Closing the Communication Loop

Incorporating Customer Feedback into Product and Service Designs

Call centers, in particular, provide us with a real-time snapshot of our customer’s needs. Incorporating issue logs into our project research allows us to react to those needs on a regular basis, minimizing or eliminating potential pain points before they get out of hand. Online channels can be similarly useful when undertaking a review of a Web site.

Some companies treat complaints as a painful reminder that things aren’t ideal. Sometimes a complaint can generate a flurry of activity aimed at placating an angry customer—the bigger the customer, the bigger the flurry. Smart companies, however, actively review all customer complaints and feed them into their improvement programs to turn frustration into satisfaction and delight.

One of the first steps I take when redesigning a corporate site is to ask for copies of any complaints the company has received about their Web site in the past twelve months. In addition, I like to ask the company what the response was to each complaint.

I recently worked with a manufacturing company that had taken the unusual step of sending all customer complaints on to their product design and engineering teams. The design and engineering folks used these complaints to generate ideas for new products, then involved the customers in product testing ahead of a product’s full-scale release. This approach to product design has resulted in high customer loyalty in the face of stiff competition from large international firms.

Another recent project highlighted the value of online Help systems in answering a range of questions about customer expectations that would otherwise be difficult to understand. A large transportation company was operating a highly-successful ebusiness site, with high transaction volumes, high customer satisfaction ratings, and low customer turnover. Customers were completing upward of 90% of all interactions online, with rapid transition to online services in new markets around the world.

However, a review of the company’s ebusiness strategy highlighted a significant gap in the site’s operation: the company acquired very few new customers through the site. Customers could have signed up through the site, but very few were actually doing it.

Our initial review of the site showed what we thought to be the cause of the low volume of signups online: a convoluted registration process that could take 48 hours to complete due to the need for the company to generate a personalized digital certificate for each new customer. So our first recommendation was to streamline the registration process to make it easier for potential customers to get started.

Then we turned our attention to the site’s online support—live chat with customer support personnel. After reviewing about 2,600 logs from these chat sessions, we concluded that the underlying problem was something else entirely: potential customers were looking for some information the company didn’t want publicly available and would provide only to registered customers. In the absence of that information, potential customers were reluctant to go through the registration process—no matter how quick and easy we made it.

Responding to the needs of this audience segment has resulted in a shift in the company’s organizational priorities, increasing the importance of new customer acquisition through the ebusiness site and facilitating a change in the way the company manages and publishes the information customers need when signing up.

Looking Beyond the Organizational Boundaries

These cycles of design, implementation, and feedback are familiar to most user experience professionals. What we sometimes fail to consider is that users are talking to us constantly, through a wide variety of channels.

But we can take this concept a step further, especially if our business models involve a chain of relationships from product design, manufacturing, distribution, sales, and after-sales support. No matter which link we provide in the chain, our customers are engaging in conversations with other organizations up and down the chain, too.

These other links in our webs of business relationships can also provide us with insights into the needs of our own audiences. At the very least, we might ask these business partners for information about common customer complaints or requests that ultimately arise out of failures on our part. For example, a product retailer may field a large number of questions about a particular feature, reflecting a gap in the information available through our Web site.

Conclusion

Mining online Help and offline service channels for recurring complaints, requests, and enquiries can inform the design of our online service channels, making them more valuable to the site’s audience and introducing new efficiencies into an organization through the migration of customer enquiries from expensive offline support centers to relatively inexpensive online channels. Closing this communication loop enriches our understanding of a site’s audience and provides a low-cost user research tool that contributes continuously to the design of online services.