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In a clip that’s fast becoming legendary, the narrator spins a nearly 2-minute tale of technical triumph and innovation — that also happens to be completely made up. Not a word of it is true.
Is this how it feels when you meet with your Web developers? If your Web people can’t talk to you about the Web in ways that connect with the business goals that you understand and care about, it’s time to talk to an interactive agency that puts your business results and customer experience first.
I caught Simon Sineck’s How great leaders inspire action TED Talk recently. I think Simon’s on to something, and he’s definitely tapped into something important in the zeitgeist. But I think he’s only got part of the picture.
I’ve got a MiFi 2372 from Bell. It’s a cool little device that I’ve been recommending to almost everyone… until a couple of weeks ago. What the device does is this: it connects to Bell’s wireless data service and acts as a wifi router, allowing you to use 3G wireless Internet to access the Internet with laptops, non-3G iPads and other devices that don’t have 3G natively on board (hello hi speed at the cottage!)… until a couple of weeks ago.
On May 3 Bell disabled all MiFis on its network because of an issue with the MiFi’s battery. It sucks, but these things happen.
What really sucks, though, is that many Bell customers found out about this the hard way — by trying to get online (in my case in a mission critical situation), finding it didn’t work and trying to solve the problem.
And what sucks even more is that it’s really hard to get a straight answer about what Bell’s going to do about the problem. A recorded message on 310-BELL said to take the unit back to point of sale; retail said to wait for a replacement (or maybe some other non-equivalent wireless product) in the mail; call center said replacement would happen by mail but couldn’t confirm whether or not they’d actually be replacing the MiFis with MiFi’s or not.
It’s unfortunate. It would be so easy for Bell to communicate with all stakeholders in a way that clears up all the confusion and that keeps the recall in the “bummer” category and out of the “fiasco” category. Here are three ways Bell, and especially their Bell.ca Web site, could stop failing at customer service:
I’m happy to announce the launch of Fruition’s new Web Success Scorecard. The interactive tool is designed to help you understand whether your online user experience is getting you the best possible business results out of the Web, social media and search marketing or whether you’re leaving money on the table.
The test takes less than a minute to complete and it’s completely free.
I just read an interesting article on surveying your clients and customers to assess their satisfaction levels. It’s targeted at law firms, but many of the ideas could apply to any business.
It’s an excellent article, but I think there’s one piece that’s missing or been under-emphasized, though.
All of the practices outlined are excellent practices, but law firms — any firms really — are still going to struggle if don’t do the initial groundwork of defining what client service success looks like. The first step should really be to define success metrics.
For instance, here at Fruition (even though we’re not a law firm) we’ve been doing post-engagement client satisfaction surveys (online, bien sur) for about a year now. Before we started surveying, we decided that Net Promoter Score (NPS) was going to be our primary performance indicator for client satisfaction. NPS is an averaged, aggregated number representing clients answers to the question, “on a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend Fruition to a friend or colleague”.
NPS isn’t going to be the right metric for every firm, but without knowing exactly what it is you’re measuring, you’re going to have a hard time defining how you’re going to measure it.
Update: A weird coincidence here. Mere hours after I posted this, Vertical Response did a whole piece on Net Promoter Score. It’s a great resource. You can check it out here: http://ht.ly/1Kl3M
via Texas Lawyer Coach | Client Interviewing | Client Interview | TopLawyerCoach.com.
iPhones and other touch-screen based mobile devices provide a slew of challenges for user experience designers, and it’s not just the size of the screen:
Web designers will have to wrestle with several issues when considering touch computers. For one thing, touch interfaces don’t give users the fine-grained control that they have with a mouse.
and
roll-over interactions are common on many websites, but these don’t work on touch devices. Other common tricks, such as hovering over a link to see the connected URL in the status bar, have to be adjusted before a user can perform the same function
Given that within the year there will easily be over 100 million touch screen devices in the wild, this is a potentially serious issue for businesses looking to connect with their users’ evolving needs. Some sites will need complete make-overs, others will need some subtle tweaks and other sites will need new mobile/touch screen versions.
There will also be a whole new range of opportunities to take advantage of mobile and touch-screen-specific capabilities to reach markets in new ways.
via Technology Review: Redesigning the Web for Touch Screens.
I just came across this cool tool from Forrester Research that lets you build a profile of your target markets’ social media participation by entering some basic demographic data about them. Forrester says it best:
Forrester’s Social Technographics® classifies consumers into six overlapping levels of participation (see short presentation). Based on our survey data we can see how participation varies among different groups of consumers, globally. We also analyze the participation of people who buy technology.
Margaret Atwood gets it! Social media — and by that I mean the Web as a whole as well as social network apps — is a conversation. About her early experiences with her followers, she writes:
They’re sharp: make a typo and they’re on it like a shot, and they tease without mercy. However, if you set them a verbal challenge, a frisson sweeps through them. They did very well with definitions for “dold socks” – one of my typos – and “Thnax”, another one. And they really shone when, during the Olympics, I said that “Own the podium” was too brash to be Canadian, and suggested “A podium might be nice.” Their own variations poured on to a feed tagged #cpodium: “A podium! For me?” “Rent the podium, see if we like it.” “Mind if I squeeze by you to get onto that podium?” I was so proud of them! It was like having 33,000 precocious grandchildren!
via Margaret Atwood | How I learned to love Twitter | Comment is free | The Guardian.
So it seems like Facebook is aiming to restore the reputation of its somewhat degraded ad platform. According to C|Net:
You’ve probably seen these ads: they make it look like they’re geared to you (“28, female, and living in Boston? Try this…”), but the rest of the message and the product itself are actually fairly generic. According to ClickZ, Facebook has built an “evaluation program, part automated and part human” to give the thumbs-down to ads “featuring user attributes that are deemed irrelevant to the actual offer.”
The big question form here: is it too late? Has the user experience of FB ads been so degraded that users will tune them out for keeps?
Facebook: That ad is not actually targeted | The Social – CNET News.
I just got back from IDEO social software and strategy specialist Gentry Underwood’s (if I’m ever reincarnated, I totally call dibs on that name) spiel at the Rotman School. He was talking about IDEO’s experience with creating interactive knowledge sharing systems and the 5 principles they’d extracted from the process. The first lesson? Technology is only the beginning.
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