1 post tagged “lowes”
What exactly is customer experience? Is it usability of your product? Is it experience dealing with your technical support? This probably has been the traditional way of defining customer experience. In modern times, customer experience encompasses all touch points your customer has with you, your company or your product. It includes the experience the customer has opening your product's packaging, it has to do with installing your product (if it is software), the first impressions of the customer when using your product, your tech support, your documentation, your media coverage, whatever.
Every product or service has a customer experience, you have no control over the existence of the experience. All you have control over is what that experience is. You are in full control of making such an experience a highly pleasant one or an awful one. However, there are more companies that I can think that provide such awful experiences than ones that provide enriching, memorable experiences.
Lately, I have experienced both the good and the ugly. Well, want to take a guess about where I had the good (if not the best) experience? If you guessed Apple, you got it right. Right from opening the packaging of my iMac to setting it up to using it to this day has been nothing but an enriching experience.
Now, let us talk about the two ugly ones I experienced during the holidays. Unfortunately both had to do with software.
I was at the Park Street Station in downtown Boston the other day with my friends who were visiting. I had to buy 5 tickets for the T. The ticket window was closed so I had to buy my tickets from the vending machine. I was happy that it took credit card. But that was the only good part of my experience. The interface left me stumped. I did not see anything called "Buy tickets". It had "Buy Passes" and some other option which I had no clue about. So I clicked on Passes. It asked me if I wanted a Stored Value Card or Monthly or Weekly Passes. Now I was really lost and given that I had already swiped my credit card, I was terrified to select anything. The woman employee who was there to help realized that I was in trouble and stepped in. She clicked a bunch of buttons and I got the pass I needed (I could tell that she has done this over and over). Do you think the makers of this machine's user interface spent any time thinking of us humans who have to use their creation? I guess not. I guess they only cared about the economical buyers that run the T who wrote the checks.
In the evening the same day, I ended up at Lowes in the self checkout lanes (they are getting more and more prevalent these days unfortunately). I thought I will score on this one. Dah, wrong. After about three futile attempts, I had to ask for help again because the machine complained that the item was removed from the bagging area. I noticed that many other customers were having the same problem.
I would love to hear from you about your thoughts on why companies miss the boat in creating good customer experiences. Is it the rush to get to the market? Is it that no one believes in usability of their products? I wonder if these folks use their own products? I will admit that we have not done everything right at the company where I work, but our product is a whole lot better compared to some of these experiences I have had. I welcome your thoughts on creating good customer experiences.
