It is not only important to give customers what they want, but also important to make it easy for them to find an answer that they are looking for. Some Web design systems appear to be constructed to confuse, with over-elaborate technology. Call centres operate rela- tively limited hours in most organizations, and often have a repu- tation – deserved or otherwise – for being easy to use, but time consuming. Some customers find themselves driven to using Internet customer service because they cannot speak to a service support operator by telephone; others search the Web site’s service areas while holding on the telephone to speak to a customer
Figure 6.2 Handbag Web site
service agent. It should be a damning indictment of the company’s telephone service if customers have kept waiting on hold so long that they try another route to solve their problem.
Service pages should be exceptionally easy to navigate. There is no gain in adding to the customers’ frustration when they have a question by making it even harder to find the information they need. This is an area of the Web site that should be designed to be extremely ‘slippery’, allowing customers to access the pages they are looking for quickly, to absorb the information quickly, and then to leave quickly. A need for customer service may stimulate a visit to a Web site that customers do not normally use, so it is also important that they should be able to navigate the site easily on their first visit.
The idea of making online service easy to use should drive deci- sions about how to provide customer support. There will always be customers who miss very obvious signposts to the answers to their questions, but the company must take responsibility for making it as straightforward as possible to find answers. A typical, and simple test, is to take the phrases that customers actually used to describe their problems and to enter these into the search facility on the company’s Web site. It is surprising how often even the company’s own product description terms do not appear as results in a search of the company’s own Web site.
Using software to help visitors as much as possible
It may seem trivial that transposed letters in a search (see Figure 6.3) can prevent the expected results from being found. But what happens when the visitor doesn’t know the correct name of the product he or she is looking for? Or doesn’t know the specialist vocabulary relating to the subject of interest? Digital channels are vast libraries of information, and visitors cannot be expected to learn the classification terms before they start searching for information. Rectifying fuzzy logic in a search tool is a quick easy improvement. Try the same mis-keyed search in Amazon or Google – both are able to find Adobe’s excellent product.
For customers to trust an online service, they must be able to view their questions and check on their progress. If they cannot do that themselves, they will quite reasonably send another e-mail asking what happened to their previous query. This will either be absorbed into ‘the system’ as a new and separate inquiry, or acquire (distract) resources to tie up their pursuit question with the original. It is far better if customers can view their own ‘account’
Figure 6.3 A simple mis-keying and Adobe’s best-known product disappears
inquiries. If that account can be unified with the solutions to any questions that they may have received from telephone operators, so much the better. We often discover ourselves in a situation where, 6 or 12 months after finding a solution to a problem, the same problem recurs. All we know is that we spoke to somebody on the telephone who was able to help us, so we call again. We speak to an entirely different call centre operator who finds some means of identifying us, retrieves our ‘account’ and repeats the solution back to us. The information already existed, on a database, and could just as easily have been made available for us to retrieve without recourse to the telephone. Somehow, it seems that when a customers can solve their own problems faster and more easily than by any other method, they are likely to feel ‘better’ about the company and its products. The alternative is that they have the mild embarrassment of having to explain to a complete stranger that they have made the same mistake again, cannot remember the solution, and are quite likely to be making the same phone call again in 6 or 12 months’ time.