Buy a list of complaints
The best experiences customers have with a product or service are when that product or service really nails a particular problem.
But how do you come up with that “killer app”? How do you “innovate”? (I say this with tongue firmly in cheek because simply meeting people’s needs is not innovation, even though that’s the word many people use to describe it).
To come up with a great solution you need to single out a specific problem. Not a whole bunch of issues that affect the experience, just one.
You can go out and do research (market research, user research, design research…whatever) and find out what people want and will use, and use that to guide your business strategy and design efforts.
To fast track this I’d look for what people are complaining about. What are customers of a certain market not happy with? Where are they being failed? What is an area where those offering products and services have dropped the ball? What is an experience customers consistently complain about?
You can discover this through research activities, or it could be via the customer service centre, it could be on social media channels, it could even be on your own website. I bet it won’t be hard to find complaints if you’re brave enough to look.
Or you could buy a list of complaints.
There are many reasons why companies don’t respond to problems that their customers, or the market in general, have with their products and services. There are reasons why the experiences we suffer as customers are not all they’re cracked up to be. And most of these reasons have nothing to do with lack of skill, commitment or empathy. They’re the organisation failing to operate in unison to deliver great customer experiences.
The case of the American Airlines website is a great example. (For those who haven’t heard the story, Dustin Curtis wrote how he thought AA.com was badly designed and offered suggestions for how it could be improved, only to receive a response from a UX architect at American Airlines, pointing out that the issue isn’t the interface design, but rather the inner workings of the large organisation that are to blame for the poor user experience). There are likely to be countless other examples.
I don’t mean to let these companies off the hook; I firmly believe they should be striving to change the way they work so that they can focus on delivering great customer experiences. But that’s not realistic in the majority of cases, or at least it’s not realistic to expect the change to happen quickly.
So, it stands to reason that they are well aware of what could be done to improve their customers’ experiences. Perhaps it’s a list, a big list of complaints from users, customers. What if you could buy that list? It could tell you (assuming it’s been properly compiled from actual customer feedback) exactly what to do to nail that experience. It’d be gold!
It might seem like you’d be paying for someone else’s mess, and in a way you would be. It’s kinda like industrial waste and bi-products; most companies pay someone to take care of it for them. Someone who is better equipped to address the problem. The same principle might apply to customer experience.
Would anyone be willing to sell their “list”? Possibly not. It would be potentially embarrassing and be giving away a huge competitive advantage—even though it might be one they never make use of themselves.
However, in a less direct way this is how great products and services have long been developed; look at how the other guy is doing it wrong and then go do it better. It’s all about finding ripe opportunities.
[Image credit: "Wall of Complaints" by dawvon]
Comments
Post a comment