Bailie.com

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

All the reasons not to deal with Wells Fargo Financial

A few months ago, I made a furniture purchase, and was offered one of those “no interest for six months” deals, and took it. I put the sales receipts aside, as the furniture came with a warranty, and waited for a statement from the lender, which turned out to be Wells Fargo Financial to come. Now, six months later, I came across the paperwork and gasped, realizing I’d never made a payment yet. So I called them, and after an incredibly frustrating user experience, I finally got my account paid, and closed for good.

I thought a lot about my experience, because a usability test, or information architecture during the design phase of their site, would not have prevented this user experience from going awry. Instead, it would have required full service design to make this a satisfactory user experience. Here, then are all the ways that Wells Fargo Financial dropped the ball.

(1) Using wrong information. Despite having provided my home address and phone number, they somehow got a partial work address and sent a statement and credit card to that address. This is to an address that has something like 80 companies, and they didn’t use a suite number.

(2) Not making contact. After having my info returned, they didn’t try to make contact, letting months go by without making contact, even after I had phoned them back in January or February.

(3) Confusing me with TMI. When I made contact, they couldn’t find me in the system, then after passing me from rep to rep, each which gave me yet another customer number, at some point telling me that one of the numbers was for internal only. The agents were friendly enough, though, and after we established that my bank wasn’t set up to pay my account, I was redirected to a retail outlet to make my payment.

(4) Lack of customer focus. When I arrived at the storefront office to make a debit card payment, the door was locked because it was their lunch hour. Someone came to the door and suggested I go have lunch and return in 45 minutes. I declined, as I had other appointments awaiting me. However, given that lunch time is probably the most likely time someone can pop out from their jobs (and as a financial institution, I imagine they prefer to deal with people who have jobs) to make a payment. It’s not like they are a 1-person or 2-person shop; I counted six people in the office - you’d think they could split lunch into two shifts so someone is always around to take a payment?

(5) Defending their lack of customer focus. When I called the head office to register my incredulity about the office closure, whoever answered the phone (who insisted that he’d spoken with me earlier, though from his accent, I knew full well it wasn’t him, but that’s a whole other story) became quite insistent that the practice of closing in the middle of the day for an hour was a perfectly logical practice because of the office size and employee entitlement to a lunch hour. He was explaining it to me in a rather condescending manner, as if I didn’t get his justification. Arghhhh. If he’d just said he would pass my frustration along to the customer complaints department, that would have been enough to save the customer transaction, but he couldn’t seem to get what my problem was.

My customer service scale works like this:
A- Great service, real gems, interested in developing relationships; I’m sticking to them like glue. Example: Apex Communications
B- OK, but if a company that impressed me came along, I’d consider switching, if transferring my account
wasn’t too painful. Example: Telus for phone, internet, mobile phone
C- If a more reputable, competent option came along, I’d switch in a heartbeat, even if the process was painful. Example: ICBC (there is no alternative - it’s compulsory to deal with them)
D - Prefer deal with them because the pain of getting involved isn’t worth it; there are better alternatives out there. Wells Fargo Financial
F- I’d prefer to do without than deal with it, I find it so painful. Example: SharePoint

You can see where this company falls on my customer service scale - I’m not impressed at all. Entrepreneurs, here’s a opportunity to introduce them to the concept of service design.

Wednesday, August 06, 2008

Why Hasbro doesn’t deserve customer loyalty

The whole kerfuffle around Hasbro forcing Facebook to shut down Scrabulous is making me examine all my toy purchases, and I’m committed to avoiding Hasbro products for the long run. (And for those of you who know that I buy gifts on a regular basis for some 7 grandkids, a niece and a new nephew, that adds up to some serious purchasing). Let me explain.

Hasbro has owned the Scrabble brand for years, and over the years, their consecutive product managers have shown that they don’t get how seriously Scrabble players take their game. They’ve successively trivialized and ignored the dictionaries, tried to “cutisie” it up (can you imagine changing chess pieces to pop culture figurines, or changing the rules for how checkmate works? this is the magnitude of change they proposed, which you can read about in Work Freak by Stefan Fatsis). So it didn’t surprise me that they underestimated the popularity of the players wanting to play online.

A lot of little sites offer Scrabble online, but what seems to be threatening to Hasbro is a couple of entrepreneurial brothers who created Scrabulous. Because it was on FaceBook, the application was heavily used, and allowed FaceBook members to play with their friends around the world.

It’s not like Scrabulous built an application after Hasbro provided an already excellent service to their user base; instead, the brothers behind Scrabulous saw a gap and filled it. (Ironically, it’s the principal behind American entrepreneurship so their actions are quite ironic.) So what went wrong? Hasbro dragged their feet, and didn’t service their customers for the longest time. And then when they say that the gap had been filled by some entrepreneurs, then they stepped in and shut them down. Even then, Hasbro still doesn’t get it. You can’t play with friends outside of your country (with the exception of Canada and the US, I believe - see the comments in the link for more on this). And if you live in North America, you can’t access Scrabulous at all - you’re stuck with the inferior Hasbro version. It feels like being in a relationship with a rather neglectful partner; they annoy you so much that you just want them to move out and inflict their arrogance on some other unsuspecting victim.

If Hasbro is concerned about their intellectual property, they should have worked with the Scrabulous folks to do something collaboratively that would benefit both of the companies. Instead, they’re alienated lots of users who associate their tactics with the heavy-handedness of Homeland Security. I wonder if they’ll try to justify their actions with the trite old excuse (see the BC Ferries post from last week) - why not, nothing else seems to make sense from a user point of view. They’re doing what’s best for their internal needs, at the expense of their potential, now alienated, customers. And in an environment where everything is on the Web and available at a click of a mouse, it’s easy to make friend - and enemies - in mass quantities, very fast.

On a personal note, I’ve gained more time, as I no longer have a reason to go to FaceBook every day. My 350 average will probably decline, but, well, those are the breaks. This is one customer who, on principle, can’t bring myself to engage with Hasbro.

Sunday, July 27, 2008

Conflicted over the iPhone

If you’re a Canadian business person who travels at all and has a Smart phone, you probably have a monthly mobile phone bill that equals half a mortgage payment. Not surprising, as Canada has the highest wireless phone and data rates in the Western world. I found http://www.thomaspurves.com/2007/04/09/canada-worse-than-3rd-world-countries-when-it-comes-to-mobile-data-access/” title="someone who had done the math">someone who had done the math, though he got the name of the Canadian agency that regulates cellular telephone companies. It’s the Canadian Wireless Telecommunication Association. (On their site, the association claims to advocate for the industry to the CRTC, which means that Canadians aren’t likely going to get any sweet deals on wireless soon, if they have their way.)

Which brings me to my own sweet deal. I’ve been doing the annual spring conference tour, either presenting or podcasting, and as soon as I crossed the border, I turned off my phone. (This despite having a Talk North America plan, which still dings me $800/month phone bills some months. Yes, Telus, but but but ... whatever. I care about my user experience, not your business justifications.) My friend, Scott, from Indianapolis, immediately handed me his extra US mobile phone for my use during my 10-day trip. Bliss. Better yet, the phone turned out to be an iPhone. As Scott tossed me the phone, he said I wouldn’t need any instructions other than the basics. Well, I needed a few, but very few, and they were for bonus functions, such as pinching or expanding thumb and forefinger on the screen to contract or enlarge the size of a Web page.

I loved being able to use Twitter from anywhere, to connect to whatever wireless network was handy, to having virtually no extra clicks to move between applications or to confirm or close applications, no typing lag time, and best of all - unlimited voice and data plan! No mobile-use guilt while in the US. What a difference it makes when doing business.

Now I’m regretting getting the HTC P4000.  My initial excitement at getting a new Smart phone quickly dissipated when I couldn’t get the phone to sync with my computer (it seemed to be an incompatibility between Vista and Windows Mobility Centre but a system restore of my computer had the function working - for a day before it stopped working again). For a while, I carried my old phone around, just for quick access to phone numbers, but without voice activation, making calls was just too painful, and though I had my calendar appointments on the old phone, I never heard the reminders because the phone was buried in my bag. So I basically use the HTC P4000 as a “dumb” phone for incoming calls, at least until someone, somewhere can get it working. Maybe by then, Telus will get the iPhone (I’m stuck with almost a 3-year contract with them still), and I’ll be able to toss this piece of hardward that requires multiple extra clicks for every function I want to use.

Even then, I’m not hopeful that I can get it set up at all. When I called the HTC call center, the rep I had kept asking me to click on menu commands that didn’t exist in Windows Mobility Centre, and eventually he confessed that they didn’t have any Vista machines so he could follow along. (Well, they did have one in their crash lab, but he didn’t want to run back and forth to the lab.) The first Telus rep was hopeless, and the second one couldn’t help me, either, though sounded more together. I’ve been wanting to mention to them that I have to reboot the phone a lot, but fear that I’ll get an inane answer. The only folks who seemed to really be helpful was the good folks at Apex - but no matter what they did, they couldn’t crack the code, either.

So iPhone holders, keep your delightful electronic gadgets away from me. I may just drool into the keys, and then where would you be?

Saturday, June 30, 2007

The Starbucks Experience, by Joseph Michelli

The first time I encountered Starbucks was when I moved to Vancouver in 1992, and Starbucks was a cool, little company in the Pacific Northwest. I didn’t know the words “user experience” then, but even in 1992, realized then that it was a company that created an in-crowd feeling by using its own vocabulary and in-store culture. I was curious, then, to read The Starbucks Experience to see what the deal was. I’d lost a few feel-good points over Starbucks, but not because it had grown to be a large chain - I never got that “now that you’re successful, we have you” vibe. My beef was that Starbucks sued a little coffee shop inside a kids’ clothing store, in some remote B.C. town, that called itself Starducks or something similar. This from a company that has a name from a character in Battlestar Galactica? In the vein of imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, I didn’t shutting down a little puddleduck shop was a very good corporate move. Aside from that, however, I was impressed with what the book outlined as their five corporate principles for creating great user experiences. I wish all executives with retail operations would read this book and implement the principles throughout their organization.

Monday, December 04, 2006

Some companies just don’t get it when it comes to marketing

I got an interesting - useless, mind you, but an interesting spin on useless - offer in my inbox today. My mobile phone service provider wants to give me a shopping bag with their logo splashed on it. Well, if I drive to one of their stores, they’ll give me one, for FREE!! (I wish I knew how to make this blink and twirl like a bad marquee). I gather that by “free,” they will give me one even if I don’t buy one of the phones they’re pushing as holiday gifts to put into the bag so that I can walk around advertising their phones.

I understand that it’s supposed to be a clever promotional gimmick, and I can see one of their used-to-be-a-union-job marketers spinning in their swivel chair and sucking on a pen, wondering how to get the message out there, and thinking, most people just take the bag home and toss it, but if we can get people to re-use the bags for a month or so, that’s a lot of free advertising during a slow season. So how do we make them think of the bag as a commodity and not just a tossable receptacle? I know, people love free stuff. We’ll give them a bag, and stress that it’s free. I know you have that same picture in your mind.

Is it any wonder this doesn’t work? If the mental model (in other words, the general way we’ve come to expect that things work in the world) is that you go into a store and the retailer gives you a bag, for free, to put your stuff in, then what’s the commercial value of a shopping bag? Why would I want to come all the way to your store to pick up what’s basically advertising material? To walk around advertising your product for you, for free? Heck, you should pay me to advertise your stuff for you, and don’t be expecting me to have to come pick it up from you, either.

This is a typical example of poor user experience, and says to me one of two things, either that the company is grasping as straws to have some sort of promotional campaign with no budget (as in “oh oh, the company is in financial trouble") or that this is a company that just doesn’t get it (as in “out of touch with reality"). I don’t know which it is, and I don’t have the energy to really investigate, but it does make me wonder.