Monday, November 25, 2013

Focus on the key moments of customer process

I was interacting with a person who introduced himself as a "customer experience expert". I see an increasing number of this title. I asked him what he does and what would the deliverable be. He defined it as someone who would design the customer interface along the complete process of customer interaction. For example, on a website, he would help design the page layout, the forms (one page or multi pages), menu items. On an in-store process, it would be the layout and the process of checkout.

There are an increasing number of companies that are now "walking the process in the customer shoes". Their aim is to make every step of the process as customer friendly and easy as possible. And this is exactly where they falter.

A Noble Prize winning psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, once stated:

"Human Beings only remember the peak and the end moments during an experience process."

And this is very true. Lets consider a queue for submission of, say, college admission forms. A typical process would be to obviously queue up early. Then await your turn. The person accepting the forms would check it and you would hope that everything is in order. If okay, then the form is accepted, else you need to get additional documents or information and maybe get back in the queue.

Now, let us evaluate this process. The peak moment is the relief from the anxiety of the comprehensiveness of the application docket. The end moment is getting a receipt of acknowledgement of submission. The college cannot do much about the number of people queueing up. But what it could do is address the peak moment early. So, a person could go down the queue checking the documents of each applicant and giving his advice. Thus the anxiety get eliminated much earlier. Then the wait is only for the queue to move up and submit the document. The end process is getting a receipt of acknowledgement. The college could hand over a bottle of water to the applicant along with the receipt. Well, he was in queue for say over an hour.

But what we find in reality is the college trying to rush up the queue by putting in more desks for acceptance. The security trying to get some sanity in the multiple queues that get formed. And the crowd experimenting with unruly behaviour in hope of jumping spots in the queue.

I, for one, have been through this scenario. The only thing I remembered was happily holding the submission receipt that confirmed my admission to the college. The 2 hour wait was forgotten. The anxiety was forgotten.

Businesses will do good to apply this analogy to their customer facing processes. The first step is to identify the peak moment of the process. Then address the same as early as possible. The next is to make the end moment or exit more pleasant.

For an online store, the peak moment would be creating the shopping basket. I have experienced web sites where once I click the "buy" button, I am taken to the shopping basket for checkout. For additional items, I am lost at this page. I need to go back or press the home page. There are websites that allow adding to the "shopping intention basket" from any page in the background. It stays on the same page and provides an uninterrupted experience of searching for additional buys. Finally, when I am ready, I get to review my basket and add/modify items in it. Also, the check out is often just a one page activity. With concepts like AJAX, this is a reality and I dont understand why websites dont adopt this approach. Often, checkout means atleast 4 pages of activity.

Focussing on the peak and end moments will make life simple and help the business focus on the key aspects of customer experience. The critical question here is "do we know the peak moment of our customer process?".
 
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