Winston{yw}

I was at the bookstore recently browsing along the Marketing section, and I observed a recurring theme in most of the marketing references: Customer Service.

What is “Customer Service”? According to Wikipedia:

.. is a series of activities designed to enhance the level of customer satisfaction – that is, the feeling that a product or service has met the customer expectation.

Customer service is also a business strategy, and providing excellent customer service is key to growing a business. Since, such a strategy definitely helps to retain your existing customers and to grow your customers base through word of mouth.

That’s definitely one of the oldest trick in any marketing reference, but do all businesses care about customer service?

Given that I am in the web industry, do all websites care about customer service?

Customer Service = User Experience

In the web context, I simply equate customer service to user experience, since both serve the same purpose of ensuring that a customer / user is happy with a product or service.

Therefore, for websites to succeed, providing excellent user experience should be of the utmost priority, as this can lead to more returning visitors, and more new visitors (by word of mouth). Websites win when they have a high volume of visitors, as monetization is always easy when there’s traffic.

As simple as the logic sounds.. However, many websites fail in user experience design, and users suffer as a result. Luckily, there are always alternatives (or clones!) to any website, and so suffering users can be unforgiving and simply go to an alternative with a better user experience design.

A simple conclusion from this is that websites should always focus most of their resources on creating a wonderful user experience in order to retain and grow the traffic.

I Don’t Really Care

I hear you say: “Ultimately, our website survives on advertising revenue. I don’t care about user experience, and I’ll just focus on getting more advertisers.”

Hmm.. Who will want to advertise with you when all of your users have left for another website with a better user experience? Probably there isn’t such “another” website now, but that means you are always vulnerable to that possibility, right?

Google: The Case Study

Take Google as an example. Their main source of revenue is from advertising too, but do they only focus their resources in getting more advertisers? The answer is: No. Google is constantly evolving their search and results interface, in order to give their users a great user experience. Imagine that Google has a small search box with multiple options, and ads and sponsored links are everywhere (above the fold, eye-leveled, etc) in their search results making it difficult to discern real content from ads. Will you like it? Will you search for alternatives that offer you a much better user experience?

The point is, Google knows what users want. Google neither assumes nor imagines what users want. Commonly known as actual usage vs. perceived usage. A user’s objective when visiting Google is simply to ask, learn, compare and leave, and that’s what Google is enabling all users to do, quickly. They display the search results clearly and prominently, and there are minimal distractions in terms of ads and options that would obstruct a user’s objective.

In terms of each search result content, Google doesn’t try to show you everything they know too. They display just enough crucial information that can either pique your interest, or help you make comparisons and draw conclusions. Essentially, displaying more information doesn’t always equate to easier evaluation of results. Haven’t you heard of information-overload? And when more information is actually more useless information, that’s even worse!

Features, that’s part of user experience too. Don’t get carried away with including all the features into the UI, or with adding the next-new-shiny-feature which was seen on another website. Again, understand who your users are and what your users want. Are they mostly power users or first-timers? Do they use all the existing features? Do they need the next new feature? Always measure and evaluate the effectiveness of every feature. Kill the ones that only serves as distraction to your users, or even worse, as distractions to your development team as they need to spend time to maintain something that only contributes to 1% traffic. Google have done so, by publicly announcing that they will stop all developments on Google NoteBook, and in this context, although it’s more like killing off a product rather than a feature, the idea permeates.

Even though I have been using Google exclusively in my examples, that’s not to say Google is perfect. They are not, but Google has demonstrated successfully that devoting resources to user experience is worth the effort. Even till today, they are constantly measuring and improving their UI to give all of us a greater user experience.

User Experience Is Important

Anyway, so you have accepted the premise that user experience is important. What should you do now?

Eat your own dog food. Imagine that you are a first-timer to your website and go through all the entry points to your website. Does your website helps you, as a first-timer, to answer, learn, compare and draw conclusions to your questions from these entry points?

That’s not enough.

Ask your employees the same question. They are your best assets even before you should consider seeking advice from a consultant.

Ask your users the same question. They are the ones who are using your website! Gather as much feedback as possible from your users, through feedback boxes easily accessible from every page of your website, and reply to your users in a timely manner, as that’s user support and is a part of user experience too.

The purpose of all these? To understand your users, and so to be able to create a wonderful user experience that users want and users like.

That’s basic customer service, you know.