Comments on: Consequences of not having a good content strategy

By: Grant Hogarth

Grant Hogarth — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 17:42:28 +0000

Having set up and run a couple of TS groups, I agree that usability is almost always viewed as a “nice to have” rather than a “have to have” item *unless* Senior Management is championing it. Then it gets foregrounded. As I see it, there are two priomary reasons, one cultural and one systemic. The cultural reason is that programmers/engineers/developers generally see usability as a low-status activity as it is seldom a technical challenge; as long as the widget works, who cares? The systemic reason is that accounting/sales (and to a certain extent marketing) usually have no metrics for losses due to deficient usability (or wins from good usability). Although some inferences can be drawn (as Mr. Tarter notes above) from TS call logs, these seem to seldom get out of the TS group (which has its own reason to protect its turf/budget), save as the increasing number of FAQ pages. There is seldom an examination of what the calls are indicating about the product, other than that “the customers seem to be getting dumber/lazier every year”.

So … as it can’t be directly measured, it’s probably not important. Beyond that, usability is not seen as “sexy” — there are few internal political bennies from improving usability. This same thinking also (in my opinion) has driven the dumbing-down and evisceration of user manuals.

By: Jeffrey Tarter

Jeffrey Tarter — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 21:50:14 +0000

If you analyze the call records for a typical support organization, you’ll probably find that roughly half of the total volume of incidents are caused by easily-fixed issues like the one you just encountered. Yet there’s rarely any process in place for identifying and eliminating these issues. “Serious” bugs get fast-tracked
to the engineering department, but I have yet to find a company
that assigns much priority to resolving usability issues, missing
drivers, bad FAQ answers, and the like.

Worse, the ROI for almost all of these fixes is so easy to
calculate. I’m sure a company like AT&T gets literally tens of
thousands of calls per year (at a cost of perhaps $25 each) for
just one the one issue you encountered. Cost to fix: negligible.
Multiply by all the equivalent issues that aren’t getting fixed…
well, it’s a lot of zeroes.

By: Linda Ireland

Linda Ireland — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:48:57 +0000

Your story is also a great reminder that executing an effective customer experience takes proactive decisions from product design to content to operations to service to brand strategy. It’s too easy – but misleading – to think customer experience is just about the direct interaction.

Companies like AT&T often complain of being commoditized by their customers. Imagine if all of the detailed content, etc decisions that created your missing menu item were focused on proving a promise that was uniquely something AT&T could solve better than anyone else. Now that would be some customer experience.

You might be interested in this AT&T customer experience post too: http://www.ceforprofit.com/2009/10/fessing-up-to-a-broken-promise/ Thanks for your useful post. LCI