Customer Experience: Simplicity vs. Functionality

When building complex software its easy to forget about simplicity for the sake of functionality. A web service like twitter does one thing. you post a short message about what you are doing. there are only so many ways your can present the user interface to allow for that. twitter has a simple interface because its functionally simple in what it does. Facebook gets more complex in what you can do and therefore the interface is more complicated and as tools get more sophisticated its easy to make the simplicity of using them harder to understand. Ideally each function you add to a software application should be as easy to use as the first one. Just because your service provides lots of cool features does not mean it cannot have a simple interface for each one of those features. if you were to graph simplicity vs. functionality you would see that simplicity decreases as functionality increases. some products like the iPhone have focused heavily on simplicity even when great amounts of functionality have been provided. Other products like Adobe photoshop just assume you want the functionality no matter how hard it is to figure it out.

Customer Experience: New Hire

We added a new member to our Customer Experience team this week. She started Wednesday and by Friday was already owning one of our responsibilities of a monthly eletter to our customers. That's what i call hitting the ground running. Part of that comes from hiring the right person. we use a book Who: The A Method for Hiring which has some great questions and recommendations about hiring the right person. An Interview is all about first impressions. These impressions go both ways, the job seeker is trying to impress you but you are also impressing upon the job seeker. dont ask anything you can learn from the resume. ask questions about who they are and not what they have done. see if the job seeker asks you questions. they cant possibly know everything about the job you are offering so they better have some questions about what they will be doing.

Customer Experience:Innovation

In my Customer Experience group we have an Innovation hour where we get together to talk about anything that might improve our group, company, product offerings, etc. Sometimes in meetings you have a great idea that is off topic but you want to followup with it. the Innovation hour lets us follow those ideas. during the week we write down items that we what to talk about for the Innovation hour. we might talk about all or some or none of those ideas depending on where the conversation leads. if the group decides something is worth pursuing then we can build a user story for our scrum backlog and take it on a future sprint. I highly recommend an Innovation hour for your team.

Customer Experience: The Recession

The economy is down so it is time to cut costs. When do you cut people and when do you cut the tools people use. When a customer calls and says they need financial relief it tells us the value they see in the software we provide is not what it once was. Its important in the customer experience process that the software they are using becomes critical to their success and is not thrown out at the first sign of financial distress. To get to the level where the customer considers our software critical involves building a relationship with the individual people who must use it within each organization we serve. During a recession is not the time to let those relationships fade.

Customer Experience: The Promoter

Thanks to some online tools we can create one question surveys and using social networks get those surveys out to our customers instantly. we are focusing on one question surveys that we send out to our customer base to gauge their experience with our product. the first one we did utilizes the net promoter model of one question "How likely are you to recommend [product] to another [potential customer]? and rate that on a scale from 0 to 10. the power of the net promoter model is scores 0 to 6 are detractors (negative promotion) 7 and 8 are passives (no promotion) and only 9 and 10 are called (positive) promoters. The net promoter percentage is how many positives did you get from the total number of people who responded.

The next survey we did asked our customers to rank 4 areas that our company should focus on from most important to least important. the idea is see what our customers think is important and then compare that to what we think is important. aligning our priorities with our customers helps promote a good customer experience.

Customer Experience: Perception is a reality

Our product is hosted so the Internet is a mission critical piece of infrastructure which lately has been giving us some headaches with key customers. the Customer Experience is very susceptible to perception of bad things happening all the time. In this case we had some interruption of service with in a 30 day window that has turned into the "always down" syndrome that customers think is the case. the reality is the outages occurred during a time when a large number of customers needed access to their data. The experience they had quickly turned from i like this product to this product "never" delivers. the truth about uptime is this: its not 24/7/365 that matters but "when i need access it better be there" and that is a much harder service level to maintain. The Customer Experience is created and strengthened or weakened and destroyed everyday.

Customer Experience: Noise

Our Customer Experience team is creating projects for 2009. One of the things we are dealing with is "Noise". This "noise" is any type if task put to our team from either internal or external sources that does move one of our projects forward. Everyone deals with "noise" in there day to day workings. Each morning you get to work and think "today i will get these 5 tasks done" and by the end of a long 10 plus hour day you have 2.5 tasks incomplete. The reason for that is the "noise". Our group is just starting to move to the Agile methodology that is used primarily for software development. The cool thing is this methodology can apply to other types of tasks such as those our team needs to perform. Agile lets us prioritize and maintain focus on our projects without listening to the "noise" and getting distracted. we kickoff the new Agile way with our first Scrum meeting in January.