Wireless Informatics Forum

I was fortunate enough this week to attend The Focus Group’s Customer Experience Forum  2008 in London. With speakers ranging from local authorities and retailers to mobile operators it soon became clear that there’s no magic formula or prescribed combination of marketing, customer care or business process re-engineering that can deliver out-of-the-box user experiences that delight end-users and turn them all into brand advocates overnight.

Differentiating services on controllable, physical expectations, such as price, availability and speed of delivery, is no longer enough; indeed it’s far from a sustainable model. Instead companies must also look at their end-users’ emotional expectations and align themselves and their user experience strategies accordingly. Emotions, after all, effect and govern many of our daily behaviors, including whom we care to interact with and whom we choose to ignore.

Promisingly the importance of user experience as a differentiator is making it to the boardroom. Too often, however, companies are building their user experience strategies ‘inside-out’, a concept described at the event by user experience expert Colin Shaw.

Companies, Shaw suggests, try and shoehorn their user experience strategies into existing operations rather than building them outside-in and first understanding what the customer actually wants and needs, what motivates them and what emotions are at play.

It all begs the question; do companies even know what their customers expect? Do they know what they want to deliver and can they articulate it? Also speaking was Tina Ruddy, customer experience manager at Telefonica O2; “The mobile telecommunications industry has a bad history for customer care. Every operator talks about customer experiences but customers are still dissatisfied.”

Listening to Tina explain that mobile brands have become interchangeable suggests that too many in the industry continue to differentiate solely on product, price and perceived quality.

It’s an understanding that led O2 to invest millions in building a customer-centric strategy, something that has helped them attain the number-one spot in the UK market (by subscriber numbers). Since launching the strategy, more than 2000 new customer-facing roles have been created, a fourth call center opened and propositions are now built based on actual customer feedback.

Describing the land grab mentality that many operators had when building market share, Ruddy admitted that the industry was notorious for treating new customers more favorably than existing ones. “New customers got all the best deals. Now, O2’s fair-deal ethos has eradicated this; we’ve completely changed our retention offers and loyalty is rewarded.”

Ultimately, a large number of user experience failings can be attributed to the mismatch between end-user expectations, what the brand promotes and what, ultimately, is delivered. As long is it lives up to expectations, a low-cost car can deliver as good an experience as a Mercedes. In the Mercedes your expectations are met by comfort, performance and exclusivity. In the low-cost car you’ll feel pleased at saving money that can be spent on something else. Different expectations, different experiences, but both delivered equally well.

Understanding these intricacies and stimulating emotions has become a key area of focus in the battle for user experience best practice. Is it alchemy? Not quite, but a successful user experience strategy requires a careful blend of insight, understanding and analysis of current end-user interactions. After all, end-users make decisions on seemingly insignificant factors, often subconsciously, based on instinctive emotional reactions.

Summing it up perfectly was Shaw, recounting his experiences across the banking industry.

“Banks want me to trust them, but they chain their pens down! What does that say about trust?”

The devil, it seems, is very much in the detail.