Easing the Customer Experience
As a consultant, I help make websites and other products better for customers, and better for business.
As a consumer, I sometimes fall prey to the kind of bad customer experiences I help organizations avoid, and it’s frustrating, because I know things could have been better.
Sometimes poor customer experience is the result of systemic constraints within the organization—old technologies, unintegrated systems and protocols. Sometimes it’s poor communication or inadequate training. Increasingly, badly executed AI customer service causes consternation for customers.
Unfortunately, especially in large organizations, we also see indifference: They may feel they don’t need to care very much about what it’s like to interact with the company, if their bottom line is healthy. That’s an attitude I don’t think we should accept, as consumers or as professionals who serve internal or external customers.
In this post, I reflect on what went wrong with my recent customer service debacle, and how companies and individuals can do better by their customers.
The Set Up
As a longtime mobile phone and Internet plan holder with a company we’ll call “Schmerizon,” I had been eligible for a discounted ‘bundled’ plan for years, but had never been able to apply the discount because I couldn’t log in to my home Internet account. There was simply something wrong with that account that no number of password changes and log in attempts could solve. So, I contacted Schmerizon for help. It did not go well.
Schmerizon, like many companies, has expanded its product lines over the years. Companies that expand organically or through mergers and acquisitions may end up with multiple backend systems, multiple online accounts per customer, and customer service silos that do not cross over product lines. Schmerizon, I surmise, has all those issues, and these factors likely played into my poor customer experience.
Every one of these problems is surmountable, by the way, if the company cares to solve it.
Unpaid Customer Labor & Sludge
I ended up spending an inordinate amount of time interacting with Schmerizon customer service. My first request was to figure out what was wrong with my online account and log me in. If that didn’t work, my next request was to just apply the discount for me—or escalate the matter to someone who could apply the discount.
No matter what I said or did, the first seven (yes, seven) customer service reps (CSRs) I spoke to were only able to give instructions about how to log in. Over and over, they read me the same instructions, and over and over, I dutifully repeated these unsuccessful steps to prove to them that I needed further help or escalation.
Trying to get the discount for which I was eligible, I spent:
❌ Four hours on a single customer service chat, in which I chatted with three CSRs who each read from the same script and could not assist. At the end of the chat, I was told to "call customer service."
❌ Two hours total on two different phone calls, speaking to five different CSRs. Only the very last CSR took an action that helped. He submitted a ticket somewhere that evidently got the attention of someone who could solve my problem. I got an email a week later, saying my discount had been applied.
It seems Schmerizon could have applied the discount themselves all along, as I had repeatedly requested. But they didn’t; most of their CSRs were not equipped to diagnose the problem or to escalate my issue to someone who could help. Only the last CSR out of eight knew what to do.
This was a training issue, but it also indicated a failure of imagination (What if instructions don’t work? What if there is a technical problem a CSR isn’t equipped to solve?) or of caring about customer experience. Why would a company not enable CSRs to escalate an issue? Instead, most CSRs handed off laterally to someone else at their level who couldn’t help.
But this is not really a post about my experience, it’s about a larger phenomenon of failing our customers.
A few months before my Schmerizon experience, I ran a focus group about mobile phone plans. It was eye-opening, and it is part of what spurred me to contact Schmerizon about my problem. In the focus group, I learned that some consumers 'mobile carrier hop,' changing carriers every couple of years to get the best rates and leave behind companies that frustrate them and don’t give existing customers the best rates. Some of the focus group participants complained about how long it took on the phone to make a change or cancel their service. One participant said he has his brother make the calls for him when he switches carriers because his brother has more patience.
All the time customers spend trying to get products and services to work, or dealing with customer service, is “unpaid customer labor”—time they have to invest because a company, product, or service is too hard to work with.
I first learned about unpaid customer labor in Lisa D. Dance's book, Today is the Perfect Day to Improve Customer Experiences!. (This book is a good read for product managers, UX strategsts and designers, and anyone with a responsibility to internal or external customers.) I had certainly seen unpaid customer labor before but didn’t have a name for it. I had seen it in usability tests when participants got stuck in a loop or hit dead ends trying to find information or complete a transaction online. I had experienced unpaid customer labor myself when I had to appeal multiple health insurance denials, resending the same documentation over and over, by an untraceable method (fax). And most recently, my Schmerizon experience involved unpaid customer labor.
In Lisa’s book I also learned about the aptly named Customer Rage Survey, a study that began with a 1976 White House study and continues to measure customers’ perceptions of how well companies handle consumer complaints. Customer rage has only increased since 1976, despite companies’ investments in customer service innovation. One potential reason, according to the current sponsors of the Customer Rage Survey: “While most companies continue to invest significantly in improving their customer care game . . . many are focusing on the wrong things or poorly executing the right approach to customer care.”
Whereas some companies may indeed be focusing on the wrong things or executing badly (hello, AI phone systems!), others may see poor customer service as a means of savings.
There’s a term for this malignant neglect by companies. It’s called “sludge,” and you can read about it here in Knowledge at Wharton. In some companies, the sludge strategy is to promote a discount or service to attract customers and get them to make a purchase, but then make it hard to actually access the deal that brought them in. In other companies, the sludge strategy is to make it so hard to access services and benefits that customers give up.
Let’s do better, shall we?
Doing Better for Our Internal & External Customers
When we force customers to work too hard to use a website or app, contact our company, get information, or access services and benefits, we—
increase their frustration
erode their goodwill and trust in the company
risk losing them as customers and recommenders/evangelists
risk reputational damage
risk competitive advantage
Alienating customers (and colleagues, if your customers are internal) is never a good thing. If your customers are external, that can mean lost membership dues, sales, volunteerism, etc. If your customers are internal, being hard to work with risks damaging your corporate culture, limiting collaboration, dulling your competitive edge, and hampering resiliency.
So, let’s strive to improve our companies’ customer experience. Here are some suggestions:
Understand your customers, what they need most, and where they have difficulty interacting with your products and services. Use that information to prioritize changes that will improve their customer experience—e.g., clearer language, simpler navigation, better usability, chatbots that actually find answers or get a human involved who can, and better customer service reference materials and scripts. Understanding customers means doing customer research (surveys, interviews, usability testing, and/or focus groups; we can help) and acting on your findings.
Commit to being customer-focused. If you have influence over the quality of customer experience, make it better. Whether your customers are internal or external, and whether you are an executive, an individual contributor, or somewhere in between, you can improve the way individuals experience your company. Even if you work in an organization that has adopted a strategy of benign or malign neglect, you can still strive every day to work in accordance with your values. Advocate for your customers. Look for ways to empower others to help customers. Every time you make someone’s customer experience better, that is a victory.
Measure performance. Always know what’s working and what’s not, and how to change it for the better. If you work with content, set goals for that content and measure its performance against the goals. For example, are product pages providing enough information for people to make an informed purchase decision, or are they bailing out of the shopping cart and calling your company? Is the content answering people’s top questions? How satisfied are customers with your website, products, customer service experience? Do these metrics corollate with sales or membership numbers? Data engenders big-picture understanding and enables informed decision making about what to change and what to continue.
Assume most customers are dealing with stressors of some kind. Being under stress can limit people’s patience and ability to navigate difficulties and unfamiliar environments. Remove as many barriers as possible for the people you serve. If you’re designing websites, products, and other experiences, think of how best to light the way for stressed-out people in a hurry. If you’re serving internal departments, think about what reference materials or formalized processes could help grease the skids.
Assume everyone’s time is valuable, and that they are valuable. Identify, predict, and seek to avoid harms in your company’s communications and products—including the harm of exclusion. Be kind, and influence your company and its products and services to be kind. That's a win for everyone.
Having had a very avoidable negative customer service experience frustrated me but also opened my eyes to the possibilities. I hope we can all agree that having dissatisfied customers is not a good outcome. Let’s strategize about how to improve the experience for our customers.
Need help understanding your customers and improving their experience with your communications or products? Get in touch!
Photo credit: Image of frustrated woman on mobile phone, looking at computer, by DC Studio on Freepik.com.
