So here is what we have: a whole bunch of personal homepages where people would put a bunch of info about themselves, their favorite music, movies they liked, and other bits of personal chit chat and then sprinkle it with some favorite photos and links to their friends.
Sound like MySpace or maybe your favorite blog? Sure does. But actually that isn’t what I’m describing!
I’m describing an early incarnation of the web. Just before the ‘webosphere’ became mainstream and every company on the planet opened up an online shop, this is exactly what the web was. A bunch of folks, posting about whatever they thought was cool, and linking to all their friends.
It’s just interesting that after all these years and all the changes the internet has undergone, at its core it has remained a place where everyday people go to connect with one another. As a normal guy, I find this absolutely fascinating and I think it says something important about what it means to be human…
…and of course, as the Product Manager here at Ilium Software it reminds me to look hard at new trends and realize that underneath, there is often an element of human nature that drives them. Figure out what that hidden element is and you are on your way to producing a product that people truly want and need.
No prizes for recognizing the reference in the title here - it’s much too obvious (please don’t tell me if it isn’t).
Here’s the current staff of Ilium Software (click for the big version):
Standing, left to right: Ken, Julie, Dan, Sheri, Matt, Ellen, Marc
Kneeling: Kevin, Lee
OK, we’ll have a prize (one of our programs, or, if you have all of them already, a handful of excellent stylus pens) for anyone who comes up with a good caption. Put any entries into the comments.
Our friends over at Laridian have recently added a blog to their website. Laridian offers first-class bible software for Windows Mobile, Palm OS, iPod and BlackBerry devices – check out their new blog when you have a chance.
I’ve been running into more and more crazy corporate policies that might help the business in some fashion, but do nothing for the customer. In fact, a lot of these policies are downright bad for the customer and yet they still exist.
My personal theory is that if a policy is “Good for the Business” but “Bad for the Customer”, it isn’t actually good for the business at all! Read on!
* When I wrote this today I saw Kevin was getting ready to post and I was going to hold off until tomorrow. As it turns out we’re talking about the same basic topic (great minds think alike!) So I’m going to post it today anyhow as a complimentary piece!
Here is an example of the sort of corporate crazy making I’m talking about:
My daughter got a little pink hat for her first birthday. Now my daughter has a rather large head (hopefully to hold a giant, super intelligent brain!) Anyhow, the hat didn’t fit so I took it back to this store in the mall that I’d never been to before. It’s a two dollar sale hat and I just wanted the cash, but the store insists on giving me a store credit.
Now I don’t frequent this store and don’t plan to frequent this store in the future. A $2.00 gift card for this place is not going to do me any good at all. I explain this as politely as possible to which the clerk says “It’s the policy.” I ask who can override this policy and they give me a 1-800 number that they say I can call when I get home to get permission to return the $2.00 hat for cash…because heaven knows that when I come back tomorrow and say “Joe at customer service in Utah said I can return this for cash.” the clerk won’t have any problem with this at all! In the end I got my $2.00 cash and while it was a battle, I felt it a point of honor to see this through!
The question I have though is “who did this policy benefit?” Perhaps the policy is in place out of a fear of shoplifters? Or maybe they are trying to retain purchasers? So that if I buy something there they keep the money no matter what, only exchanging for store credit to buy something different? Or maybe they think I paid with a stolen credit card and now I’m trying to cash-in and they’ll have to pay for it twice!
In fact, the only thing the policy did was convince me that I would never shop there again. Unless you’ve got a monopoly in your market, the permanent loss of a customer and the loss of all future business from that customer is far greater than any possible savings the policy is meant to provide. Not to mention the fact that I’ve never said a good thing about this store to anyone I know, further eroding their customer base.
A policy like this one probably looks great on a ledger sheet or in a staff meeting, but the reality is that it fails in every way. Not only do you lose money, but your staff end up hating the policy and thus the job, because they are the ones that end up dealing with the frustrated customers.
The best policies are ones that support top quality customer service, respect for your customers, and realize that a kindness to a customer today means larger profits down the road. Maybe someday corporate America will finally remember this.
UPDATE: Something I had to add was a link toa Customer Service horror storyby David Berlind of ZDNet.com. It is a perfect example of a policy that I assume is meant to save the customer money, when in fact all it does is drive customers away.
Ilium Software is really happy to have customers, but not so happy to have them that we would do anything to keep them. On the surface, doing anything seems like ‘bending over backwards’ to satisfy the customer. That’s not a horrible idea - we really try to make people happy within reasonable limits and company policy.
When I say ‘do anything’, I include threatening, badgering, obsfucating, hard-selling, and otherwise retaining. The first - and quasi-official - thing that I want to get across is that we don’t have a retention policy or a manual. Ilium Software does not have a document that says how to retain customers when they say, “I don’t like [product], I want a refund.”
For more examples and some ranting, keep reading.
Example: The Consumerist [Warning: links in this paragraph may lead to articles containing profanity] is a blog that collects good and bad stories of customer service. A while back, they cracked a story about AOL’s customer retention policy with a stunning recording that a customer made while on the phone with a CSR (customer service representative) to cancel his account. The customer, Vincent, even appeared on national TV with his story. More recently, The Consumerist received a supposed copy of AOL’s retention manual and published it online.
Ilium Software has a ’no questions asked’ return policy. This means that we don’t try to hassle you, give you tons of surveys to fill out, make you jump through flaming hoops, etc.
If you ask for a refund, you may actually be asked a question, but that’s usually if you indicate in the request that you had a specific problem with the software - an error message, failure, etc. When I get a request to refund a purchase that seems motivated by a problem that I know we have a solution for, I offer the solution first. If you don’t want eWallet because it won’t install onto your PDA, but I happen to know how to make it install since you are running into a common problem, I want you to be happy with what you purchased and get it working. If it isn’t going to work, or if you just don’t want to spend the time, that’s fine too. I don’t consider this ‘retention’, more like the original refund request is really a technical support issue and the refund portion is just out of frustration.
In other words, I’ll offer you help if I can, and if you don’t want it, I stop there - I’ll process your refund as soon as I have all the necessary information.
So, to conclude the mostly-official-Kevin-interpretation-of-company-policy statement, we don’t do what AOL and other companies apparently do. If you want a refund, we’re happy to refund you if we can.
If you want to read my personal opinion on this whole ‘retention’ issue, read on. Otherwise, stop. Put down your pencils and do not keep writing.
Warning: personal exclamations of incredulity that may or may not be shared by other people who work for Ilium Software ahead.
I have one question for you, companies that have policies in place to sell a customer on something they don’t want: WHY? I almost feel like the startled, angry use of a profane word or two would be relevant. When I found the stories about AOL on The Consumerist, I was mad.
I try to help customers who have problems leading to a refund request because I want them to be happy with our software, and if the reason they aren’t happy is fixable without a refund, then why not offer it? The exchange is usually pretty short.
Customer: “[Program] won’t install, I get this error, I tried it ten times and it still gave me the error, I want a refund.”
Me: “It looks like you’re having this well-known problem. You can fix it by doing [sequence of steps to fix problem.] If that doesn’t work, let me know and I’ll be happy to refund your purchase.”
You: “Yay, it worked!” Or, sometimes, “I don’t care, refund me,” or, “It didn’t work, refund me.” In which case, I refund you.
I really hope this doesn’t make me into a hypocrite, saying that we don’t try to retain customers, while there I am trying to retain them. If I bought something at a store and angrily stormed up to the service desk demanding to return it because it didn’t do X, and the desk rep said, “oh, did you try this?” and educated me on how to make it work, I don’t think I’d still want to return it. I might feel a little dumb, but I wanted the product in the first place and I can assume I’d still want it if it worked right in the end. I assume this is why most consumer electronics now come with a large graphic on the inside box flap, reading, “STOP! Having problems? Don’t take this back to the store! Call this phone number instead!”
But a manual detailing the process to convince a user they’re wrong? People hired by a company specifically to sell you something you don’t want any more? People whose job future depends on how many people they successfully “win back”? People whose job is to make the customer defend their own reasoning repeatedly in order to ‘satisfy’ them? Give me a break.
Aren’t customers important? Wouldn’t trying to sell someone on something they truly didn’t want just alienate them? Doesn’t it effectively prey on their own confusion, lack of knowledge, or fear of confrontation to get them to do what the company wants? That’s ethically awful in my eyes. I will certainly never, ever refer someone to AOL since I’ve heard about this mess. I don’t feel afraid saying that publically - why would I want anyone I know to have to potentially deal with customer support reps who won’t let them go? Why would anyone want that?
It makes me wonder if whoever made this business decision ever ends up on the other side, like with spam (Do spammers hate spam too?) I try to imagine an executive putting in motion a system to retain customers, then having to discontinue his cell phone and having to say, “pretty please with sugar on top” to the CSR.
I have had one exactly one experience with a retention department. I cancelled my mobile phone service with T-Mobile to switch to Cingular for various reasons, mostly because I wanted a phone T-Mobile didn’t have. The exchange went something like this:
Them: “Is there a particular reason you wish to cancel service?”
Me: [Lists reasons]
Them: “Is there anything else we could do to make you wish to stay with T-Mobile?”
Me: “Well, not really. You actualy have really good service, I just want to do something that you don’t offer.”
Them: “Okay. Your account will be terminated, you’ll receive a final bill for X amount on date Y, blah blah blah.”
That’s about as far as I want to see ‘retention’ ever go.
Is the bottom line so important, the minimization of ‘churn’ so vital, that a company is willing to do whatever it takes?
I hope that someone who reads this has a different opinion than I do. I want to see the other side to this, to see what it’s like to be in a position where the decision to forcefully retain customers is one that you or your company feels is necessary. I promise not to create some sort of argument if anyone posts a comment like that, and you can certainly post comments anonymously with our blog system.
How important is appearance? Is it a vital part of any application design? Or just a nice thing to add if you have time for it?
There have been a couple of great posts about this subject today. One of them is at Just Another Mobile Monday and another at Treonauts. Both of these address the subject from the point of view of a user. I thought I’d take a second to discuss it from the developer end.
Creating a great looking app is actually something every developer (well, every developer I know anyhow) wants to do. Actually doing that, though, is something else altogether. There are plenty of roadblocks to making this happen.
Resources
This is an obvious one and it affects a lot of small software houses. Designing a really good looking interface takes time and money. If you don’t have the skill in-house, you need to out source and that requires a serious investment. …
Screen Real Estate
This is something both of the articles I mentioned talked about. Mobile software needs to take full advantage of the limited screen space mobile devices offer. The challenge here is that a good looking interface takes up space. While it can make the use of space more effective in some cases, more often it uses up screen space that cannot then be used to display data/content/etc..
Making it Work
Pretty is one thing. Pretty and functional is another. It is a serious challenge to come up with an interface that not only looks good, but also does its job! (Anyone remember the old IBM commercial where the guys were showing off the animated flaming logo on the website but the site couldn’t handle customer orders?)
“Microsoft Says…” Or “Palm says…” or “HP says…” There have been many times when we’ve wanted to do something a certain way, but in order to achieve that all important approval from the powers above us we had to do it in what we thought was a less effective way. (Ever wonder why so many Windows Mobile apps don’t have an Exit/Quit function?)
Planning for the Future
And last of all, when you put a beautiful interface like that onto a product, you’ve just set in virtual-stone how that product will work. Need to add a button for a new feature? Time to redesign the entire interface! Discover that the field isn’t big enough? Gotta order a whole new skin!
OK, so it’s hard to do and there is lots standing in the way. You probably get that by now. The question of course is how much should developers care?
In my opinion, a lot. A plain text data feed has its place but for those programs we use while we’re on the move, over and over throughout the course of our day, it has to be a product that treats us like human beings….not data processors.
For Ilium Software, this is something we are always looking at and as we move toward the future, it’s something that is becoming increasingly important in the evolving mobile software marketplace. It costs money. It costs time. But hopefully in the long run it will pay off.
