The Devil is in the Details: User Experience Design’s Impact on Customer Retention
When it comes to customer experience, the devil is in the details.
A Chief Marketing Officer can create a broad sweeping, exceptional branding program but can lose countless customers based on the smallest, tiniest interaction—even something as simple as an online password reset.
This concept became crystal clear on a personal level past Saturday when doing something as mundane as ordering more coffee. I have a Keurig and I order K-cups from them online. Unfortunately, this time I could not get into my account. I tried the password reset feature, but it wouldn’t work.
Needing to reset my password is not a reason for me to “leave” Keurig. How Keurig handled my password reset is why.
When I could not get in, I submitted a customer service request to Keurig and Googled “K-cups” which immediately lead me to Amazon.com to order my coffee. Then, I forgot about it. Amazon delivered my coffee four days later… and hours after that my customer service request response arrived from Keurig. I got my coffee before I got my help from Keurig!
Unfortunately the response from Keurig was not only very late, but also generic in nature. To make matters worse, the email instructed me to call an 800# for help. Keurig.com does not offer enough value for me to spend my time on the phone. Additionally, I already had a better experience at Amazon.com where I found a greater flavor selection and lower shipping costs. At this point, yes, a simple failure of the password reset lost Keurig a customer.
How to Ensure that Every Detail is Perfect
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Tags: Amazon, bad, customer, experience, Feature Design, Feature PR, Keurig, musaraca, raelin, Sales, service, user
Great story Kevin. One person alone cannot be in charge of and fix customer experience issues. That is incumbent upon everyone in the company. What you experienced Kevin is a company, not just a person, whose culture is also broken. Thank you for sharing that!!
Jim
Glad you like the post, Jim, but this is Raelin’s story. I get my coffee from Starbucks ;-)
I’m Starbucks too (the third place). Great story Raelin!!!
Thank you Jim. You’re so right – poor customer experience cannot be corrected “tactically” – it starts with culture.
Interestingly, I just signed up for a social membership to read the rest of this article. After clicking the confirmation e-mail, I eagerly returned to the site to read the rest! But no luck… although I am logged in to the site, I still can’t access the article. I logged out, shut down IE, and re-opened the site, logged in again, and — no luck! Funny I am having a terrible user experience trying to read an article about terrible user experiences. So much for Ideahaus!
I just saw your comment and checked into your membership settings. Our system is showing you are “unconfirmed” which means we sent you an email to the address you provided with a request to click on a link. This completes your registration process.
Please check your trash or spam filters – sometimes our email will get sent there as it’s the first one from us – and complete the process. If you can’t seem to find it please let me know and I will have support manually confirm you.
Sorry for the inconvenience signing up. I hope the effort we make on addressing your issue helps make up for it. – kp
What some companies don’t realise is that be allowing the employee to respond to the situation on a case-by-case basis it empowers the employee and in an organic way produces a highly legitimate brand advocate.
Good business is often about trust – sure if can backfire but when it comes off it’s great business.