience works the whole way through because it’s usually the small things, the things that we gloss over, the things that we’ve seen so many times we become blind to, that make the difference.

I was thinking about what made a good or bad customer experience, and even the words we use to describe that experience. I came to the conclusion:  it depends.

It depends on how we are feeling that day,  how previous encounters have been, the type of interaction we are going to have (ie. phone, face to face, ATM machine), what we’ve heard from our friends or read in the papers… This amorphous pool of personal and shared experiences with an inifinite number of variables that we constantly add to or take away from, the sum total of which is like our ‘experience baggage’ that we carry around with us. We unconsciously apply it to whatever situation we might find ourselves in.

We almost score each interaction or ‘micro-interaction’ using the following unconscious equation which has been built up over our life, but is worked out within milliseconds:

experience baggage + expectation = customer experience score

Our set of expectations is equally random. They have likewise been built up over our lifetime and are made up of and influenced by an infinite number of everchanging variables.

We then express thatcustomer  experience with a set number of stock words or phrases, almost like a score: good – bad, positive – negative, satisfied – dissatisfied…

Where am I going with this? Well it made me think that actually this makes it quite difficult for a company. But that made me then think, that even though it might be a difficult challenge for a company, there must be a base level of expectation that needs to be met in order for a positive customer experience to result. What’s difficult is that base level of expectation is everchanging. Take the following two examples.

1) Withdrawing money from an ATM machine. The entire transaction is a physical one – put in my card, enter PIN, account verified, money counted, get card back, take money, buy pizza. Simple. I don’t need to fill out any forms, talk to anyone, just need to remember my PIN. My ‘customer experience score’ is perhaps idling in neutral, until the machine runs out of money, swallows our card…

2) Renewing insurance. Finally managed to renew my insurance last night and unexpectedly had a fantastic experience from Mike at company XYZ. My ‘experience score’ was definitely set to negative. I was expecting it to be a longwinded and frustrating experience. I wasn’t disappointed to begin with and I posted a blog about it - renew my car insurance – make it easier please. 

The company that I ended up using was recommended to me by a colleague at work. So perhaps I was already off to a good start. I researched the company online and went through the process of getting a quote to see whether it was potentially competitive or not. I had a few questions that I noted down as I went through around legal and breakdown cover, and protecting my no claims bonus. Usually, if money is involved or there’s a legal aspect to it, I’ll do my research online, but end up buying it over the phone: I want to talk to someone about it. 

I called the company up and ended up speaking to someone called Mike. He was friendly, clear in his explanations, and in spite of a few stock phrases, left me feeling that he was genuinely interested in helping me find the most appropriate deal available for me. He was also impartial to a degree: if your current policy is cheaper, there’s no point moving elsewhere. 

Taking out insurance like reading through a booklet sent out by your bank on interest rate changes is a chore. But Mike managed to make the whole process much easier and smoother both for him and for me, because he simply tried to make the experience a pleasant one for both of us. He surpassed my expectations, and in so doing raised my ‘customer experience score’ not necessarily overall for renewing insurance, but certainly for this insurance company. My expectation of them at any future encounters will now certainly be higher and benchmarked against the service Mike provided to me. 

It also made me realise that there is such a fine line between a positive customer experience score and a negative one, and how quickly one can turn into the other. Sometimes, however, if I’m simply in a bad mood, it doesn’t really matter what level of service or customer experience you provide; but that shouldn’t stop us trying.

I came across a tweet this morning which had a link to a couple of great articles by Mike Hughes on user assistance and manuals.

• Straight Talk: Surviving Tough Times as a User Assistance Writer
• User Assistance in the role of domain expert

The takeaway for me from these articles was that user manuals have traditionally been written from a product perspective. That is now changing. Many of us simply don’t read the instructions, we stumble through, and if we are moving vaguely forwards we keep on going until we sort out the problem. There’s only so many buttons, it’ll come on sooner or later, right?!

Companies producing user manuals, how to instructions, technical specs, online help are going to have to realise that customers have changed, and the way in which help is and can be provided has changed and is changing. A new help experience is evolving and customers are driving it, we just don’t know it yet.

More often than not (billing queries aside), customers don’t even need to go back to the company they bought a product from to get help anymore. There’s enough of us who have bought the same product, who have experienced the same difficulty, and posted a clip on YouTube or tweeted about it. Go on to YouTube and see how many videos there are showing you how to remove a SIM card from an iPhone. Search ‘iPhone SIM card’: 419! And we aren’t just talking about 30 second videos either.

What companies do know, however, is that the customers of today are far more demanding, perhaps not more demanding, they just simply have the means to be more vocal about it. If something doesn’t work, we receive bad service, or the instructions don’t make sense we can blog or tweet about it. The great ‘advance’ is that we can blog or tweet about it now, while it’s happening, from where it’s happening and more than that, what we say can be read by literally thousands of people, and even more than that they can pass it on and on and on…

If companies are now faced with the rise of a modern day consumer who is brand-agnostic, independent, selfish of how they spend their money and time, and willing to participate (or be a voyeur) in a highly congested constantly ‘on’ information network fed by a plethora of trusted and untrusted sources, how do they provide them with help?

If the starting point for many of us is ‘I never read the instructions, I just stumble through’, where does that leave a company trying to put together a help manual or provide a help experience. Actually, I think it’s a really good starting point for a company as well.

They are at last trying to understand the relationship between the customer and help: what help is actually needed by the customer when the customer actually needs it, as well as how the customer approaches the whole dynamics of help. There’s another layer in there as well, but that can be dealt with another time – emotion. What’s the emotional state of the customer when they need help: excited, anxious, frustrated… This all adds to the overall experience, and perhaps more often than not dictates how we feel about a company when we put the phone down.

What if, when we put together a user manual or provide how to instructions online we approach it from trying to meet a customer’s possible need state at that moment in time? What if we accept that a customer will only dip into a help manual when they want to find out how to do something they don’t know how to, but also accept they’ll want to get it set-up in two minutes or less; what’s the implication of time in that scenario? What if, we start to also use what’s already out there on YouTube, Flickr, blogs, tweets etc? What if we provide more meaningful headings that are specific to certain groups at certain times, such as - Sending pictures of the kids to the grandparents on your cameraphone? I don’t know what any of that might look like, but it already sounds a whole lot more fun and engaging for all of us.

PostIt note for Monday 9am: Make Carphone Warehouse Help tweet of the day more fun and engaging (see that, clever play on tip of the day, get it, tip – tweet. Okay, forget it then. Another note to self – don’t try so hard, customers will see through it! Humour has to come naturally. Further note to self: don’t forget to link to Carphone Warehouse web site, good for natural search, added bonus).

Challenge for Monday: Be fun and engaging in 100 characters or less.

I’m trying to renew my car insurance at the moment. What’s great is that I can do the whole thing online. What’s not so great is that it takes forever and just to get a quote I have to fill out the same information over and over and over again. Why can’t you have a ‘quick quote’ function, an express form that asks the basics, and then gives me add-ons depending on what I want. Something that takes no more than two minutes.

Until I actually want to buy from you, you don’t need to know my name and telephone number. Start thinking about it from a customer’s point of view. And why is it that your online deals are different to your telephone deals? I research online and find a price, and then perhaps prefer to speak with someone when I come to actually buy it or simply to confirm some details, and yet I end up with a completely different price and in some cases totally different questions to answer.

And please if you are going to do an automatic look-up on my address, make sure you have my house number! Perhaps you might like to read Luke Wroblewski’s book – Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks, there’s probably a LinkedIn group or three you could join as well!

Please think about me, your customer.

Bought a Ben 10 Omnitrix watch from Argos for my son for Christmas. As far as I know, my son has never watched a Ben 10 cartoon at home, but apparently it’s all the rage in the Reception year playground. What I was amazed at was how easy the whole process was. I had bought from Argos before and was stealing myself for a long wait. 

Research: online – Google search, Google shopping, Amazon, Argos. Decided to buy it from Argos. Did a store check, they had three in stock. Reserved it online, but would pay for it and pick it up in store.

Purchase: Duly wrote the reference number down. Went down to the store, saw that there were lots of people queuing up. Happened to see a kiosk in-store that allowed me to purchase it, get the receipt which told me which queue I needed to go to and how long it would take – five minutes.

Went to ‘queue A’ handed the receipt in, and two minutes later was handed my son’s Ben 10 Omnitrix watch.  Walked out very happy and very satisfied at a great customer experience. Amazing, since I only came in to contact with one person – the one I handed the receipt to, and for literally a second or two.

What it shows is that it doesn’t take human contact to have a good experience, but it does require that your expectations are exceeded. The unfortunate (or fortunate) thing is that expectations are fluid, and for some businesses they are lower and for some higher.

Customer 15 :: CPW love

You’ve just been given a BlackBerry from work and on your way home on the train you try to set up email on it. You do a search on the internet and miraculously find some step-by-step instructions on the Carphone Warehouse web site on how to ‘Set up email on your BlackBerry‘. You’re feeling very pleased with yourself at this point. 

You’ve had a quick look at the instructions and there don’t seem to be too many steps involved. You’re ready to start setting up email on your BlackBerry.

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I have only recently started using twitter (http://twitter.com/guy1067) for a variety of reasons:

• monitoring what people are saying about Carphone Warehouse (‘CPW’) where I work
• just trying to understand more about twitter and how it works
• trying to understand the relevance of twitter to providing help

A week or so ago I was monitoring what people were saying about CPW. One particular person had tweeted that he thought he could improve UK productivity by 20% by rewriting the systems at CPW. I made the decision to tweet him back and although my intervention did not resolve the situation, the whole encounter was a hugely valuable experience; probably more for me than for him.  My observations as follows.

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