Your products need to work well.
My car failed its MOT. 6pm - I needed a car.
In the short walk from the garage to Southampton Airport I had booked a car and completed the ‘paperwork’. On arrival the agent handed me the keys. “Bay 26 – you are good to go.” He did a tiny little dance as though to impress the competitor agents.
Point is, it worked how I expected it to. When I remarked on this to colleagues, we quickly found ourselves wondering why on earth we would tolerate it being any other way. The standard is set, that’s the new baseline. Ever been told that ‘Online check-in is not available for this flight’?
(I still had to call to extend the hire though and there was some vagueness on the cost of that extension – one for the backlog, Avis.)
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It is mandatory for everyone working in the field of customer proposition development to frequently observe that customer behaviours are changing and expectations are high. In fact, it is so true that it is said so often that we can forget to believe it and act on this base insight. Hence my obvious title.
Let’s assume we have a proposition that is useful and could feasibly address a consumer need.
As we develop it there is a question that we should ask ourselves, and keep asking ourselves: Does it work how the customer would expect it to work? Or the same question another way Does it work how our TV advertising people would like to portray it in the ad? (People still make TV ads, right?)
Of course, a good product team must understand the nuances of what the customer really wants and they should use all the good co-design techniques to do so. And yes, sometimes the customer doesn’t know what to expect so it’s for us product people to lead – even then they’ll form an expectation quickly.
All this obviousness and we’re still cranking out products and services that don’t work how customers expect and hoping they won’t switch. Well they do, readily.
Why, in spite of all the focus, methods and know-how in this area, this still happening:
1. Inability to craft digital user experiences. Poor production values in the design and execution of the user interaction – the bits the customer looks at and touches. Digital channels require craft skills to make them; you need to have or to buy those skills. [I think there is so much focus on customer experience people are forgetting the digital user experience and usability - which is odd when digital is such a large chunk of it.]
2. End-to-end but not front-to-back. A beautifully designed interaction layer sat on top of old business processes that were designed for the analogue world where a customer service agent dutifully attempted to obfuscate them from us. Business process design is a craft skill too.
3. Whole is somehow less than the sum of the parts. Sprints are good they bring pace and frequent iteration. Every now and then, take a step back and check that the whole thing is still cohesive and coherent. And remember you can remove things not only add things. A sort of Experience Debt sprint. [Is that a thing or did I just make it up.]
4. Ignoring Trustpilot, Google Reviews and similar. Too easy to explain away why the ratings and reviews are not relevant for some reason. Just ask yourself Is there any truth in this? – you know there is.
5. Confusing pragmatism with compromise. Knowing when it’s good enough and shipping it is a positive thing. Launching a poor package of updates because you wanted to show you were making progress is not good. (And don’t try to pass the latter off as test-and-learn).
The morale of the story: stop launching bad products that don’t meet the heightened expectations of customers. You’ll get found out and they’ll go somewhere else. You know this. So, stop it.
P.S. The comments in [square brackets] were supposed to be there. They aren't things I left in by accident.