Today, it is almost a cliche that brands want to “listen to customers”. They have Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and myriad social media initiatives to supposedly ‘listen’ to customers and make the brand open and communicative. Unfotunately, this is mostly limited and as soon as a customer has a real complaint that needs a real solution, the company suddenly doesn’t feel so communicative any more.

AT&T has launched a nifty iPhone app that could a be model for companies that actually want to listen to their customers and use the complaints and feedback to improve the service. AT&T’s “Mark the Spot” application lets a mobile subscriber complain about dropped calls, low network coverage and bad voice quality. This is a location based app that uses aggregated data from many complaints to find and show areas in the AT&T network where subscribers experience the most problems.

This is a good way to let the customer vent their anger about a dropped signal, feel that AT&T is going to do something about it and at the same time provide AT&T useful information about problems in its network. The information is a collected in a way that is instantly usable rather than generic ‘feedback’ that usually finds it way to ‘nowhere’. This is also removes irritating IVRS systems and call centers from atleast a small part of the customer care function.

The only problem with this approach is that a customer could easily end up feeling that he’s sending complaints into a black hole (which is usually true even while talking to customer care), in the absence of a response or any updates on what happened to his complaint. This is standard psychology, you want a ’sense of progress’, a sense that someone heard you and they’re doing something about your problem. This is what responsiveness means (not just sending a auto-reply email acknowledgement). AT&T should take this forward and when the network problem in a particular area is fixed, it should send a short update to everyone who complained about the particular location.

I like this app particularly because it acknowledges the fact that most customers are not going to report dropped calls and network problems (from location) if it means opening up an email client and writing an email to a generic email address (complaints@att.com). Consumers have become too cynical to expect anything to come out of such an email. It is smart to acknowledge this and make it easier for customers to complain in a way that gives them a sense of ’specificity’ (as against the ‘generality’ inherent in writing to a generic email address or filling a web form).

I was considering buying a laptop and called the Dell helpline to ask a few questions. I was put through to a “Sales Account Manager”. He answered all my questions well and was quite helpful, but insisted that I place an order on that very call. I said I wanted to consider other options and would get back to him. So he requested me not to call the helpline again, but to call him directly so that the sale would be through him. He sent me his mobile number on SMS. The next day he called me to check if I had decided. The day after that I had five missed calls from him. I called him and told him not to call me. I’d call him and place the order when I made up my mind. Which I did last thursday. The payment, order and address confirmation went smoothly and I was quite pleased with the simplicity of the whole process. I was promised that I would get the notebook in courier by Tuesday, February 23rd, or latest by February 24th.

My current notebook is not brink of dying with only half the screen working, the other half blank. I was quite anxious to get the new one. I was provided a Blue Dart tracking number to check on the status of my shipment. On Tuesday (the due date) I checked online and was shocked to see that the destination was mentioned as Mumbai and the estimated delivery date was March 1. I immediately tried calling Varun (Sales Account Manager) whom I had placed the order with. No response. A few rings and he would disconnect my call. I called about ten times and finally wrote an email asking him to call me ASAP. No response.

Today morning, I spent 2 hours calling the Dell helpline. I spoke to about 12 different people. Narrated my problem and gave my order number to each one of them. Each one would transfer my call to the “relevant people” and then I would be on hold for about 5 minutes listening a female voice advertising their “premium care package” and monitors. Even when I specifically requested them not to transfer my call, they would. “All our customer care representatives are busy”, I heard that about 50 times today morning. If I chose the “Buy a new computer” option on the IVRS, I was immediately connected to a “real person”, but soon lost his interest when I told him I had a problem with an order I had already placed.

Finally, I called up BlueDart to see if I could get some clarity on what was happening. My phone was picked up on the second ring by a very helpful, live human being. He took my details and within 2 minutes told me what the problem was. Despite my giving the address in writing, Dell had screwed up and given them the wrong pincode. This pincode was apparently out of BlueDart’s “Service Area” and therefore they brought the parcel to Mumbai from Chennai and were going to arrange for a special delivery to that pincode, which would take an additional 3 days from the date promised to me by Dell. I told him that my address was 2 km away from BlueDart’s Goa HQ and there was no way it was “out of service area”. He quickly corrected the pincode but said my parcel would still arrive three days later because it was being held at Bhiwandi for the ’special delivery’.

All this, without a single person from Dell being helpful. All of the ten people I spoke to sounded like they were doing me a favor by listening to my problem. The only helpful people at Dell seemed to be the sales people who expected you to place an order. Once you place your order, you are on your own.

While it is understandable that mistakes happen, a company that does not move quickly to acknowledge and correct it, is going to leave the customer with a terrible experience. In this case, ”my Dell representative” simply ignored my calls and no one else in their customer care department was any help.  I had to myself correct Dell’s mistake with BlueDart and make sure I got the notebook. If I hadn’t done this myself, I wonder when Dell would have woken up to the fact that they had shipped to the wrong address.

Ofcourse, Dell is by no means an exception. There are companies in every industry who offer the most shabby after-sales experience and have a unresponsive, irritating and useless customer care operation. However, in my experience, Dell topped every other “bad experience” I’ve had. It was like they were behind a screen and there was no way to reach anyone who could help.

It is shocking how  companies will spend millions on advertising and marketing, but won’t fix these simple problems. None of the problems arising out of this experience are difficult or expensive to fix. But I am quite sure if I order a laptop from Dell next year, I could have the same experience. Ofcourse, I won’t order from Dell again.

With experiences like this, Dell still has the cheek to say “Yours is here”.

A presentation I recently gave at the MIT Institute of Design, Pune to the students of their PG course in Design Management.

“You put in your memory card,” he says, “and it prints thumbnails of all your photos.”
“Uh, OK,” I reply.
“Wait, this is the cool bit. On the printout, there are little boxes next to the thumbnails. You tick the size you need, and put the paper back in the machine. It reads your ticks and prints the pics you want automatically!”

Now that is not just a ‘tellable’ experience, but a very nice use of technology to create a human-centered interface without too much gadgetery.

Read the entire post here.

When a customer walks into the branch and goes to the teller to deposit a cheque, he is given a cryptic answer and sent to fill the deposit slip. Once filled, he is given clues to find the drop-box. This leads him to different areas of the branch and creates oppotunities for interaction with more bank employees in his quest to find the drop-box. Finally, he finds it hidden behind a desk on the first floor, reaching there only after crossing the deadly dungeon (narrow spiral staircase).

Ok, so its not a game. Just another example of how customer experience doesn’t figure in most descisions at service companies. But this is taking it too far! You don’t need a service designer to tell you that something as commonly used as a cheque drop-box should be in an open area, preferably close to the entrance and definitely with signage.

But then again, may be you do!

At Guts, we do a ‘Service Audit’ to pin-point these kind of situations. The Service Audit involves experiencing a company’s service through all possible touch-points and in every possible situation. This really helps find the pain areas in the company’s service delivery and a customer’s experience. In many instances (like the one described above), operational expediency overrides any consideration for customer experience. Setting this right is not difficult or expensive once you look at it through a ’service design’ lens.

Seth Godin at Gel 2006 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.

[Seen at BoingBoing.net]

Most of the examples are funny and striking, but some are weak examples of ‘broken-ness’. I’d like to take an example to illustrate how we sometimes look for someone else’s “mistakes” to prove our point. But these ‘mistakes’ are in a context which needs to be understood.

Seth Godin shows the photograph of a pharmacy pill bottle meant for a dog. Apart from saying “DOG” in brackets after the name of the patient, the label has instructions like “alcohol may intensify the effects of this drug” and “use care while operating a car”

Yes, its funny that a bottle of pills for a dog has these messages. But, the reason why this is broken is not because of these messages (as Godin points out). The labels are pre-printed with these messages. So it is out of the pharmacist’s control to remove these irrelevant messages from a bottle of dog pills.

From a user experience point of view, this is broken because the pills are given in the same shape and size of bottles that are used for human prescriptions. Chances are that an old couple with dozens of prescription bottles might mix up pills and take the ones intended for their dog. An easy way to fix this is to put all prescriptions for animals in a bottle of a size and shape distinct from the normal bottles. This clearly indicates who the pills are meant for. And with a different bottle, a new label without the ‘funny messages’ might be in order.

I also discovered an interesting but now defunct blog called “This is Broken”. It has dozens of examples of services and products that are ‘designed’ badly.

For instance, I drink 2 cups of coffee in the morning. This makes me happy. Three cups would be nice once in a while. But, I might not enjoy the fourth cup as much as the third. Or the fifth cup as much as the fourth. So the value or joy I derive from drinking coffee, keeps decreasing after the third cup.]

Similarly, it adds to my service experience if a bank offers 3 different (like, really ‘different’) types of bank accounts or if while booking a flight, I can choose between a veg/non-veg meal and a fruit platter. But sometimes, companies don’t take into account the basic principle of diminishing marginal utility while offering choice.

Kotak Bank offers 7 types of saving accounts, each of them identical to the other, except some minor differences.

To top this, the names of the accounts (Ace, Pro, Nova, Edge, Classic, Easy…) are hardly descriptive of who the account is for, what’s different about it, why should I choose it.

The multitude of accounts aren’t just bad for customer experience. It adds to the complexity of management, service delivery, back-end software and training for customer-facing staff.

Jet Airways allows you to choose from 27 (yes twenty seven!) types of meals including options like non-lactose, low-purine, bland-soft, low-sodium and a ‘Moslem meal’! I’m not even sure how many of these are actually available.

So why is more choice bad? and what is the ‘right amount of choice’?

1. When faced with too many choices, people prefer making no decision rather than a complicated one.
2. Post-purchase regret is more likely if a consumer feels that he could have fared better by making a different choice.
3. Failure to understand or see the difference between the many choices causes the consumer to get confused and feel vulnerable.
4. Creates unnecessary complexity without adding value to the customer experience.

The right amount of choice differs from service to service. But a simple rule of thumb is that an additional unit of choice should cater to the needs of a large enough customer group, should have 60%+ different features or should have a substantially different customer experience.

Barry Schwartz, an American psychologist has written extensively about this and a few years back published a book titled “The Paradox of Choice: why less is more”. Here he gives a talk about how the increase in choices has made us paralyzed and dissatisfied rather than freer and happier: www.ted.com/index.php/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice.html

31Volts, a Netherlands based Service Design firm, talks about how a multitude of choice in ’service touchpoints’ is not always a good idea: http://www.31v.nl/2009/03/creating-a-better-service-experience-by-providing-less-choice/

Accenture recently released its fourth Customer Satisfaction survey with a special report on ‘Customer-centricity’ in India. It has some revealing findings about what Indian customers care about, about their loyalty to service providers, what they do when they have a problem… Here are some highlights:

90% of the respondents have left atleast one service provider due to poor service
Wow! 90% is a lot. Globally, the figure is 67%. The higher India figure is aided by greater choice and fewer entry-exit hurdles. 15 years back you had to wait for 3 months to get a telephone connection. Today, you can get 5 mobile connections in about 2 hours. This shift in power from the ’supply side’ to the ’demand side’ is something that a lot of companies (both private and government services) are yet to come to terms with.

Banks, Internet services and mobile operators were switched most commonly
This is very obvious. Services that have become ‘commodities’ are the ones that will have the least customer loyalty and will be the easiest to switch. With number portability on the cards, mobile operators will see and even greater outgo of customers swayed by marketing messages and promotions. Incidentally, these three services are also the ones where the margins and profitability are constantly under pressure. When a service doesn’t offer anything unique, it is impossible to be consistently profitable in a buyers market.

45% respondents switch service providers because of a better price, 71% because of poor experience
Yes, Indians are price-concious. But they aren’t pound foolish, penny-wise. Increasingly, if a customer is generally happy with a service, he is less likely to go price shopping or change services for a small price differential. People have less time which they want to spend with their families and doing things that interest them. But if you make their lives difficult, they’ll walk.

52% respondents believe their expectations are never or rarely met
Are the expectations too high or are the services just out of tune with customers really want. A little of both. Companies will at some point have to say ‘itne paise mein itnaich milega’. But before that, they needs to spend time understanding how customers use their services and create service models that address these needs. There is little focus on designing services and experience in India right now.

Talk to me!
85% customers call a helpline for assitance, 68% send an email, 47% visit a website and only 31% visit a physical location

While this survey is revealing, it must be taken with a pinch of salt. One, it is limited in size. The number of respondents is around 300. Two, most respondents are reffering to customer service, not ’service experience’. But, customer service comes into picture when there is a flaw in the service model. Three, this survey probably represents a very narrow class of Indian consumers. I don’t think it is really reflective of what a rural mobile customer thinks or how he acts.

Download the India Report here or go to the Accenture website to download the global report.

A restaurant, is a restaurant, is a restaurant, right? You go there … order some stuff … they serve you … you eat … you go home !!! How different can this get? Yet, for a few years now, a chain has been pushing the envelop on this. Here’s a first hand account of the ‘Crazy Noodles’ experience.

The first thing to hit you on your maiden trip to Crazy Noodles, would be the bright (borderline fluorescent) pink and green interiors. The walls are adorned with rather large pictures of delighted customers, in (increasingly common) black and white. The loud music in the background belongs to the standard ‘pop’ variety – but it does seem to have a skew, which contributes towards making the atmosphere very lively. Graphics on the table tops, inquire: “We hope you have left your table manners at home”.

The menu is (by now predictably) an oddly stretched rectangle. The waiter comes in with a weird plate with what looks like mint, but he squirts some liquid on it from a syringe and seconds later the mints expand into two tissues (unpredictably) ready to use. By now you are already expecting something crazy to happen – and the glasses of water, which come next, once again do the trick. The glasses have rather unconventional spherical bottoms, and rather than sitting on your table, they totter perilously. Eventually even the cutlery used for serving food is unconventionally shaped.

But is this place only gimmicks? What about the core product – the food? Well apart from the predictable twist in naming the dishes, the food is of a consistently good quality, it is priced moderately, served in generous portions and there are some ‘Crazy’ specials on the menu for the adventurously inclined.

The architects of the Crazy Noodles experience could have overdone the ‘crazy’ bit, but they have balanced the fine line between memorability and annoyance. For instance there is nothing crazy about the staff. As is customary in ‘Chinese’ restaurants in our country, the staff is primarily North Eastern. They are polite and genial, and even volunteer to tutor you in using chopsticks if you are in the mood for it.

Search for ‘Crazy Noodles’ on MouthShut.com and you’ll find a young housewife’s laudatory review, actually titled ‘Crazy Kiya Re”. All in all, Crazy Noodles is a fine example of a finely crafted customer experience layer, around the core of a well made and right priced product.

And oh yes, just one more thing … at a pre-appointed time, all the staff suddenly gather in a small group … the track changes to ‘Here comes the Hotstepper’ … and they all break into a well choreographed, small jig.
By now, the sneers of even the most cynical customers had made way for a broad smile :-)

Navin Boricha
navinboricha@gmail.com