First the set-up. As a part of our family’s end-of-year review of finances, we realized we were paying too much for cable, internet, and phone with TimeWarner. We went out and researched other providers and settled on AT&T’s DSL and phone bundle (we decided to nix cable for a while) based primarily on price. We placed our order on January 9 and were told the effective date would be January 17. So far, so good.

The evening of January 17, I plug in the DSL unit and nothing: no phone, no internet. I call tech support and I get a friendly guy who tells me there’s something wrong with our account but because it’s after-hours, he can’t get more information. No problem, I’ll call back in the morning. When I call New Services the next day, the individual I talk to verifies the problem and tells me the internet order has been pushed out 45 days. Why? Well, she couldn’t be sure but would get it resolved. Just give them a couple of days and it would be taken care of. A couple of days later, we are met at our door by a tech who says he’s come to turn on our phone. My first thought was, “Why the hell are you here on Friday instead of Tuesday like you were supposed to be?” But I’m happy we’re finally going to get our service – as promised – so I say, “Great, go ahead and help yourself to whatever you need.” Thirty minutes later, he returns to the door and says there’s a problem with our line and will need to come back with new equipment. Unfortunately, we don’t see him again that afternoon and I guess AT&T doesn’t work weekends so we don’t see another individual until Monday. Never mind the fact the tech screwed up the phone line and we were without home phone service for the weekend.

Monday morning another tech arrives to fix the problem and after 2-3 hours of work feels confident he’s got us all sorted out…without fully checking that both phone and internet actually work. Unfortunately, I have the mother of all sinus infections that day so I take him at his word. Later in the evening, I check on the DSL unit and I’m amazed to see the red blinking light that tells me it’s still not functioning properly. The only service that appears to be working is the phone but it only works if using the phone jack in our upstairs office (the downstairs kitchen jack that is our preferred location is broken).

Next day, I try to call New Services but because of the labyrinthine phone tree, I think I ended up talking with a central call center rep. Yes, there appears to be a problem with our account. No, she can’t determine what the problem is. Yes, I’m still going to be fully charged starting on our effective date of January 17 even though I haven’t received close to satisfactory service. Yes, she’ll make a note of my objection.

If you’re keeping score so far, I’ve spoken to at least three AT&T contacts over the phone and two techs. And our service problem is far from being resolved. Not exactly the best experience you want for a new customer, particularly one who works in customer experience.

I decide to take a different route and contact AT&T via Twitter and see if I can get someone to give a shit about my problems. I manage to get a fairly quick response from @ATTCustomerCare on January 26 and am told to send an email with an accounting of our problems.

Hallelujah! A response from Algeria, Social Media Manager at AT&T. Finally, someone who will own my problem and finally help me get our service started. Right?

Imagine my raging frustration when all I get is more sweet talk about wanting to help and escalating the issue without seeing actual results. Since the nine days since @ATTCustomerCare told me I could expect a call about resolving this issue, I’ve received ZERO calls. But I sure have received plenty of tweets of apology and reaffirmations that I’m important.

Guess what? Every one of those tweets might as well read, “Blah, blah, blah you unimportant asshole customer, we’re big and we really don’t care.” Do I believe Algeria was sincere? Yes, but it doesn’t matter if everything she says is counteracted by a company without a clue when it comes to delivering a positive customer experience.

So as I mentioned yesterday via Twitter, AT&T has not only lost a new customer but gained a very vocal detractor who will be more than happy to share his customer experience with anyone, anytime, anywhere. All the nice words, all the marketing and PR bullshit, all the empty promises mean nothing if a problem isn’t resolved. Because in the end, that’s the power all customers have over companies that prove they really don’t care through their actions.

One of the key points in their conversation – which can be found in Curt’s Inc blogpost – centers around generating greater market demand and improving a customer’s experience through the creation of hassle maps. Slywotsky defines a hassle map:

Whether you’re talking about a consumer or a corporation, a hassle map defines all of the actual steps that characterize the negative experiences of the customer. Think about these questions: Where are the emotional hot spots, the irritations, the frustrations, the time wasted, the delay? Where are the economic hot spots? And then think about this: What are the ways that businesses can radically improve the hassle map for both the customer and themselves?

Many companies face a problem when it comes to the user or customer experience. It’s rarely one huge catastrophe that sinks them. Rather, it’s more akin to death by a thousand cuts. Our customers or users experience a hassle here, another hassle there…eventually, the hassles build up to a point where the negatives outweigh any positives. And another otherwise satisfied customer leaves for something better.

Let’s get a better handle on these hassles – understand what they are and ruthlessly rip them from our customers’ lives. At Journyx, we’ve started developing a Hassle Map Program to collect and catalog how customers interact with our software. I thought I’d share a bit of how we’ve set it up.

Step One: Collect feedback through conversations and observation.
We’ve piloted the program using local customers, which gives us the advantage of getting some face time with them. It’s always a benefit when you can put names with faces…and let the customer do the same.

For these in-person sessions, I record use a Kodak Zi8 video camera and tripod. I love this camera because it’s unobtrusive and still provides pretty good picture and sound quality. And since I also want to ensure I’m capturing every move and mouse click, I set up a recordable GoToMeeting session. I find the combination of video camera and G2M give me several angles in which to understand the hassles our customers experience when using our software.

Step Two: Build the Hassle Map
When it comes to developing the hassle map, I’m a big fan of the mind mapping technique. While it can be done on paper, I much prefer electronic because we’re going to want to build a database of hassle maps. Of all the mind mapping software out there, I highly recommend Mindjet MindManager. It’s pricy but it does something that few others will do: it allows me to conduct searches across maps. So if I want to look for patterns of frustrations across customers, I type a keyword and let the program perform its magic.

Step Three: Put the Maps into Action
It’s not enough to gather the data, right? For the whole Hassle Mapping program to be productive, the data needs to be put to use in your market strategy and product planning. Factor it into your roadmap. Start sharing the outcomes throughout your organization. More than likely, you’ll uncover some hassles not just around your products and services…you’ll learn about hassles with support and sales. If so, make sure that gets to the right folks in your organization.

If you want to know more about our Hassle Mapping program, come to ProductCamp Austin this weekend. I’m proposing a session called Hassle Mapping Your Way to a Better Product Experience. If you can’t make it and would like to know more (or if my session isn’t chosen), reach out to me and I’ll make sure you get the PowerPoint and session collateral I’m preparing for the event.

Along similar lines, Joshua Horwitz at Reference Success encourages us to Look Forward by Looking Back to Your Most Loyal. I like Joshua’s third point:

Find New Faces Don’t be afraid to ask who else might have stories to tell.  We always recommend trying to find multiple contacts within each customer reference site, but that request gets easier as the relationship matures.  Asking your loyal customer to vouch for how easy it is to be a reference for your company can make all the difference in recruiting others that may have new perspectives and new stories to share.

What’s worked for you in collecting those compelling success stories from your customers?

“The ideas underlying customer experience are not new, and historically many successful entrepreneurs have used essentially qualitative research techniques to develop distinctive customer experiences…Developing a new customer experience involves risk, and research techniques – especially quantitative techniques – may be incapable of eliciting a response from potential customers where the proposed experience is hypothetical, and devoid of the emotional and situational context in which it will be encountered.”
Adrian Palmer, Customer Experience Management: a Critical Review of an Emerging Idea

Customer experience has to be captured in the wild and in the moment. Focus groups are for wimps. Now, go get it.

I think there’s a hypothetical, “perfect world” answer and there’s also a more realistic, “down to business” answer. The perfect world answer is they should be dealt with at the same level of precedence. When a customer has a problem, their primary – if not only – focus is that it gets resolved. The only difference is the method they choose for communicating with the company.

Where it starts to veer in some strange, uncharted territories is now customers can share their complaints for all to see via social channels. If I complain about a lousy service on Twitter or my blog, not only will my followers and readers see it, but it can be instantly and easily shared far beyond my first-level network. And it’s that very public airing of grievances that scares most companies into focusing more on resolving problems raised on social channels than those raised on more traditional channels.

However, here’s another reality that all companies must grapple with…and why they need to give each customer complaint the same precedence regardless of the communication channel. If I make a call and get no satisfaction, I’m going to blog about that experience. If it’s my father or grandmother or friend who has had a lousy customer service experience, I’m going to Tweet about it. But if a business effectively deals with the situation in whatever way it first arises, there’s no need to complain publicly. Rather, I might just tell my network about the wonderful customer service offered to make up for a problem.

My bottom line is: train all your employees to deal with a customer problem in whatever way it shows up because you never know how it will escalate beyond that moment.

Join the conversation at Forum Q&A

All of which is why Joshua Black’s post, 5 Sneaky Ways to Find Out What Customers Really Want… Without Asking Them, over at Men with Pens is a real keeper.

See item #2:

Go to Wal-Mart: This expression means you should get out there and eavesdrop on your customers in their natural environment. Hang around the lions while they’re kicking back in their den complaining about their biggest problems to other lions (like who left their dirty undies lying around the cave).

Customers will never really tell you their problems if you ask directly. They often don’t exactly know what their problems are.

Listen to what customers say. Are they complaining? About what? Are they sighing over something they wish they had? What is it? What problems keep them from getting the results they want?

Don’t say a word. Take copious amounts of notes and quietly leave the scene like an entrepreneurial ninja. I like to hang out at coffee shops and use my Blackberry for this kind of covert operation, because it just looks like I’m texting someone and being oblivious to people at other tables.

And as a smart commenter responded, another method for gathering similar intel is to run Twitter searches for keywords and themes related to your product or business.

What other ways of uncovering consumer intelligence out in the wild have you found most beneficial to your business?

Our impatience and cynical criticism of anything new that isn’t absolutely perfect.

We’re like Statler and Walforf from The Muppet Show whose sole role was to throw barbs at the performers (except most of us armchair pundits are not quite as witty or endearing as our Muppet counterparts). Oh and I’m not throwing my own criticism out to everyone else but me. I’m putting myself squarely in the middle of this trend. As an anthropologist, I can see the fingerprints of cultural entanglement all over this problem. None of us are immune from feeling impatient with technology (or really any customer-related experience) that doesn’t meet our ever increasingly high expectations. And therein lies the key problem.

We’ve assumed a sense of entitlement which is nothing more than consumer empowerment gone awry and to the extremes. We think we’re entitled to a perfect first product with no flaws. Witness Exhibit A: Dell’s try at building their first tablet, the Streak. Yes, I was a beta tester and have been using the Streak for a few months so can attest it has some significant issues. But I hope Dell doesn’t pull up stakes and quit because of all the fierce condemnations they’ve received from several tech publications. Instead, I hope they have guts and a long-term strategy that sees this as a building block.

Exhibit B (and actually what provoked this post) is how fast we’ve decided that Apple’s Ping is a failure. Dammit, it just started…and yet here’s a perfect example of how quickly the critics will descend on anything new. Anyone who has started to look at Ping should have instantly recognized it is an emerging work in progress. And whether it ultimately works or not, it deserves a chance to try and make it.

And here’s another one about Ping as a spammers delight. Yeah, Apple’s engineers should have foreseen this. But anyone who knows how tech products get to market also knows the challenges of sealing up every single hole in a first release. The beauty of web-based apps is how quickly things can get resolved once they are put out into the wild.

And lest you think I’m defending Apple and Ping, I’m actually defending the product’s right to get itself into the consumers’ hands and make necessary adjustments through time. And to do that, we have to be patient as consumers and not expect demand perfection from the get-go. If we can’t manage to do this, we’re looking at a very unattractive future possibility:

The idea of new takes on a different, ever increasingly derogatory meaning. Fewer and fewer companies will decide to take risks and build new technologies for fear of getting blasted (at best) or ignored (at worst) because they didn’t meet increasing standards that become nearly impossible to meet in first iterations. And then we are only the poorer for our own lack of patience.

I once served under a VP of Services who wanted to dramatically improve customer service so he made it a benchmark to “delight” our customers. When asked how we’d be improving our service operations, he replied it was in the works. Then when pressed to actually give some idea of what a “delight” benchmark meant and how it was going to be measured, he quickly found a way to change the subject. Before long, delighting customers became just another meaningless buzzword for the Services department.

Don’t let this happen to your organization.

First and foremost, get your basics up to grade. That means committing to excellence at customer service fundamentals – like responsiveness, internal teamwork, accountability, plans and metrics…to name a few – before graduating to delighting your customers. It’s that whole crawl before you can sprint kind of thing. If your basic customer service structures and systems stink, no amount of delightfulness is going to mask the stench.

Service is just one facet of the whole customer experience. Even if the customer service experience goes from baseline to phenomenal, what if your company’s products or services remains blah? What if there are chronic issues with shipping? What if marketing’s promises turn out to be undeliverable half-truths? The point is that investing financial and people resources into creating stellar customer service just through channels like phone, web, Twitter, and self-service is a waste if the rest of the enterprise doesn’t match up.

Finally, I must admit I hate the word delight. Have you, as a customer, been on the receiving end of a customer service rep asking, “Have I delighted you today?” or “What more can I do to delight you?” It’s practically impossible for the use of “delight” to not sound condescending to the customer. And when it comes to building relationships with customers, communication and language matter.

Rather than saying, “Every business must delight (or astonish or thrill or enchant) its customers!” it’s more important to take care of the basics FIRST. Instead of proclaiming fuzzy, high-minded (while no doubt well-intended) initiatives, place initial priority on a steady dedication to practice, reflection, and continuous improvement. Your customers will love you for it.

photo credit: Metro Transportation Library and Archive (via flickr)

What’s the price of free? It’s not a trick question like “Who’s buried in Grant’s tomb” but a dead serious one, particularly if you’re a small business relying on inexpensive business solutions to succeed. You might use Zoho CRM for your customer database, Evernote to take important business notes, and Skype to communicate with your employees or contractors. All of these options are free (though some have paid, upgraded services) but I argue not without cost.

For me, I’ve been a user of Google Voice since back when it was non-Google GrandCentral. It was a great solution for me, providing slews of neat features all for free. There was even a time when I went on a working vacation and accidentally left my cell phone at home. No worries – I went to the online settings and had all my working calls forwarded to the vacation house. How cool is that?

These past couple of years, I’ve been a happy user…until this week when I discovered that the free service came with a high price. It turns out that I haven’t been receiving my calls to my Google Voice number for the better part of a month. When someone calls the GV number, they go to a generic voicemail and can leave a message. Except the message enters a black hole. The individual thinks they’ve successfully left a message for me but I never receive it. So for all intents and purposes, the caller thinks I’m not interested in their business (which couldn’t be further from the truth!).

So what to do when things go wrong? In my case, I have two recourses: 1) I can go to the public forum and log a question. Or 2) I can go to a private troubleshooting form, describe my issue, and wait..and wait…and wait. See, when a service is free there are no SLAs that a company has to worry about. There’s very little we can do when a problem is urgent. We’re at their mercy which is a tough spot to be in when you’re struggling to build a company or consultancy. I’m into day #3 and haven’t heard a peep from Google about this problem that is entirely their fault. Talk about feeling helpless. And personally irritated that I left something so damn important as a communication channel in the hands of a free service.

This is a situation very similar to one my friend, Paul Hudson, at Intersperience talks about in a recent article called Hidden Cost of Self-Service. I would also argue that even though Google Voice is free and that imparts risk for us users, it really doesn’t matter whether the service is paid or not. A failure to provide even an adequate level of service will tarnish your reputation and significantly diminish the customer experience. I’ve learned the hard way to not be so trusting of Google’s entire service suite or the free services from other companies. The cost to me has proved far too high.

A show of hands – are you using Google Voice for something important like your business or job hunting? Are you okay with the consequences when things go wrong? Before you answer, think carefully about your own reliance on free services (you can also take a look at some of the issues listed at the Google Voice Support Forum…it’s a bit scary).

Friends, protect yourself when it comes to the important things like phone numbers, email addresses, websites, etc. Don’t be lured by free when the cost could be lost customers. And business executives, don’t casually walk down the path of free and self-service. When things go wrong, will your customers still trust you to care for them when it really matters?

Anyone else have experiences with free services costing them more than you bargained for?

Update 07.20.10
After a few days of trying to line up a call, I finally spoke to Craig Walker, a Product Manager for Google. Turns out the major issue here was my request to move my GV number from one Google account to another. There’s an account transfer request form available through the GV help forum but it’s not exactly supported (which raises questions about why its still in existence). Associating a current GV number with a new Gmail address presents some hairy technical issues so word of warning: When you sign up for a Google Voice number, make certain its associated with a permanent account because it’s pretty much locked in.

But once I finally nailed Craig down, he was responsive in getting my call history and voicemails transferred to my Bailey WorkPlay gmail account. And he was generous in offering me a few perks including a sparkly new – and rather easy to remember – number: 512-827-9000.

Sadly, that’s often the internal corporate dialogue that happens around customer surveys and feedback mechanisms.

Once upon a time when I was a membership development director of a nonprofit association, I had a long chat with my Board of Directors. They wanted to conduct an extensive member survey to solicit opinions on the state of the professional society. At this point, it was my job to ask questions – a lot of them – in order to fully understand the purpose and objectives of this project. When I asked about the purpose of the survey, most responded that they wanted to know how the membership felt about the state of the industry as well as gain their feedback about the association. “Terrific!” I thought. It had been a while since a survey had been conducted and this would help me and my staff (along with executive management and the Board) to learn about and improve the member experience.

But imagine my utter dismay and horror when I then asked, “So, what will we plan to do with this information once we collect it?”

“Oh nothing. We just want to know how our members feel about their membership, to understand their sentiment.”

So, in essence, we would be collecting opinions for funsies but cloaking it in the disguise that our members’ opinions would be used toward taking some action.

Time for some tough love and honesty: is your organization collecting data but not taking action on what you receive? Are you conducting surveys and gathering opinions with no plan for corresponding actions? Are you mining the web for sentiment data but not committing to doing anything with it?

Here are three simple steps to fix it:

Have a plan. Simple? Yes. Easy? Maybe not. But start to build a plan for how your organization will utilize all the various feedback you receive – both formal (through surveys) and informal (through social media).

Involve everyone. Every single person in your organization is receiving feedback. Your sales folks get it when talking to prospects, your techies get it when they hear about feature requests and bugs, your accountants may even get it when talking to friends at an outdoor barbeque. Now help them share what they learn and integrate it all together.

Err toward action. Don’t wait for the perfect timing to act on feedback, particularly if the feedback is beneficial to enhancing the customer experience. Your customers are giving you a gift in their opinion. Now, say “Thanks a bunch!” and do something remarkable with it.

photo credit: pink_fish13 (via flickr)