13 Jul 2007 1000H

Customer service as design investment

Just wanted to talk about this article from MSN that says Sprint’s dumping 1000 customers because they complained too much. I can’t say that this is entirely due to consumer fraud, because if it were the case, would Sprint rate so far down the scale in consumer service? (Perhaps Sprint should not have rebranded with yellow and black, which are warning sign colors.)

In essence, each call to a CSR (customer service representative) costs any company money: call enough times and you start costing a company money. But isn’t this really a case of blaming the victim?

Why not look at this as an investment into design?

By this we don’t mean, as so often is the case, “make it pretty” visual communications design, but design of services. Design to anticipate problems. Designing errors and problems out of products. Designing information for comprehension. Testing for rigor. Turning those results back into the design and production process. You know. Continuous improvement.

For instance, for the now notorious XBox 360, which Microsoft is dumping $1bn into fixing manufacturing problems, I have spent about 4-6 hrs in calls over the last three machines. Since the calls were outsourced to India, the Philippines, and finally, the repair facility in McAllen, Texas, it’s true the cost is less, but the real cost is in the damage to the brand and public perception of a business: do your customers feel good about the experience they had with your company? Then, too, what is Microsoft doing to loop that $1bn of design learning back into the XBox 360 so it becomes better?

Did you ever see the design of the “mag-safe” power cord on the newest Apple laptops? It’s now magnetically attached to the computer. If it is accidentally yanked out, the force merely detaches the cord without pulling on the computer. Why? Because enough people called in to AppleCare and sent in computers that were damaged from tripping over the power cord and pulling them out or pulling the entire computer down. Is it infallible? No. But that’s design for you. You fold it into the next version and the next and the next, or you step back and say, okay, are we at a point where we need to rethink the entire thing?

In this day and age, people call CSRs when they can’t find things on a company’s website or the thing they want to do cannot be done on a company’s website. Sometimes, maybe even often times, they just can’t be bothered and will call first. Good experience design should anticipate the touchpoints with the consumer and be integrated with the business so that when the inevitable questions or problems come up, the business is prepared to respond in ways that are wins for themselves and for the consumer.

I’m not saying there aren’t problematic users. At one of my clients, I sit next to the customer care section and talk with them fairly regularly to ascertain where problems might lie. The CSRs don’t see the best side of humanity at all. There are troubled people out there. When they run into a problem on your service, that gives a troubled customer the trigger to unleash all their pent-up frustration. I feel the CSR’s pain pretty much daily when I overhear their calls.

If enough problems come up that fall into a bucket, it’s an opportunity to improve user experience by targeting that section for redesign. It’s a mystery to me how large companies such as these seem to solely think of them as figures on a balance sheet instead of partners in the design of services and products.

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2 responses to "Customer service as design investment"

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15 Jul 2007 1903H

K writes:

The mind boggles. Our service sucks so customers complain so let’s get rid of the customers? Sounds like a plan to me…

10 Dec 2007 1135H

George Kissi writes:

Yeah, the fact that they receive so many customer service calls is evident that their service sucks! I used to have sprint so I should know. I didn’t call to complain I just switched to a different service.
May be if enough people did that they will listen and learn!

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