Customer Crossroads

Decision Fatigue: it wasn't your imagination

You know what happens when you have to make too many decisions -- it's exhausting.

Science has now proven that this is true, even when the decisions are very important. John Tierney reported on research conducted by Jonathan Levav of Stanford and Shai Danziger of Ben-Gurion University in a recent New York Times article. Their research showed that the possibility of getting paroled depended more on what time of day your case was heard than other facts.

If judges, who are used to long periods of concentration, can be affected by this phenomenon, imagine how challenging an extended shopping trip is?

Ego Depletion

Another scientist, Roy F. Baumeister, developed the idea of ego depletion, which appears to be at least part of the explanation for what is going on. The process of making decisions involves self-regulating behavior. And our capacity for this is not unlimited -- to the contrary, it deteriorates and needs regular re-charging.

Some of the specific scenarios discussed are well-known overload situations, like choosing items for a wedding registry, or selecting fabric from a choice of thousands for a custom-made suit.

At last, the explanation for the hideous choices suggested for gifts at wedding registries -- the couple in question were exhausted, or they would never have selected that $150 gravy boat.

More difficult for the poor - because they have to make more tradeoffs

One very interesting finding reported on is that shopping is even more tiring for those of limited means, because they have so many more trade-offs to make. The drain of 'willpower' that results from this constant need to make trade-off decisions leaves less energy available for activities that might alleviate poverty, such as studying or starting a micro-business.

Other research confirms that people will spend more money in some shopping situations if faced with expensive decisions after their energy stores are depleted.

Implications for designing a better customer experience

We run an ethical blog here, so we're not going to help you extract more dollars from exhausted decision-makers. Plus, we know that people will often choose NOT to decide, and just walk away, if they are faced with too much choice.

A better way to look at this situation is to understand that people will benefit from taking a break when faced with a lot of decisions and trade-offs. Food also helps to restore our capabilities.

You could build a small break area for your clients where they can have a coffee and cookies before they finish choosing automobile options or mortgage options, for example.

Another strategy to reduce the distress would be to simply reduce the number of choices by presenting customers with a limited set that is most suited to their situation.

For yourself, when you feel fatigue setting in, go for a coffee and a muffin, it will help you regain your ability to make sensible choices. And you won't wind up with a bunch of costly crap that you wonder why you bought.

Resources:

Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue, by John Tierney, The New York Times, August 17, 2011

Delivery: Your customer service is only as good as the last contact

We recently bought some new appliances. Good sales experience. Then we had to deal with delivery.

The delivery window? All day.  (Have these folks not heard of cell phones?)

First problem: Two rather rude individuals arrive, and say they know nothing about a stove, but have a refrigerator.

Then they try to move the fridge in without taking the front door off.

After they leave, we have several bangs in the wall and moulding to touch up. Then we discover a few things that have been knocked off the back of the fridge, little bolts, and plastic thingy, that sort of thing. No idea where they belong.

Very poor response from customer service when we phone to try to locate the missing stove.

Stove finally gets delivered. Again, they want a full day delivery window. Older and wiser, we take the front door off ourselves (as well as putting it back on ourselves.)

Stove arrives, and these delivery guys are at least civilized.

However...

The somewhat better delivery experience does not quite wipe out the unhappy memory.

Our sales guy has apologized, and makes vague noises about "doing something" for us. But nothing happens.

So. We now join legions of others who hate the whole appliance purchasing thing.

Depsite a pretty great sales experience, I'm not sure if we would choose this retailer again.

My take

Profit pressures have pushed things like delivery service down to the cheapest possible option for most companies. The net result is that you get what you pay for -- people who are ill-equipped to represent your brand, and who may actually damage the total customer experience. And they are often the last people to see the customer.

Is anyone doing this better? What have your recent experiences been like?

Sugru - cool stuff to modify your own stuff

I stumbled across this interesting new product call Sugru.

It's sort of like plasticine with a purpose -- it hardens at room temperature into a soft, pliable, silicone rubber. It adheres to lots of materials, and you can form it by hand. (Don't you just want some already??)

Quite apart from the cool factor here, and the general usefulness of such a product, I think it could be awesomely good for design purposes.

Here's how we could use Sugru to support our own innovations:

• Watch the web to see what people are doing to modify products, especially YOUR product
• What new features are people making to standard products, such as bicycle pedals?
• How about giving people some Sugru in a customer innovation lab or workshop, and asking them to modify your product?
• Send people home with some Sugru, and visit their house a week later to see what they've done with it

The photo at top shows a great example of what I'm talking about, from one of my favorite innovative web sites, Instructables.

It's a camera that has been modified so it's easy to hold by a child, and won't easily break when dropped. The fun colors are just a bonus.

Here's the lovely video from the creator that tells you all about it.

 

 

Computer tinkering is dead: The new digital divide

In the previous post I confirmed that personal computing isn't really dead, it's just a popular headline.  However, something else is changing. Computing is so pervasive, that a new digital divide is becoming more apparent. It's the divide between users and experts, which is getting bigger all the time.

Computer tinkering may be dying.

Let me put forth a couple of observations, and see if I can pull them together.

Nugget #1: Parents of anyone under 18 often assert that their children know a great deal about computers and how to "program" them. They say this because their kids showed them how to use basic features on a device.

Nugget #2: In research projects with teens and young adults, I have often found that teens are not actually better at "programming", they are just more comfortable. They are equally, if not more, frustrated by web sites that are badly organized, for example.

Nugget #3: Devices with poor user interfaces continue to baffle most. My favorite example is the portable projector, (now that nobody seems to have VCRs anymore.) Before a meeting where there will be slides projected, there is always a tense moment when we learn a) how to turn on the projector, and b) whether it will project what is on the laptop.

In the last century, when I got my first PC, you had to develop some facility with DOS to use the device. I had an early version of Windows (3.0 I think), which I hoped would remove DOS from my life, but didn't.

It's very complicated, and I'm not the only one who thinks so. Software executive Ray Ozzie said in Dawn of a New Day, that the personal computing environment has become hugely complicated for all of us:

as the PC client and PC-based server have grown from their simple roots over the past 25 years, the PC-centric / server-centric model has accreted simply immense complexity.  This is a direct by-product of the PC’s success: how broad and diverse the PC’s ecosystem has become; how complex it’s become to manage the acquisition & lifecycle of our hardware, software, and data artifacts.  It’s undeniable that some form of this complexity is readily apparent to most all our customers:  your neighbors; any small business owner; the ‘tech’ head of household; enterprise IT.

Pinnacle of complexity reached

Things have reached something of a pinnacle of complexity, to the point where even backing up your data (a modern moral imperative) has become a major challenge, far from the point and click simplicity promised.  And that's just one example. I recently tried to move my iTunes from one desktop to another, and was astonished at the difficulty of this task. We could come up with hundreds more examples easily.

We can no longer hope to resolve any significant computing issue ourselves unless we happen to have advanced training.

Young people are no different. They do not know how to "program" their devices, they are just more comfortable using them. They are willing to poke at things until they work, rather like kicking a vending machine. Their parents may believe this is "programming" because the parents are unable to figure out how to use basic functions of devices, such as texting, especially when models change.

Cloud computing to the rescue

There was time you could tinker with your car -- that is long gone, because cars are far too complex, and are stuffed with computers.But driving, actually using the car, is getting easier. And the cars are getting smarter, so they look after us better -- they help us manage braking in slippery conditions, for example.

I think the time where us normal folk could do much tinkering with our computers is fast disappearing, and this is likely to be a great relief to many. Cloud computing options have shifted the complexity to someone else, which is as it should be.

The net result is this, however -- actual ability to "program" things -- to tinker and such -- is going to become even more of a geeky specialty than it is now.

Implications not clear - what's your take?

I'm not sure what the implications of this are, actually. But would love to hear your take.

Personal computing isn't dead, it's just gone pervasive

I've been seeing a flurry of articles on the future of personal computing -- they bubble up on a regular basis -- that say something like "The PC is dead." You have to admit it's a great headline.

The latest to catch my attention was this one: Engineer of original IBM PC declares end of PC era, in TechRepublic. Mark Dean, the engineer in question, is quoted thus:

PCs are being replaced at the center of computing not by another type of device — though there’s plenty of excitement about smartphones and tablets — but by new ideas about the role that computing can play in progress.

Author Jason Hiner's take is that:

computing is no longer about a box but is being absorbed into everything and is now about creating experiences that connect people and enable them to do work wherever

Fox News already reported the death of the PC in early 2011 from the Consumer Electronics show. Others had reported it earlier, and still others (such as Steve Ballmer) argued that it's not really dead.

So is it really dead or what?

I'm not sure anyone cares. The real debate seems to be about the form of a computer, which is probably not something that consumers think about much.

What we are really experiencing is such a pervasive presence of computing ability that we don't even think about it as computing ability. Cars that lock their doors on their own, and keep their lights on while you go in the house, for example. Information accessible from so many devices, that when we see a screen of some sort, we kind of assume it is connected to the web.When it isn't, invariably you see someone pushing the screen looking for a reaction that isn't forthcoming.

Form factors (fancy term for the way stuff looks and works, what components it has to use) are changing, definitely. I don't think things like keyboards are disappearing though. I don't think big screens are disappearing. What is disappearing are the limitations of devices -- we're going to be able to go all mix and match.

What is likely changing is that the divide between users and engineers is becoming more entrenched, and more permanent. More on that in the next post.

Resources:

Early computing in pictures - Royal Pingdom, kind of an interesting technology site

The PC is dead - Fox News - January 2011

The PC (as we know it) is Dead - MSNBC - June 2011

Dawn of a New Day, Ray Ozzie's blog - Chief Software Engineer at Microsoft from 2008 to 2010 -- this is a more nuanced article. Long, but interesting. October 2010

 

 

Nice article from Christopher Elliot on Bnet @YourService on phone service horrors from most businesses.

http://www.bnet.com/blog/customer-management/5-things-you-should-never-say-on-the-phone/952?promo=713&tag=nl.e713