Customer Service is an essential element to deliver remarkable customer experiences and several trends are changing the way companies can offer a remarkable customer service. I personally believe that we still haven’t seen the full impact the web will have on customer service but small companies and startups provide a glimpse how the future of  cost-efficient “online customer service” might evolve. For an example take a look at www.getsatisfaction.com and check out the profiles for O’Reilly and Seesmic (a Californian Startup).

I am sure that in the next 18 – 36 months we will increasingly see that large corporations use the web to drive down costs for customer service  while at the same providing the same or an even improved customer service experience.

One approach to provide online customer service are online communities. These have emerged around companies and their products together with discussion forums have long been a source for customers to get answers to their questions without the need to interact with the company directly.

One example is crackberry.com, an independent site about the BlackBerry smartphone that has already 30% of the visitors that the original Blackberry.com site has (see compete.com statistics). From my own experience the crackberry.com forum is a really valuable and helpful source for customer service.

While many of these sites are independent and do not represent an organization, companies increasingly understand the potential of online communities to offer customer service. 

The New York Times has published an article titled “Customer Service? Ask A Volunteer” which explains the story, motivation and success factors of a online community for customer services that has been created by Verizon.

Mr. McMurry is part of an emerging corps of Web-savvy helpers that large corporations, start-up companies and venture capitalists are betting will transform the field of customer service.

[…] Verizon needed to find a smart way to try to tap into that potential resource for customer service.

In talking to people and surveying the research on voluntary online communities, Verizon concluded that super-users would be crucial to success.

There is also a statement from Verizon about the success of the experiment.

At Verizon, Mr. Studness says he is pleased with the experiment so far. He calls the company-sponsored customer-service site “a very productive tool,” partly because it absorbs many thousands of questions that would otherwise be expensive calls to a Verizon call center.

Read the full article “Customer Service? Ask A Volunteer” in the New York Times.

Posted in customer service | Permalink | No Comments »

Hugh Dubberly, founder of Dubberly Design Office, has collected over one-hundred descriptions of design and development processes from architecture, industrial design, mechanical engineering, quality management, and software development and published them in an eBook called “How do you design?”.

His view of the scope of design reflects the motivation for this collection.

 

 

This collection is highly valuable because it helps to reflect how we are solving problems and how we might achieve different outcomes by adopting and following different processes.

You can find more information at the DDO website or download the book as a PDF directly.

Posted in design thinking, methods | Permalink | No Comments »

Dealing with service failures and customer complaints requires more than just fixing the immediate problem. The key for companies is to ensure that they capture and manage the full range of customer complaints and ensure that processes are incorporated, that fix the root causes of the customer complaints.

An article in the Wall Street Journal from September 2008 titled “Making the Most of Customer Complaints” from Prof. Stefan Michel, IMD Lausanne, David Bowen, Thunderbird School of Global Management and Robert Johnston, Warwick Business School summarizes challenges and strategies to ensure the successful management of customer complaints.

Here is an excerpt:

Nobody’s perfect. That’s a fact, not an excuse. Which is why it’s crucial for companies to realize that the way they handle customer complaints is every bit as important as trying to provide great service in the first place. Because things happen.

Customers are constantly judging companies for service failures large and small, from a glitch-ridden business-software program to a hamburger served cold. They judge the company first on how it handles the problem, then on its willingness to make sure similar problems don’t happen in the future. And they are far less forgiving when it comes to the latter. Fixing breakdowns in service — we call this service recovery — has enormous impact on customer satisfaction, repeat business, and, ultimately, profits and growth.

But unfortunately, most companies limit service recovery to the staff who deal directly with customers. All too often, companies have customer service sort out the immediate problem, offer an apology or some compensation, and then assume all is well. This approach is particularly damaging because it does nothing to address the underlying problem, practically guaranteeing similar failures and complaints.

Read the full article “Making the Most of Customer Complaints”.

Posted in customer satisfaction, customer service | Permalink | No Comments »

The way we talk not only represents who we are but also influences what we might turn into. This is not just true for individuals but also for organizations. The vocabulary that is used within an organization is a mirror of the organizations culture.

How would the focus in your organization change, if your corporate vocabulary is dominated by words and associations from either competitors, shareholder value or customers? If you talk about your customers all the time, your focus tends to shift on customers and through this you could take a big step in getting closer to your customers.

With this in mind it is interesting to see a blog post by Ian Sefferman, a former Amazon employee, about the use of the word customer experience at Amazon.

Customer obsession is the single most important asset you can have as a company.

Every second of every day you should be able to know exactly why you are working on whatever it is you are working on and how that helps the customer. What about it makes their life easier and their experience with your company better?

I worked as a software developer on the Email Platform team. That meant, among other things, we were responsible for sending massive amounts of marketing and transactional mail to customers. Obviously, not all customers find this to be the greatest experience, so it was particularly important for our team to ensure that we did not send spam, and we targeted each mail directly to those customers who would be interested in receiving the mail. The words “customer experience” were perhaps two of the most uttered words on our team each and every day.

The implications for your business

Reflecting on your corporate vocabulary and how it is used could provide valuable insights about the real focus in your organization. Is your organization focused on itself and communication is mostly about your organization, its products, management and processes or do you focus on the customer and actually mirror this in your language? Is your organization’s vocabulary focused on preserving the status quo or on shaping the future? If you want to change your corporate culture, how would you need to change the language that is used in your organization?

Research Potential

I think it would be very interesting to do a analysis of documents, emails and other communication in an organization to identify the degree of customer orientation and customer focus. Doing this with a longitudinal analysis one might get an interesting measurement tool about change within an organization.

Posted in customer experience, strategy | Permalink | No Comments »

In the following article I want to focus especially on the area of ecological sustainability and sustainability is used synonymously for economic sustainability.

Sustainability has received a lot of attention in recent years and the role of sustainability in business and design is a heavily discussed topic. While I certainly agree that it is the right thing to follow principles that ensure economic, social and ecological sustainability, I am less convinced about the value “sustainable products” offer to customers.

But if sustainability doesn’t offer value, why is there a need for electronic cars? And why do consumers pay organizations to offset their carbon footprint? I think this has nothing to do with the value that “sustainability” offers but is instead motivated by other reasons. I would like to discuss a few observations that I have made and the consequences these observations have for marketers.

In search of substitutes

The recent interest in electric cars is not driven by an increased demand for sustainable, electric cars but actually because of souring prices for oil. Consumers are looking for cars that use something else than oil and found it in hybrid and electric cars.

The same holds true for other products where paper packaging is used instead of plastic packaging as well as the so called cradle-to-cradle design, where you focus on designing your products with the whole product lifecycle (including  recycling) in mind.

All these decisions are driven by consumers (and designers) who are looking for substitutes to reduce the high costs of current solutions.

Your peace of mind

Another driver for an increased demand for sustainable products is guilt. It has become en vogue to look down on people who drive a SUV and to feel guilty whenever you do something that is not environmentally friendly. This has gone so far that people have started not only to calculate their carbon footprint, but also pay someone to offset their carbon footprint through investments in economically friendly initiatives.

Whenever I book a flight on a German travel site it induces guilt by telling me how much carbon dioxide I will create with this flight. Luckily I have an option to pay someone to make up for my environmentally unfriendliness which so far I have chosen not to use due to my personal concerns about this “donation schemes”. These donation systems are already the reason for official warnings from the U.S. government about scams to offset your carbon footprint but this is whole different story.

Certainly there is nothing wrong with using guilt to stimulate a certain consumer behavior and make people buy your products. Yet at the end of the day, it is guilt and the corresponding need for having “peace of mind” that is driving the decision of consumers and not the intrinsic need for a “sustainable product”.

Sustainability becomes a hygienic factor, but not a differentiating factor

If sustainability does not provide any (functional) value to consumers itself, one might ask why more and more companies are changing their marketing message to incorporate aspects of sustainability? There are certain interest groups that use the current environment to push their interest and their messages and they pick rather popular targets. Apple has created a special section on its homepage about the ecological aspects of its products as a result of a public criticism from Greenpeace in 2006 about toxic materials in its products.

This is also the reason that it becomes a necessity for companies in the current zeitgeist to ensure and communicate all aspects of their sustainability initiatives in order to prevent to become a publicly criticized for unsustainable practices. But just when every product and company is “sustainable”, sustainability itself becomes a commodity, a hygienic factor and is not a differentiating factor anymore.

The role of sustainability to create customer value

With sustainability not being a differentiator itself and due to the lack of customer value that is created through sustainability, one might ask what the role of sustainability can be in product and service design? From a theoretical perspective the task is to turn the value of sustainability from a symbolic, emotional value created by ecological aspects into functional value of the core product. IDEO’s Diego Rodriguez calls it “turning green into red”, designing green cars so they full of passion and delight.

I have written about the Tesla Roadster, a fully electric car that is a great example about this. Tesla has continued this “process of turning green into red” with their latest car, the Tesla S Sedan, which has received praise all over the media for it’s revolutionary design that doesn’t reflect that the car is an electric car. Here is one picture, you can find more pictures online.

 

The implications for your business?

So is design for sustainability the wrong approach? Not, it isn’t and designers and engineers should indeed focus on it. But one has to remember that the value proposition to the customer is essential and business should not focus on product characteristics that leave the customer’s needs and motivation out of the equation. A “sustainable product” alone doesn’t solve a customer problem, except that it make him feel less guilty and could help him save costs.

If businesses are serious about designing sustainable products, they need to translate sustainability into features that offer customer value and are not just providing peace of mind. And if you are designing a substitute product, then position it as substitute product and help consumer safe money.

The goal should be to design a product that sells not because consumers want a sustainable product, but because consumers want the product and don’t care that it is sustainable. Only then we have achieved a true change towards an ecologically sustainable society.

Images courtesy of [xotoko], [vgm8383] and Jalopnik

Posted in customer value, green | Permalink | 1 Comment »