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Use content experience to improve User eXperience

I have been wondering about this for some time now. In my opinion, an ideal software does not need documentation or technotes or any instructions. (It may need conceptual information, but that's fine as long as UX is concerned!) There, the cat's out of the bag. And this is coming from someone who writes for a living ;) I see an issue with most of the enterprise platforms coming from all the big organizations. Off the top of my head, Google is a rare exception. The issue is content fragmentation. There are many unstructured, stand-alone pieces of content. These stand-alone pieces include the various documents, technotes, product pages, support pages, separate portals or user communities, technical articles, whitepapers, social media channels, and so on. At times, these are available on different domains altogether.

The content experience is so broken for some software that a user has to read a few documents cover to cover and search for deployment, compatibility, and usage-related issues through a few technotes, before the user can decide on purchasing, deploying, and using a software.

Content fragmentation is a bomb waiting to...!

Imagine if we had to suddenly stop typing an email in Outlook and resort to searching a document describing how to format the email or a technote describing which platform the email can be read on! Rudimentary example but it drives home the need for a better UX.

Many companies take the easy route--just provide a link in the product and call it integration, do SEO on stand-alone documents and call it better discoverability, keep re-sharing some assets on social media channels and claim easy discoverability, answer customer calls indefinitely for a limited set of issues and label is good troubleshooting support, and so on.

  I understand it is difficult to have an outstanding User eXperience (UX) or even a great content experience, given the real and perceived business constraints. In fact, it may even be impossible to tweak or streamline everything, given the king-sized legacies in the enterprise world.

But will it kill us to just curate the content we already have, without inventing anything new, and publishing it in one place, with a good navigation strategy, metadata, and sharing options? Putting together information from existing pieces AND making it available at the right place in a software, at the right time, for the right audience should solve most of the customer issues the enterprises face.

Context-sensitive text, wizard-based workflows, in-product pop ups describing appropriate user action, fail safes to help novice users, reviewed content on the UI to help understand UI items, are some UI constructs that can make life easy for a user.

Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

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Dear customer service people and their businesses, a good bribe cannot replace a good user experience

At this local restaurant, I found that the fried rice I received had hard rice grains. After I shared my feedback, the waiter's first reaction was an offer to replace the half-eaten dish with a new one. Instead, I went on to offer something like, "While tonight this rice will do for me, but please do ask the cook to not leave steamed rice in the open for a long time, lest the steamed rice grains harden."

I was appalled, when the waiter seemed oblivious enough to not register my suggestion to improve the product quality and moved to the next table for taking the next order! I don't blame him. He is just brainwashed by the management and the culture of the place.

Every business would like the replacement requests to disappear! How come they don't value the feedback then? And the horror of horrors is that a bribe is used to silence the feedback. Similarly, my mobile service provider, upon erring me, has offered discounts more than once. This looks to me like the attitude of this well-fed, sleepy stray dog, on a summer afternoon--Ignorance is bliss!

Let me break it up for you, dear businesses. The discounts and the replacements never made up for a bad user experience. When done in good faith (for example, the return policy at my local Decathlon store), it feels like a reward of its own. It surely leads to brand loyalty. However, when discounts and replacements are provided to silence, to obfuscate, to diverge, or to circumvent the issue, then it is a brand-killer.

Product innovation starts with what the customers need.

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A better and personalized support experience is a low hanging fruit

Dear brands,

I tell you so much about me. On top of that, I leave so many trails in the public domain that many of you or your affiliates pick up as demographic target data.

Why would you still send me content that you know for sure I don't need or I won't read?

Dear Flipkart,

Looking at my purchase history, you'd know I love you. I have been shopping from you since Oct 22, 2010. So you know I am not targeting you. I shop online only from you and have no other examples to give! All I want is a good customer experience. And I want you to save operational costs to give me better deals. I just got the following response for an almost Boolean query. It tells me far more than what I asked for and I am interested in.

Let's look at the associated costs of the above response:

My 1 minute reading irrelevant information. If I am already asking targeted question after comparing two products, don't you think I'd have noticed the promotions on the main page?

My 5 minutes wondering about the mailer. (Why would a smart company like Flipkart waste so much bandwidth of attention? After all, only support and service differentiates between the companies. Especially, now that Amazon, Snapdeal, etc. are offering the same products at the same cost.)

My 15 minutes writing this blog post. (Let me clarify that this is a positive cost, for me! Thanks for the inspiration to write this post.)

A support employees 2 minutes locating and copying this template information in their response to me.

Someone came up with this item in the support protocol/SOPs and trained the team spending many more minutes.

An editor's many minutes writing and maintaining this template. Many such irrelevant template may be floating around.

A content strategist curating and retiring content. At Flipkart's scale, there may be many such templates, protocols, SOPs, etc.

Of course, don't customize the entire process based on my feedback; rather personalize the process.

Image courtesy bdunnette on Flickr

So dear brands, alternatives then must come from such methods as the following: 

You can use big data to find what to customize. Look at my reviews and figure my writing style. That is how I like to be communicated with.

Provide preferences setting in profiles. What is a good time to call me? How long an email do I like? What are my preferences for shipping order and paying methods?

Look at my order history before responding to me. May be have 5 internal parameters to quantify the nature and eccentricities of each customer. An employee interacting with a customer can quickly look at 5 normalized values and get an idea of how to customize and partially personalize their communications.

Make 1 or 2 of these normalized parameters, while respecting privacy, available to your courier companies. They handle a very big part of your customer experience.

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How can organizations become world class when anyone can create a good business

In today's age, everyone has a the capability to implement the same business model. How can then organizations and individuals stand out?

Humanize your customer interactions and be considerate.

My wife recently went through a medical procedure at the well-known RG Hospital in New Delhi. Their service and overall experience was good. My experience during our two day stay, reinforced my belief about customer experience being the differentiator. It can make or mar a business. Of course, a business needs to have the core expertise and hard deliverable. But the differentiation comes from service. (One can differentiate based on intellectual property to stand out, but that is a different topic.)

  So naturally, the feedback I provided them is around improving the customer experience--right from when we enter the facility to leaving. Ironically, I had one of my best experiences with the housecleaning staff! There is a lot he can teach all of us, especially the doctors therein! And the rule of the thumb is to humanize interactions and communicate clearly.

This housekeeping staff member knocked when entering the room, politely asked for our permission before proceeding with cleaning, announced what he was going to do so our expectation was set, and closed the door when leaving. He spoke clearly and was appropriately loud. Most of the doctors and attendants on the other hand barged in to the room, checked something, gave some medication, said nothing, and left leaving the door ajar. In fact, a few times attendants said yes to our requests and forgot to do the needful!

  If you seek specific examples of how we customers perceive the world from our eyes, contact me. An example: handing a paper with diet plan is not good communication. Spending a few patient minutes (without rushing!) with the patient to discuss the diet plan would be better. Another example: while the team was doing the needful to discharge my wife, we were not updated and wondered what they are up to.

Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

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Fine print exists because the businesses want to safeguard themselves against whatever they cannot fix for good.

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Customer support is the face of any organization.

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