The State of Customer Service in 2012 Customer service has evolved from being a necessary cost channel, to one of the most important business differentiators in existence. The explosion of social media has empowered customers and changed their behavior, making them more influential and demanding than ever. In addition, companies like Zappos thrive by making great support a central pillar of their brand identity. It’s an exciting time to be in customer service, so read on to find out where we stand today. What Frustrates Customers Most About Call Centers? Even though most consumers still prefer to use the telephone for support, only 26% agree that call centers provide great customer service. What are their biggest complaints? Having to speak with multiple agents and repeat information(42%)Being kept on hold for long periods of time (17%)Not being understood by IVRs / speech recognition (12%) Source: Zendesk Infographic What Channels do Customers Prefer? Source: Avaya Consumer Preference Report 2011 What Do Customers Think of Service
These Brands Are Doing Amazing Things With Instagram Forms On Mobile Devices: Modern Solutions Why You Should Get Excited About Emotional Branding Globalization, low-cost technologies and saturated markets are making products and services interchangeable and barely distinguishable. As a result, today’s brands must go beyond face value and tap into consumers’ deepest subconscious emotions to win the marketplace. In recent decades, the economic base has shifted from production to consumption, from needs to wants, from objective to subjective. We’re moving away from the functional and technical characteristics of the industrial era, into a time when consumers are making buying decisions based on how they feel about a company and its offer. Read more... A Guide To Validating Product Ideas With Quick And Simple Experiments You probably know by now that you should speak with customers and test your idea before building a product. Mistakes include testing the wrong aspect of your business, asking the wrong questions and neglecting to define a criterion for success. Read more... Read more...
The Future Of Customer Experience – 3 Examples Of Virtual Assistants, Biometrics And Siri-Style Services The future of customer service is less about the people than it is the sound of a person or the virtual image of an individual. Humans are just so inefficient. But they can be improved, too, through interfaces that provide them more automated capabilities. Salefsorce.com is on the edge of this trend. Other examples include Zendesk, which now provides customers with a new Facebook private messaging capability. “In the customer care and collaboration realm, this sort of infrastructure empowers users to designate when and how they want messages delivered to them as part of “unified communications,”said Dan Miller, senior analyst and founder at Opus Research. What these companies are doing is just a warm up. Here are three examples that Miller has been writing about on the Opus blog: Virtual Personal Assistant: Meet Lola. Siri-Like Service: Dragon ID, also by Nuance, is a voice authentication service that wakes up when it hears you talk.
HellBound Bloggers (HBB) - The International Source For Technology & Blogging. Results of Mobile Phone Handedness Survey | Jonathan Stark January 11, 2013 Back in 2010, I posted a mobile phone handedness survey and asked folks to fill it out to get a sense of how people held their phones. In Dec 2012, I added a field or two about screen size and resolution and re-publicized the existence of the survey. Caveat: I wanted to segregate the results of the two surveys but for some unknown reason Google Docs wouldn't let me. Download full summary as PDF (147 KB) Download 2010 results as CSV (24 KB) Download 2012 results as CSV (61 KB) How to build Emotions into Customer Journey Mapping For ten years Beyond Philosophy has been advocating that emotions account for over half of a Customer Experience. We are very pleased that this seems to becoming more accepted. I am often asked how an emotion is evoked. Over millennia, humans have developed a complex set of emotions to help us deal with our environment. So what has this to do with the Customer Experience? So how do you apply this to Customer Experience? We would therefore advocate that when you are undertaking journey mapping that you are only looking at the rational side of the Customer Experience then you are looking at the action, the symptom, not the cause, the emotion.
Inspired UI - Mobile UI Patterns Enhancing the service blueprint – Carrie Chan The Gist Service blueprinting is a tool used by service designers to model service processes from the customer’s perspective. Developed a couple of decades ago by Lynn Shostack, the blueprints are primarily used to showcase the customer actions, the backstage actions & support processes, and the physical evidence—all the tangible evidence that the customer comes into contact with throughout their service engagement. However, the success of services depends largely on customer satisfaction, and how they feel they were treated throughout the service. It only seems natural that if studying and mapping services according to the customer perspective, these aspects—customer satisfaction and emotions—should be included. My work for IBM Research explored exactly this: how could service blueprints be enhanced so that customer emotions and satisfaction would be taken into consideration? Process Next, I started using my own example of a service experience to start doing some mapping.
UI Patterns For Mobile Apps: Search, Sort And Filter Advertisement As I was waiting for a table at a local restaurant the other day, I flipped through a couple of the free classified papers. I was shocked to realize how dependent I’ve grown on three simple features that just aren’t available in the analog world: search, sort and filter. AutoDirect and some of the other freebies are organized by category (like trucks, vans, SUVs) but others, like Greensheet, just list page after page of items for sale. But after taking a look at Craigslist mobile, it became obvious we could all benefit from some best practices around mobile search, sort and filter UI design. Search Patterns Before you ever try to design a search interface for any platform, buy and read these two books: Search Patterns: Design for Discovery by Peter Morville and Jeffery Callender, and Designing Search: UX Strategies for eCommerce Success by Greg Nudelman. Then take a look at these search patterns specific to mobile applications: Explicit Search Auto-Complete Dynamic Search Sort
Carrie Chan Interview « Design for Service Carrie Chan is a recent graduate of the Masters program at the Carnegie Mellon School of Design. Her thesis project focused on the Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I interviewed Carrie during a break in the thesis presentations at CMU on May 12th, 2008. Project Poster [PDF 1.1MB] Project Overview:Direct Care: Enhancing Family Experience Welcome kit – Toy, blanket and cameraIn-room display – Digital informationMobile monitoring device – Webcam updatesParents’ corner – In-room whiteboardAt-home website – Integrated informationFarewell gift – Photos, cards JEFF: Hi Carrie. Let’s talk a little about your project. CARRIE: In the service design class last year, we worked for UPMC and healthcare was something that really interested me. JEFF: Did IRB have some specific objection to allowing you to work with kids? CARRIE: It was the overall thing. Childrens Hospital didn’t used to be a part of UPMC, like they are now. Without her I wouldn’t have been able to do any of this.
Android niceties Customer service is failing consumers [infographic] Last year we wrote a post on why customer service is broken, and some of the stats in this infographic from drumbi tell the same story. For example, 60% of US comsumers don't think companies have tried to improve their customer service, while 80% have abandoned a transaction thanks to poor service. UX Design For Mobile — Designing For Device Orientation: From Portrait To Landscape Advertisement The accelerometer embedded in our smart devices is typically used to align the screen depending on the orientation of the device, i.e. when switching between portrait and landscape modes. This capability provides great opportunities to create better user experiences because it offers an additional layout with a simple turn of a device, and without pressing any buttons. However, designing for device orientation brings various challenges and requires careful thinking. Nearly all mobile and tablet applications would benefit from being designed for device orientation. Using Device Orientation For A Secondary Display YouTube’s mobile application is a great example of device orientation design. However, using orientation to display a secondary interface can be confusing for users. YouTube’s mobile interface in portrait and landscape modes. This interface lacks any visual clues about its orientation, and it has limited controls. Categories Of Orientation Design Fluid Extended Title Bar