Snip/Shot by Toddy Mladenov

Are Your Customers Really Being Difficult?

In today’s blog post on her blog Valeria Maltoni lists the “Top 10 Reasons Why Your Customers are Being Difficult” and on my comment that I prefer to look at the “customers” more like “client” she replied something that provoked my post. This is what Valeria wrote:

“@Toddy - however, interestingly, many businesses are set up to have transactions, keep moving people through the funnel or pipeline. This might be fodder for another post as things are changing rapidly especially in types of businesses that are evolving.”

This brought up the question how may businesses are set up to have transactions or keep moving people through the pipeline? And is this the right business model? The only one I can think of is the grocery business and even that one can lose customers if it just uses the conveyor model.

Let me give you an example. Imagine you have few choices of grocery stores to go – let’s say Whole Foods, Safeway, QFC and Trader Joe’s. How do you choose which one to go to? Here are few criteria you most probably use:

• Closest location
• Assortment
• Quality (Organic food:))
• Price
• Brand preference

Let’s say that you are a snob and the brand preference is the most important for you. Than the financial crisis comes and you cannot pay anymore the triple price for organic food in Whole Foods and you settle on the low price (for the same organic product) in Trader Joe’s. Once the crisis passes then you go back to Whole Foods and everybody is happy – you saved money during crisis, Whole Foods got you back and Trader Joe’s made few transactions with you. This is typical for pipeline businesses – they don’t care who comes in and who goes out as long as they can sell you something. As Valeria wrote, many businesses are set up that way – they consider their success by the number of transactions, and this is the most important for them.

But what if?… What if for example Whole Foods finds a way to keep you as their customer during tough time. What if they provide you with some incentive so you receive part of your money back – whether it is a cashback, or discount coupons, or rewards card, or link to Upromise account. There are many options they can choose from. The key is they know what are you looking for.

I know that it is easier said than done. You may say: “How are they supposed to capture the feedback? Stick surveys to the apples?” Not really! But if you give me an apple I will be glad to fill in five-minute-survey for you:) Knowing me, and you, and the guy staying next to you in line they will know what they can do to keep us in their lines and not move to their competitors’. We call it “feedback loop” but the loop is not closed until the business reacts on the feedback.

I think the point here is not whether your customers have been difficult; the point is whether you know your customers and whether you adapt your business according to your customers’ needs. Here are the two questions you need to answer:

• Is your company transaction oriented or customer oriented?
• Which one will position you better in the long term?

How late is “late” to keep a customer loyal?

Today I received a phone call from Comcast representative responsible for our street (you know, those guys who knock on your door and offer you stuff:)). He told me that he received a list of people who are scheduled for disconnect and was interested to know whether I will reconsider my decision if he gives me discount on the rates and “more movies”. Too late!

I was Comcast customer for more than 3 years – started with basic TV and Internet and upgraded about year and a half ago to premium channels and DVR. Of course with the upgrade also my bill grew:) The only times I heard from Comcast for those 3 years where when I had problems with the service, and the only “offers” I got from them were from this type: “If you don’t want to pay for support on issues, you can pay few bucks more per month, else it will cost you $99 to get technician to your home.” At the time I thought: “OK, if I pay $2/month I will be covered for the next 4 years and I can call the technician every day:)”, and signed up. Don’t understand me wrong! It is not that I was unhappy with the service but at some point of time I got the feeling that I am not getting enough value for the money I am paying.

Few of my neighbors switched to Verison FiOS and sent mail to the neighborhood how happy they are. Few weeks ago Verison guy stopped at my house (you know, one of those guys who knock… you get it:)) and threw few numbers for the same service as Comcast + 1 more HD box + watching recordings in every room + more premium channels for the half of the price I was paying for the first 6 months and $20 less for the remaining of the year. In few words – he convinced me. Of course you should not forget the installation fee that will offset the $20 for the second half of the year but my saving was 1/4 of what I was currently paying and I got more goodies like premium channels and additional HD box.

When I called Comcast to cancel the existing service the lady was very friendly (I had problem with their callback service that really frustrated me but this on the side), and just asked me whether I will reconsider if she offers me same options for lower price. She wasn’t pushy which I liked, but she tried to keep me as customer as much as possible. Normally I am hard on my decisions and don’t look back and wonder “what if”, but after the call from Comcast today I asked myself: “What if I received a call after New Year, and Comcast offered me to upgrade my service and pay less money?” Would I consider Verison then? I don’t think so. Normally I don’t want to go through the troubles of having some cable guy at home, drilling my walls just to save few hundreds.

But the country is in financial crisis. My goal is to keep my standard of living but pay less money for it. Goal for businesses should be to keep their customers so they have uninterrupted stream of revenue. It may not be obvious but the solution is simple – if companies (or their employees) think proactively what their customers want, and act proactively to offer it, we, the customers will be happy and stay loyal. Isn’t it that what companies need – to keep existing customers and acquire new ones? In case of Camcast is really simple. If they gave me a call few weeks ago and offered me what they offered me today I wasn’t going to switch to Verison.

Here is what I would do if I was the guy who called me this morning:

1. Every January I would call every one of my customers to wish him or her New Year and chat about their experience in the past year. Why January? For two reasons:
   • After the shopping spree made during the holiday season, people start rethinking their finances, and
   • Tax season starts in January, and people start thinking about their finances even more
2. I will have handy all the promotions my company offers, and will go over those with my clients (yes, I would think of those people as clients and not just customers). We will work together to find a way to increase the value of the deal; for both sides. This doesn’t mean I have to give them money back. Can be rate discount, or free service for 3 or 6 months, or they may want to subscribe for more but just have no time to call our customer service. And it is not that companies don’t offer discounts – Comcast always has promotions for new subscribers, why don’t they extend those to the existing ones?
3. Two-three months after that I will call them to ask whether they are happy with the service and whether I can help with something else.

Next year I will do the same and the year after and the year after, as long as I work for this company. If the year is bad (think recession like now) then I will be even stricter. I will not wait to hear that my customer goes to the competition before I remember that he or she is MY customer.

And one more thing: if Verison forgets about me by next year, I will switch back to Comcast… or somebody else, who knows :) We, the customers are the one who drive the economy, and should demand that companies pay attention what we want.

What is “typical” for web response time?

Very often I participate in discussions where web response times are discussed and I hear all kind of strange statements (called “crap”:)). While browsing the Web for the last 13 and so years, starting with slow (9.6Kbps) modem connection over analog telephone line and ending with quite satisfying (6Mbps) broadband one I can certainly say that I’ve build my own opinion. When I hear statement “typical page load time is 6 sec” I get really pissed off. I want to scream: “Are you nuts?!!!! 6 sec is ridicules time! Who is going to wait 6 seconds for your crappy page to load?”

I remember few years ago at SAP when we developed one of the first WebDynpro application and our prototype page loaded in… (hold on)… 20 mins. And I remember the time before SAP when colleagues of mine developed online PDF merger that presented the success page with link to the merged PDF after… (hold on again)… 20 mins (I don’t know what is so “typical” about the number 20 but they really responded after approximately 20 mins of time). Twenty minutes is totally unacceptable response time for any application (not only Web) and this examples triggered research I did years ago (SAP one is from 2003 and the PDF one from 2001) to understand what are the acceptable response times in Web space. After searching Google for the PDF scenario and reading the UX guidelines for the WebDynpro one, the number 3 stuck in my mind and I can’t get it out now.

3 seconds is the response time you should not exceed on the Web! That’s it!

Searching in Google today here is one of the top results you will receive The Psychology of Web Performance. I really like the following sentence from the post:

“Keep your page load times below tolerable attention thresholds, and users will experience less frustration (Ceaparu et al. 2004), lower blood pressure (Scheirer et al. 2002), deeper flow states (Novak, Hoffman, and Yung 2000), higher conversion rates (Akamai 2007), and lower bailout rates (Nielsen 2000).”

10 years ago when the modems ruled the world the goal was to create small pages that can be served fast via modem connection. Today we create huge pages that contains tons of images, videos, style sheets, JavaScripts, Flash and who knows what else. Some of these can exceed few hundred kilobytes. However users don’t care how big the pages are; they don’t care how many images there are on the page; they don’t care how many servers are in your web farm. Most of the users don’t understand the mechanics behind the page, and why should they? The only thing they care about is how fast your page is loaded via their 6Mbps broadband connection.

Here is my table for tolerable response times on the Web. It is based on the post above as well as on Response Times: The Three Important Limits.

Response Time	Analysis
<0.1 sec	I don’t think you can achieve this one on the Web (if you can, the the user’s browser will not be able to render it:)) but it is goal that you may want to pursue.
<1 sec	Your page load time is great. You can continue to improve your performance but only if you don’t have better things to do.
<3 sec	Your page load time is OK, however you need to keep an eye on it. You are on the border for broadband users. However if this is the load time over narrowband you should not be worrying too much.
<4 sec	This is the limit for broadband users. I certainly think you have a problem if your users need 4 secs to load your pages and I will suggest you spend some time improving your performance.
<6 sec	You are on the border for narrowband users. Performance should be one of the things you should be thinking already.
>6 sec	You are amateur:) Your web site may still be visited but you will lose visitors (approx. half of them including myself). If you don’t care keep going.

Few more things that you need to think about when you exceed the 1 sec threshold. The first one is that you need to provide feedback showing the user you are still working on the request. Modern browsers do provide progress bar although it is not useful all the times because it spins like the hourglass in Windows without giving you any indication when the result will appear. If you go above the 6 seconds threshold you must think of ways to change the workflow or even the architecture (we managed to solve the 20 mins issues above only through major changes in the architecture).

Although performance is not the only key it is one of the keys for your web site’s success. If you target the thresholds in your performance testing you will surely be screwed because you don’t account for the unknowns and you will surely exceed the threshold. What happens next – the user moves on.

How do you respond to your customers' requests?

When I started blogging several weeks ago I remember reading a post from David Meerman Scott talking about the blogging mistakes and the worst about pages. I should have thought more before I selected Blogger as my blogging platform. David, you were right! Free service comes with its "qualities". Right after setting up my blog I submitted two post - my About post and my first post about Staples... Voila! Google decided that I am spammer and blocked my blog. You know - I got the standard message telling me that I need to submit my blog for review by a real person and everything is fine they will unblock it. I did that and verified that I am person.

My goal is not tell you that Blogger sucks but how companies interact with their customers. My request to Google went into black hole. Or at least this was my impression. My expectation was to receive e-mail (even automatic would help) confirming that my request is received and somebody will look at the issue in the next X hours... days... months. Nothing like that happened. I received no e-mail and had no idea whether my request was received, handled, denied or something else. On the next day I went back and submitted the request again... and again on the third day. Nothing. I just moved on. Blogger was not in my list of choices anymore. The feeling that my fate will be decided by the bits of a machine made me feel miserable. Will I be the lucky one who will be randomly chosen to live or will the Terminator erase any sign of my existence?

My next example is Sphinn. As part of the registration I was supposed to receive activation e-mail. For some reason I did not receive it on the e-mail I used for registration. I tried contacting Sphinn team through their Contact Us form using my registration e-mail as well as my Gmail. So far no response. However I really want to use the service and I registered with my Gmail account - surprisingly it worked.

My third example is from the offline world. I am looking for a new car and decided to check Audi Q7 from the local dealer Barrier. Everything was fine - the guy showed me the car, I did a test drive with him, we checked the inventories and so on. I had to leave and asked him to send me what is available as well as what APR they will give me. Two days after that he left me a voice mail asking me whether I need something more to make my decision. Dude, I told you what I need. Where is it? I called him back and left him also voice mail with the exactly same information. I got even a call from some girl in Barrier to ask me what was my experience and she promised to talk with the salesman and get back to me soon. I don't know what they understand with "soon" but it is almost 3 days and I still don't have what I need. And I like the car, and I want to buy it... and in this market where car manufacturer are facing bankruptcy I would expect that dealers will run after me to sell me the stupid car. Ooooh, I am just flying in the sky and thinking that "the customer is god". It seems nobody cares about the customer.

Time to stop complaining - here are my takeaways:

• If you own a web site make sure you have good feedback channel for your visitors. If somebody sends you a message try to respond within acceptable amount of time - for me this is 24h, but it is your own choice; you may want to respond to such inquiries once a week or once a month but are you sure this person will wait so long to hear back from you. The worst thing you can do is to never reply.
• Provide link to your feedback channel where you think people will be confused in your workflows. Perfect example for that are error pages (look at my post Staples found an easy way to lose money - AdSense) as well as product and check-out pages. Don't assume that people will go through your web site smoothly and without asking themselves "what the heck does this mean".
• Don't hide your contact information. Lot of corporations burry their contact information so deep that users get tired of clicking and just give up. It is all for "support cost savings", "deflection" and other stupid reasons. I know it costs money to reply to every message but people get frustrated when they can't find a way to send you a message. And it is even bigger nightmare with the phone numbers. For example I needed to click 2 times to find phone number for Google, while Shpinn's one I couldn't find at all.
• If you provide phone number (and better you do) make sure there is a option "Speak with customer support representative". In the spirit of "deflection" every company tries to hide the option for "customer representative". Normally this is the last option in the menu if at all mentioned; companies try to change the default 0 to 9 or 8 or #*723#2**# (try to remember that one:)). What happens after such tricks is that people learn and next time thy call they directly go and choose the "customer representative" option just because they are frustrated.
• Provide alternative feedback channels or ways to contact your company. Email and phone are the standard ones but you can add chat, forum, social web site where you participate or something else. Be creative.
• I want to iterate - respond promptly. Sending back automatic message when a user sends you request is mandatory. This is the first indication that your system works. In the message include your expected time to respond (or Service Level Agreement - SLA) and stick to it. In all three cases above my expectations were not met (apparently Google enabled my blog but month and a half after I submitted my request and not 20 days as they promised; I still don't know how long Barrier needs to get the list but 1 week I think is too long).
• When you respond to your customers try to be personal. Don't use case numbers, "madam" or "sir" (I really like the e-mails from Mr. Mumbaga from Zair who offers me $2M and addresses his mails with "Dear Sir"). Use your customer's name - this will make him or her feel much better. I really enjoyed my stay in the hotel in Tokyo not because the hotel was nice but because people there made the effort to say my last name (now try that:)).
• When you respond to customers give them your name. You can give them any other information that will be helpful for them to find you (unless you think you provided really crappy service:)). You will be surprised but somebody may want to call your manager to say "thank you" and not to complain about you.

Those are just few of the advises I can give you if you are committed to provide great customer support (online or offline). I will be honest and tell you that I broke some of them in certain occasions and I still feel bad about that - everybody makes mistakes but you should try to improve. Just ask yourself the question - what is more important for you? Spending 1h replying to your customer or losing your customer?

Do your user scenarios fail with catastrophic errors?

While in Japan 2 weeks ago I needed a photo organizing tool for my photos. What I needed was a way to edit the caption and description as well as to add some tags to the photos. I went through a couple of choices described below.

Google Picasa 3

I used Google Picasa for quite a long time and it was my first choice. It is OK for browsing pictures but what I figured out was hard to do was to edit their properties. Let me be clear - it is not hard but it is confusing, and I wasn't sure what the end-effect will be. Finding the actual menu (or button) for the properties was small challenge. As a long time Windows user my first choice was right click menu -> Properties. This brought a pop-up window showing me all kind of "useful" information about the picture, like file name, file size, camera information, aperture and bunch of other things - all of it... READ-ONLY. Good! Now what? From the quick screening of the available buttons on the screen Geo-Tag was the only one that sounded similar to what I wanted to do but I already knew this is not what I was looking for. From my experience with computers I learned that I should let myself be surprised and clicked on the button. Of course it asked me to install Google Earth. No, I am sorry but this is not what I need. Next choice was the menus but the only choice I had there was Picture -> Properties, which brought up the same properties pop-up as above. Now I was stuck and went to my second choice - Windows Explorer, described below.

Few days later I came back to Picasa because I was curious to learn how I can achieve my goals with it and after some more searching I found the following button: with a tooltip "Tag photo(s) with words for searching". Great! I found it!... Or at least I thought so. It seems that this button allowed me to tag the pictures but only that.  Changing the caption/title (I am not sure whether those are the same?!?!) and adding description is done from other places on the UI or there is no chance to do it at all.

By some reason Picasa saves the Caption in what Vista considers Comments field - Duh!

One more thing I would like to have from a photo organizing tool is to give me a way to easily filter photos that are not tagged, have no titles and most likely use some cryptic filenames. Picasa provides some filtering functionality but I couldn't find a way to get only pictures from specific year for example.

Here is my scenarios checklist for Picasa:

• Bulk edit - Poor - I can do bulk edit but only the tags
• Properties edit - Poor - Not concentrated in one place but spread everywhere in the UI
• Filtering - Poor - Although I may want to filter by face (I am still trying to figure out why this one is the most important) I would like to have richer filtering like date, camera etc.
• Search - Great - I really admire Google for their search (and may continue to repeat it over and over again); if the picture is tagged you can find it within a second
• Upload to Web - Poor - works only with Picasa Web (I know, Google wants to push their apps, but... I like Flickr)
• Easy to achieve your task - Not at all - I had to think a lot

Windows Explorer

My next choice was Windows Explorer. With all the marketing messages you will think it is easy to do lot of things as far as "photos" are concerned. And it is! You can bulk edit, add titles, tags and subject and few other things. What a surprise was when for the same file type I received different properties in the Details Pane. Here the pictures:

They are both JPEGs - why do I get just subset of properties for some pictures? After some thinking (and heavy headache) I figured out that files with longer names have fewer properties shown in the Details Pane. I guess it depends on the screen resolution but on my laptop on 1024x768 the last column of properties was disappearing. More interesting is that together with the last column disappears also the last property from the column before the last. This made me think that there is some idea behind the behavior but... there isn't. Putting this to the side I think Windows Explorer does pretty good job for editing picture properties.

Here the summary:

• Bulk edit - Very Good - I can select bunch of file and edit every one of their properties at once
• Properties edit - OK - Right-click -> Properties works well but the bug (or feature) described above makes the editing in the Details Pane annoying
• Filtering - Non existent - I cannot filter by criteria
• Search - Poor - It is slow... really slow
• Upload to Web/Share - Non existent - I don't expect Windows Explorer to be able to upload to Flickr but...
• Easy to achieve your task - Quite Easy - for Windows user the learning curve is quite steep

Windows Live Photo Gallery

If you are wondering where the title of this post comes just continue reading. I already had Windows Live Writer installed, but I didn't want to install the whole suite because I don't care about the toolbar and Windows Live Hotmail - I don't see any useful functionality in the toolbar and I stopped using Hotmail short after Sabeer Bhatia sold it to Microsoft. Writer I find pretty useful though after I started using it about month and a half ago. Deciding to add the next application to the suite I went to Windows Live Photo Gallery Web page and clicked on Get it Free. Free is cool :) when the installation started I got the following error:

This is CATASTROPHIC ERROR! I am really sorry but the colleagues from Live really screwed it up! How can they imagine that somebody will always install their whole suite? And the error message? It is ridiculous! "Catastrophic failure"? C'mon, can't you guys think of something better? I can imagine my mother seeing this error message - she will run to the next available photo organizing application and just forget about Live Photo Gallery. Few retries didn't solve the problem. Searching in Google and Live Search returns mostly results about failure installing Live Messenger. After some browsing through different message boards and some hard thinking I decided to un-install Writer and install both applications together. Voila! It worked. To be honest I would expect to see this topic as the first one in the troubleshooting notes for Windows Live Suite.

Once again I would like to emphasize - how do people from Windows Live thought that installing applications from the Live Suite one by one is not so common scenario? Why didn't they test that more thoroughly?

After I passed the troubles having Photo Gallery installed I could say this was the software I was looking for. It was missing features like slide show but I still had hover preview and full preview and this was enough for me.

Here is my summary:

• Bulk edit - Very Good - Right Click -> Properties allows you to edit almost every property
• Properties edit - OK - Right-click -> Properties works perfect but you can edit only few things in the Info Pane 
• Filtering - Good - I can filter by tags and date taken, which is very helpful
• Search - OK - It is comparable to Google search but I was wondering why it differs from Windows Explorer one. One more thing is that it doesn't search among the Tags set by Windows Explorer
• Upload to Web/Share - Good - I can upload to Windows Live Spaces and... Flickr. Good one, guys!
• Easy to achieve your task - Quite Easy - I was able to get around with most of the functionality pretty quickly

Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition

Adobe PhotoShop is my favorite tool for editing images and I started using it almost 15 years ago. Having this in mind I expected Adobe Photoshop Album Started Edition to be quite sophisticated tool for organizing photos.

After some clicking around I found it pretty easy to tag photos and filer by tags or date taken. Although the controls looked quite strange (sliding control with years as scale) finding out how to do certain things is not so hard. However not all of the image properties could be edited and also different properties are edited from different parts of the UI, which I find not very convenient. Search was completely missing and it seems Adobe put their effort in creating other "useful" features like Messagebox for example, which offers you to "Save $20US on Adobe Photoshop Elements 7". Sure, this is what I was looking for from a photo organizing software!

In general:

• Bulk Edit - Poor - You can edit only the tags and captions in bulk
• Properties Edit - Poor - You cannot edit other properties than tags and caption
• Filtering - Good - Filtering by tags and date taken is quite easy if you get familiar with the controls
• Search - Non existent - sorry, but I cannot live without this one
• Upload to Web/Share - Very Good - Send via e-mail, send to mobile phone and share online (including Flickr:)) are all available
• Easy to achieve your task - Easy - Once again, I needed some time to understand how the UI controls work but after that I was able to do most of the things quite easy

Coming back to my scenario here is what were my prerequisites and goals:

• Between Oct. 14th and Oct. 18th 2008 I took about 300 pictures
• I used two different digital cameras - point and shoot and SLR
• Both cameras save the pictures with different file names and both use something cryptic
• I wanted to download the files from both cameras to my PC and add captions, author, tags and some description to the pictures
• After that I wanted to upload my pictures to Flickr and expected to have the information preserved
• Optional I wanted to be able to organize my pictures the way Flickr organizes them (in sets and collections)

From all the tools I chose Windows Live because it mostly matches my goals. I may not be the typical user (or I may be) but I would expect most of the tools to cover this simple scenario above.

Few other things that I noticed while investigating the tools:

• Not covering the main scenario people want to go through frustrates them
• Adding unfamiliar UI elements on top of complex workflow adds even more to the frustration
• Separating common functionality and spreading it throughout the UI adds confusion (and more frustration)
• Not supporting "standard" ways for accessing some functionality increases the confusion (and hence the frustration)

There are trends and new inventions but product goals should be to make live easier for the user (and not harder). Now I will go and organize my photos.

Disclaimers:

1. While playing with the tools I may have missed some of their features but my goal was not to do side-by-side comparison. This Google Picasa may be able to upload to Flickr and Windows Live Photo Gallery may have slide show and Adobe Photo Album may be able to edit all the properties. I was just not able to find this functionality if it exists.
2. I need to remind you that I am Microsoft employee and some people may think that I am recommending Windows Live Photo Gallery because I am biased. If this was the case I wouldn't have named my post with the failure I saw while installing it :) I will try to do my best to submit this information to my colleagues and I really hope they will improve the experience in the next release. And working closely with Windows Live content team I will suggest troubleshooting article for the failure I saw.

UPDATE: As G pointed out below there is a slide show button in Windows Live Photo Gallery. He (or she) mentions that the button is on the Menu Bar but I couldn't find one there. However one of the controls at the bottom triggers the slide show:

Do you know your international customers?

Last week I spend in Tokyo visiting Microsoft's subsidiary. It was my first trip to Japan and thus my first opportunity to learn about their local culture. I worked a lot with people from different countries but mostly over the phone. Although you can learn something about the person on the other side of the line meeting them face to face is worth hundred phone calls.

I personally think every country has its own culture and companies should respect that. For me being global doesn't mean "create one product and deploy it globally" as most of the companies do. That your product sells well in your own country and may be couple of more doesn't mean it will sell well everywhere. As confirmation of this statement of mine I learned why iPhone sales in Japan are not doing so well (don't think that Windows Mobile or Blackberry are ruling the market - no, that is totally not the case). Here some statistics first:

• Japan population is ~127M
• Average number of phones per subscriber in Japan is 1.2
• Number of mobile phones subscribers passed 100M mark at the beginning of 2007

 

All this can tell you that mobile phone market there is HUGE.

 

Apple released iPhone worldwide (including Japan) on July 11th 2008. For the first 2 months the estimated sales for Japanese market are 200,000 units (source mocoNews.net). This is just a small fraction of the 10M iPhone 3G sales (source Yahoo!News) and even smaller if you take into account the Japanese market of 100M (forgot to mention that this is also the biggest 3G market).

 

As usually the reason people in Japan are not buying iPhones are the features. If Apple tried to learn a bit about the local culture they would have understand that Japanese use their phones for almost everything - they call, send text messages, send reminders to themselves, take pictures, and… play. However browsing Internet and GPS are not among their highest preferences. Few of the important features iPhone misses and as it seems are crucial for the local market are decorated email (read "dancing Panda" and "meowing Hello Kitty") - this is hit among youth people in Japan; keyboard (for texting) and ability to recognize captured barcodes - it is not easy to text if you have the on-screen keyboard and even harder to play. Additional to that iPhone is not localized in Japanese and this is one more obstacle for their customers (it may be hard to understand but very few people in Japan speak English).

 

I have to admit that Steve Jobs made great deal requiring SoftBank to make minimum order (500K units). The question now is whether SoftBank will make second one.

 

From other side Windows Mobile and Blackberry are also among the losers in Japan. They both target information workers and although they include keyboards and localization (at least some of the models) they miss the rest that can make them "cool" in this market.

 

Once again I would like to emphasize - learn about your local customer before you enter the market, this can make or break your sales. Apple is a great example how such successful companies can fail locally.

Oooh Google, please don't confuse me!

For long time I thought Google is doing great job with their simple and usable interface. Until I decided to submit my blog to their search engine. Here is what I experienced while trying to do that.

I typed http://www.google.com/addurl/ and landed on the page. Everything was fine except that there was a big white rectangle and empty input box right above the Add URL button. It was the optional field intended to distinguish between humans and machines doing the submission. For maybe 30 secs my browser (IE) was keeping the connection open and trying to download something with no success. At the end the following appeared in the rectangle:

If you can read this, you don't have images enabled. No problem; just leave the text-box below empty.

The first question that popped in my head was: "How come I don't have images enabled? I see Google logo on the top." Initially I was confused. Where can I enable those images? Deciding that this is browser problem I opened Firefox. The same result!... And the same with Chrome. OK! So, it is not that I don't have "images enabled", but it is because your server crashed and couldn't generate them. But why are you trying to convince me that the problem is on my side? Now I was frustrated. It seems the developer who implemented this never anticipated problems anywhere else except on the user side (as normally is:)).

Leaving the text-box below empty I typed the URL and the comments in the input boxes and clicked on Add URL. Surprise! I landed on the same page. What happened? No confirmation page? Waw! That is sooo... no Google.

Now, this is too much - here you guys, broke one very important UI design principle:

• Always provide feedback to the user for the result of her actions

Not mentioning anywhere on the page that my submission was successful is something that really confused me. Am I done now or not?

Nobody sais you need to develop fancy UI using Flash, AJAX or Silverlight; it can be simple but it needs to response to users' actions.

Comcast really cares

Three weeks ago I was at Web2.0Expo in NYC, where I attended mostly the marketing sessions. Few of the sessions were about customer support, all quite interesting, but one story just struck into my mind. It was the Comcast story. The presenter, Lane Becker from GetSatisfaction.com, started with the question: “How many of you use Comcast?” Almost everybody lifted their hand. “And how many of you hate Comcast?”, he continued. Almost everybody who used Comcast lifted their hand. Of course, I lifted my hand twice.

Some history. Several months before that I did some cabling in my house (I bought 30 years old house and still remodeling it:)) and few weeks after I noticed, that on weekend evenings I couldn’t get the on-demand service to work. On the next morning everything is fine but in the evening the issue appears again. It seems the problem was with sending the signal back to Comcast to request movie information or the guide. Internet was working properly and for me there was no reason on-demand service not to work. I called Comcast several times; they’ve reset the box few times but nothing. One more issue was that HD programs were also not received properly in the evening – losing sound and bad picture. It was clearly bandwidth issue. Comcast sent a technician who replaced couple of splitters and confirmed that everything is OK (of course, while he was in the house everything was working fine). Nothing changed again - in the evening I encountered the same problem. On top of that the hard drive in the box broke and I lost all my recordings. With all my frustration I called Comcast one last time and told them I will cancel the service if the problem is not solved. They replaced the box and send another technician who replaced my attenuator from Leviton. All good but in the evening… guess what… no service again. However after restarting the box I was able to watch movies without anymore problems. The next issue I encountered was with the new DVR – very often when I switch the resolution from HD to normal or reverse I lose signal to the TV. The only thing that helps is to restart the DVR (I mean the hard way - unplug its power cable) but then I lose the guide and need to wait 30-40 mins to get it back.

After I learned from Lane about @comcastcares I decided to give it a try. This is a team of few people (5 as far as I know) in Comcast who provide alternative way to support their customers - through Twitter. The guy named Frank was very responsive. He suggested changing bunch of settings and looked at my account. No improvement so far but this is not my point. Just knowing that there is person on the other side that listens to me, understands my problems and tries to help me, makes me feel better - it gives me confidence that my issue will be resolved. Few days ago I even got a phone call from Customer Service representative to ask me whether I solved my problem. Comcast is great example how companies that think about their customers can change the perception and turn things around. The experience I had with Frank is worth thousand times more for Comcast than any IVR investment - it is cheap, it is according to my schedule and more important, it made me feel valued as customer.

Of course it is not the technology they use to provide support. I think the important piece here is the person on the other side. Doesn't matter whether it is a phone, chat, e-mail or snail mail - treat your customers individually, listen to them and learn from them. This way the advantage will come to your side.

Staples found an easy way to lose money - AdSense

My first post was supposed to be about my positive experience with Comcast, and I even have the post drafted, but I couldn’t let this one go just like that. Yesterday I was looking for TV stand for our living room and did search on Google for the terms “tv stands”. I browsed here and there in the organic results and decided to try the links from the paid ads on the right. Everything was fine until I clicked on one from Staples. It linked to… an error page. Initially I though this is just an intermittent issue with their server and I went back, searched again and clicked on the link to Staples… again (this time it was ranked differently, and title and description were different but the URL was still pointing to staples). Guess what? Generic error… again! Slowly I started getting frustrated. It is not only sending me to an error page but the error message is really stupid:

“Generic Error
A system error has occurred. Please continue to staples.com.”

Hello! I am looking for TV stands. I “continued” to staples.com. The home page had 3 different banners – one rotating for saving on bunch of stuff, another to save $5 on multipurpose paper and third one for 50% on some other paper, long list of categories, list of best sellers, and banner for helping fight breast cancer (I appreciate that one – at least they contribute to good cause). However I wasn’t able to see TV stands anywhere. I typed “tv stands” in the search box and list of about 30 items was presented to me. I didn’t like any of those and went away.

Tonight though, while browsing, I remembered Staples and decided to check whether they fixed the issue. I searched again for the same terms, and again Staples was one of the paid ads on the right. Aaaand… ta-daaa. Generic Error! “This is ridiculous”, I thought. Staples is a publicly traded company with $14B market capitalization, $20B revenue last quarter and gross profit over $5B. They should be able to afford decent web site. It isn’t something I developer alone in my spare time.

I really got curious and started analyzing the case. Here are some questions floating in my head while clicking around to get more information about Staples:

• Why the heck Staples pays for ads that target TV stands? For me Staples is office supplies company and not furniture company.
• How much they pay for those keywords? According to Google AdWords Keyword Tool “tv stands” is very highly competitive phrase for advertisers. This tells me that bidding can go up to few dollars for this phrase.
• What is the search volume for this keyword? According to the same tool “tv stands” search volume is 550K for September while “tv stand” (without the “s”) is 673K for the same month. Staples link appeared only for “tv stands” (with the “s”) phrase, which means they bid only for this phrase. Also their ad is not present on every search, which means they don’t pay the highest bid.
• Is TV stands one of their main items they sell? I went back to Staples’ web site and tried to find TV stands in the list of categories. It is under Furniture – Carts, Printer & TV Stands. Duh! I surely want to put my TV on a cart and roll it around. However there was no banner or something on the home page telling me that they want to promote TV stands and the lack of good landing page (the one with Generic Error I don’t consider landing) made me think that they just bid for all keywords matching one of their categories or items. How smart this is?… Hmmm, not smart for me.

For my calculations I decided to use $1 per click and assuming 5% click-through rate here is what I got 550K * 5% = 27.5K * $1 = $27.5K for September. Not so much for $14B company – they can afford it.

However if you are smart here is how you can approach the problem and save yourself $27K.

• Make sure your landing page is always up. If you are running campaign for specific item, prepare good landing page showing the user the benefits to buy this item from your web site – lower price, broad selection, fast delivery… you chose. ERROR PAGE AS LANDING PAGE IS UNACCEPTABLE.
• Bid only for keywords that describe items you specialize in. I know you sell also mops but you are flooring store, not cleaning supplies store. If you sell something as byproduct don’t bid for keywords describing it – it is just waste of money; you cannot provide such a good selection as a store specializing in cleaning supplies.
• If you are running campaign for specific item make sure the landing page for the campaign is linked from the home page (and also other key pages). If you really want to get rid of those mops make sure people browsing your web site know that you sell mops.

And some more tips for the error pages:

• Use descriptive error pages. Generic Error is a lame message to show to the user. You should always know what the error is. If your developer is so lazy and doesn’t want to catch every exception at least provide something more engaging like: “Ooops, we screw it up. Please excuse our laziness, but we are really not sure what happened”. At least it will make people laugh.
• Give more options to navigate out of the error page. Don’t send the users to the home page only - give them options to search, browse categories, call a phone number etc.
• Always provide link to report the problem. Not everybody will report an error but somebody will. If Staples provided this option I would have clicked on it. Always treat those reports with highest priority – you pay money for people to land on this page and if somebody reports error on it you should fix it immediately.

Hope you get the idea. Just one more thing – I clicked 5 times on the Staples’ ad for TV stands and bought nothing. I wonder how many other people did the same.