Jananas

If your company is like most others that I’ve encountered you probably have a customer service department. Except that their function is likely limited to dealing with escalated complaints and performing a once or twice yearly customer satisfaction survey.

They’re reactive. They deal with problems after they’ve arisen. They deal with the problems that they know about, that get reported, that are serious enough that someone was angry enough that they followed up. They miss all the problems that people didn’t report because they were more minor or because the customers didn’t have the energy to fight the good fight.

I think its much simpler than that and I think that its proactive.

It starts before a product or service even hits the market. In fact, it starts before its even been developed. Its a focus of corporate culture that means that a customer centric view is always present. That all staff members care about the product and are actively thinking about how to make it better. That your customer service staff are involved from the beginning and help develop business requirements.

Why is this important?

Because if you are thinking about customer experience from day one, you will build better products. Better products mean that you’ll have fewer calls into your call centre, fewer complaints about bad software or service, and all around more satisfied customers.

One of the key elements is the importance of time. Take a little more time thinking about how your customers use the software, how they interact with your staff, why they call the call centre. And then test. And then test some more. Test longer than you think would be necessary. Why? Because it means that you’ll catch more of those mistakes that customers would otherwise be frustrated about and call in for.

What else is important?

Don’t wait until your annual customer satisfaction survey to see how you’re doing. One, you’re probably too late to garner useful feedback. Two, the way that you frame the questions likely makes the information useless and unable to be actionable.

Instead, actively listen to your customers. Search for yourself through channels like twitter or using tools like google alerts or blog searches. What are people saying about you today? If you can identify a problem now, you can fix it faster and it’ll impact fewer customers. I could go into much more detail on this, but Julien and Chris did a bang up job of explaining why its vital in Trust Agents.  So trust me, and give it a read.

Test me out. Test out my theory. I’ll bet that in the long run it’ll save you money and improve your customer relations.

I’ve come across big name bloggers who make disparaging remarks about what us little guys write about. And you know what, they’re right.

I do write about my animals, although sometimes its to raise awareness of the animals rescue groups I work with (like Toronto Cat Rescue) or have adopted from (like the Soi Dog Foundation in Thailand). And you know what, this blog is really about me and my animals are a big part of my life. I’m okay with being a stereotype when it also means being myself.

I also have a tendency to write about customer experiences I’ve had (feel free to reference either the customer experience or rant categories). I don’t mean to come across as the crazy or angry or bitter customer with a huge hate on for the company. I understand that sometimes things go wrong. That’s part of life. It happens. Totally okay with that. But I also know that things can be better and more importantly I want them to be better.

In the moment I might be frustrated, but my motivation is as simple as wanting things to be better. They aren’t going to get better unless people say something and provide feedback. There aren’t really mechanisms to provide feedback. I recognize that most of the big companies I might complain about are never going to come across what I’ve written. On the off chance that they are astute enough to be looking, I can only hope that they might take the feedback into consideration.

Moreover, by writing down my thoughts, feelings, and assumptions on how things could be improved or even totally rebuilt I understand what I think is important. It helps me clarify my thoughts on what makes a good system or process or customer experience. It helps me build my expertise and refine my opinions.

To balance it out, I also write about a lot of the things that I do in my life. Food we make, cookies I bake, hats or sweaters or other assorted things that I knit. I write about places we travel. I write about the silly projects we do, like trying to make homemade plastic or our current root beer challenge.

I always read about how blogs are supposed to have a theme. How I’m supposed to provide value and build expertise. I often get a little worried that I don’t have a focus. The longer I blog, the more okay I am with not having a dedicated focus. That isn’t the point of this blog. Jananas is about me being me and everything that includes – cats, complaints, and all.

On our way home this evening we passed by several bus shelters, all of which had ads for Vertica Residental Services (a company that helps make apartment living easier). I’m using the image below to illustrate my point and because it was too cold out to take a photo.

Jason took one took at their ad and started snickering. I ask (I’m curious!) and he points out that the largest type on the ad is their website ‘ vertica.ca‘ or more importantly ‘verti-CA.CA‘. Caca, as in slang for defecation. Indeed.

I’m going to assume that most people wouldn’t have noticed this, but Jason did which means that other people must have noticed as well. Not necessarily a major problem… unless it gains momentum and takes over. Would you be willing to take a risk like that with your brand image and name?

The problem stems from using .ca as their top level domain. Switching to .com would solve this (although it would also mean that they wouldn’t immediately and visibly branded as being Canadian). Sometimes I find it hard to conceptualize that something so small can potentially have such a big impact.

Maybe its worth having your 10 year old check over your product names and branding. Just in case they notice something rude that our adult sensibilities overlook.

I believe in building for the long term. In business, this means planning for 10, 25, or even 50 years into the future. Except that I work in an era where corporate focus is on short term gains. From shareholders, investment bankers, and a market focused on making a quick buck to executives and middle managers whose bonuses are based on revenue gains or costs cut today, the entire industry is saying ‘now, now, now’.

There are short term gains to be made. Those shouldn’t be ignored. But when they are the sole focus of a business, new products are rushed to market and short cuts are taken. In the back end, operational issues pile up and band aids are applied liberally to make things work (for now).

Each week cut from a testing plan, each product launched before its ready, each band aid applied means more work in the future. It means that five years down the road testing plans will be twice as long. Why? Because each band aid is a separate set of testing conditions. The more you apply, the more conditions you’ll have to test. The more opportunity there is for things to go wrong.

That’s just taking the basic systems into account. You can just as easily layer on a human factor. As staff turns over, the history and knowledge about each band aid (its reason for being implemented, how it worked, what it impacted) is more than likely lost – if only because they were applied in such a hurry that they weren’t properly documented. It was crunch time, there was pressure from above to get the fix in today, now, five minutes ago! Your operations department probably no sooner had this particular solution in place and there the next middle manager was breathing down their necks about why this other issue hadn’t been fixed.

The staff who put a fix into place might remember what they were thinking when they did it. Staff who came onboard later likely has no idea. And if they do, its because they put the time and effort into figuring it out – time and effort that could have been spent accomplishing something for the future instead of research past mistakes in order to be able to fix them.

Over time, this problem gains momentum and gets bigger. Until one day its big enough that it begins to hinder your ability to grow or to make revenue or to get to market.

So what do you do differently? Take a step back and think about how a decision today will show up in the system five or ten years from now. You take an extra week testing it out. You pay more attention to business requirements so that you don’t need (as many) band aids. And you know what? You listen to your operations staff. Give them time (and the space) to spend fixing the system every day so that its maintained.

I have a story about a company who had more product managers (the people coming up with the ideas and campaigns and work) than they did operations staff (the people actually implementing the work, testing it, and responsible for the overall state of the system). That isn’t feasible in the long term. And if you’re not around in the long term, then you aren’t really much of a business are you.

While I was in Thailand I adopted a dog. I had to pay for his crate and flight home and Paypal was the only timely option to pay for it. So I made an abnormally large payment, especially when compared to my normal eBay or etsy purchases, and my account was essentially blocked due to suspected fraud. Not unexpected on my part. They even sent me an email to notify me, which I was thankful for.

So I login in an attempt to rectify the situation. They ask me to change me password and security question, check and check. Get that finished and they need me to confirm that I’m me. There are several ways that I can do this…

1. I can confirm my location… Except that I’m in another country without access to most of my bills (which have my address) and access to a fax machine/ability to mail info in. I do have some electronic bills, but their system doesn’t accept pdfs and instead only accepts jpgs or gifs. Only my bills are sent as pdfs, so I would have had to take a screen capture or convert the file or something – all things that are a little difficult to do when I’m not at my own computer. And all things that require me, as the customer to go through another step to get them the information. So I’m already a little annoyed. [As an aside, I asked the CSR when I called in tonight why they didn't accept pdfs and their answer was that its because pdfs can contain viruses. Yup, totally possible. But (and to me this is a big But), you are an internet company. You should be able to handle some level of attack by viruses if only because its going to happen at some point. What you shouldn't do is make it difficult for your customers to get you the information that you're asking for. Don't make them wait longer than necessary. Don't make them convert files (many of them may not have the skill set necessary to even do that). Its simple - make it easy for your customers to deal with you.]
2. I can confirm my bank account or credit card number… On the Paypal website my bank account or credit card numbers appear as XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-1234 (credit card example used because its easier for me to remember the number of digits). So I would have assumed that ‘confirming’ this would mean entering the entire number, e.g. 1234-1234-1234-1234. If they match, then voila, I’m me. Nope. What this meant was that I could add another bank account or credit card and undergo the process where Paypal sends a couple of pennies, I confirm the exact amount and then the account has been added to my list. But this takes a few days and I may not want Paypal to have access to even more of my account information. Or I may just not have any other accounts. Regardless, this isn’t “confirming” my information its adding new information, which is not the same thing.
3. I can confirm my telephone number. Now I couldn’t do this while traveling because I didn’t have my phone with me while I was in Asia (for obvious expensive Canadian roaming reasons). However, when I looked into this some more this evening Paypal doesn’t even confirm mobile phone numbers. Really? Lets take a step back and think about who uses your service. I’m going to make some wild assumptions here and guess that it tends to be younger, internet savvy people. Who probably use their mobile exclusively and have ditched their landlines in the last few years (if not way before that). In fact, the only people I know who still have landlines are my parents. And they certainly aren’t buying things on eBay. Again, its simple – make sure that your policies make sense for your customers.

I’d forgotten that I hadn’t dealt with this and then went and bought something on eBay tonight. Something that had to be paid for right away. So I called in and had the block removed from my limited account. And the kicker, their 800 number was US only so I got to pay long distance charges to talk to a person because their system was so badly set up that I couldn’t do something simple on my own.

Its things like this that make me wonder. What use is policy if it makes it difficult for your customers to do what you want? Where does common sense belong in the decision making process? Why isn’t there more of a focus on usability?

These aren’t mistakes that are unique to Paypal. Rather, this experience highlights some of the things that frustrate me so much about most businesses.