I’ve always believed that when building products for customers, their voices ought to lead the development process to ensure the best customer experience. Over the years though, I’ve learnt that it’s not that straight forward. There’s a few more things to consider before blindly changing your website to pink after receiving customer requests. Although customer suggestions may state otherwise, the colour pink may not be ideal for accessibility reasons, or may not be in line with the company’s colour palette.
At Allbound, for example, clients don’t start using the product immediately after subscribing. Rather, the company only kicks off new clients on the 1st and 15th of every month.
At face-value, this activity adds friction to the customer. This is especially true of the customer who would like to start using the product immediately after discovering Allbound. But, in the long-run customers are able to benefit from this process because “all sales processes are aligned and contract execution is measured simultaneously” according to Jen Spencer. Allbound can provide its customers a delightful experience by easily spotting trends in the customer data over a specified period.
So, is there ever a time where you shouldn’t solve your customer’s experience problems? Yes. If the value added to the customer in the long term outweighs the friction that occurs during the customer’s experience.
Customer experience improvement diagram explained
Identify problem
Experience related problems may be raised by internal, or external customers.
Internal customers: complicated system, delay in receiving customer queries, unable to access customer database.
External customers: delivery taking long, customer cannot get answer to a question, sales process starting on set date.
Find root cause
Conduct research to identify the cause of the identified problem. Research methods include usability tests, field studies, company databases, etc.
Valuable friction? Yes or No
This answers the question: does this friction add value to the customer in the long run. Delayed delivery time has a negative impact on customer satisfaction, for example.
If the value added to the customer doesn’t outweigh the friction caused then proceed to solve the customer experience problem.
Example of how to evaluate customer experience issues
Identify problem
It comes to your attention that there is a problem: users are not completing the onboarding process.
You then analyse the clickstream data and notice that a lot of customers fall off in the sections where they are required to upload documents.
“Hmm, I wonder why they are falling off at the document upload sections,” you ask.
So you conduct a few interviews and ask the users why they fell off the section where documents were required.
Find root cause
These are the responses you received during the research process:
“I didn’t have one of the documents that were required so I went off to look for it and got distracted by my child thereafter so I never got to completing the form.”
“After completing 3/4’s of the application form, your system requested that I upload document xxx. My business doesn’t have that document?”
Bingo! A lot of users stopped completing the onboarding process when requested the documents. The documents were not at hand and therefore many users simply fell off the onboarding process.
Valuable friction? Yes or No
Two questions to consider:
- Should the user receive the list of documents before starting the onboarding process?
- Should the user documents get requested during the onboarding process?
The method chosen will differ for each company according to the KPI’s as well as the organisational goals. These questions may be evaluated as follows:
Should the user receive the list of documents before starting the onboarding process?
Yes. This enables the user to gather all their documents before starting to fill in the form (or at least be aware of the required documents beforehand.
The disadvantage of this method is that many customers can get discouraged by seeing the documents, and fall off after seeing the required documnets.
Overall, this method allows you to filter and receive mostly qualified users (if they continued passed the list of required documents, they probably have the documents).
Should the user documents get requested during the onboarding process?
Yes. Psychology studies have found that the harder a task is perceived to be, the more unlikely it will be completed.
Therefore, requesting the documents after the onboarding has been started gives you the opportunity to sell the value of the product during onboarding, Some customers may only be intrigued by your offering upon completing a deep dive.
The disadvantage of this method though, is the inflated number of users who start the onboarding process even though they are not qualified.
Overall, by allowing the user the opportunity to engage with your product through the onboarding process, you may increase the chances of conversion (Netflix’s onboarding is an example of this).
Conclusion
Before you implement your customers suggestions on how to improve the customer experience, first consider whether the friction caused by the problem adds any long term benefits to the customers.
The answer to this question will differ per business. But the company’s goals and KPI’s will help answer question 3 (valuable friction).
You can also find out if you need to follow UX principles in this article.
