Jesse James Garrett, Director User Experience Strategy, Adaptive Path published an articles in the Design Management Review in Winter 2006 titled “Customer Loyalty and Elements of User Experience“.

He stresses the importance of emotional bonds for building sustainable relationships and explains the considerations that go into creating great user experiences as a set of five planes along a continuum from abstract to concrete.

The savviest marketing strategies and the most efficient customer service processes won’t deliver loyal customers if those customers don’t have a positive experience with your product.

Download the full report.

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Basically they are the first thing I throw away as soon as I have taken them out of the postbox: customer magazines. A few are worth looking at it, some even have articles in it that might be worth more than the seconds it takes to screen them but mostly they are a subliminal attempt to sell you more. But there is also a different way.

Red Bulletin

While I don’t want to go into details about Red Bull because it is a very special product where most of the customer’s experience is derived from emotional aspects (even though it is perfect support to pull an all nighter) they understand how to create a company magazine that can be read cover-to-cover. The magazine is not promoting Red Bull - it is telling the story of Red Bull and helps you understand the core of the brand. It is a documentation of the lifestyle that represents Red Bull. It is authentic.

Another aspect I noticed was the number of highly qualified journalists that are writing in this magazine many of them authors in sophisticated German and Austrian newspapers.

So if you want to read a customer magazine that is not trying to sell you more but to communicate the underlying story the Red Bulletin is a must read.

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While doing research for a workshop I stumbled over an amazing video and audio recording about an AOL customer who wants to cancel his account, but unfortunately he is not allowed to. The call center agent strictly follows the script of his AOL Customer Retention Manual and gets it horribly wrong.

Unfortunately for AOL, the guy who is cancelling his account made a recording of this call. Here it is (transcripted version):

[Read more]

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Everybody likes to hear praise - from customers, from colleagues, from your boss or your spouse. It makes us feel good and confirms us in the actions we are doing. Nevertheless just listening to praise can be charming to your ego but it might not be enough.

The challenge is that in search for constant improvement, praise doesn’t lead to improvements because it doesn’t help you identify areas where improvement could lead to even better results. In your quest (or how Tom Peters calls it your “search of excellence”) to deliver an remarkable experience to your customers, listening to the customers’ praise won’t be of much help.

Even McDonalds has realized this - in order to improve their customer’s experience the company is closely tracking customer complaints and is identifying restaurants with a low number of complaints (their “brand builders”) and restaurants with high numbers of complaints (the “brand destroyers”).

In their report “Loud And Clear, The
Voice Of The Customer” they identified that their franchises in Hawaii enjoyed highest customer satisfaction rates while the lowest satisfaction rate was in Philadelphia. Through listening to their customers and their complaints they are now in a situation to pro-actively manage the customer experience in order to increase customer satisfaction in their “brand-destroyer” restaurants.

So it’s time to stop ignoring your customers and provide them means how they can communicate their complaints and you can be sure to find areas for improvement that will in the end lead to satisfied customers and increased sales for your business.

The full article in the Startup Journal of the Wall Street Journal can be found here.

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