What to do when the User cannot proceed
Here is some advice for the customer service challenged.
Travel and self service should be made for each other.
In most cases they are. However there is a significant disconnect of what to do when a user reaches a problem/issue that he cannot resolve himself.
On average – and I am not quite a typical user – I hit the “Contact Us” button on a website at least once a day only to be very frustrated.
Well, I used to think that maybe I was special but apparently not so.
I am also not the only person who gets frustrated according to iPerceptions.
I have used the iPerceptions study material before and found it to be a mine of information.
The latest study on Q2 data was released last month. There are some very interesting nuggets that we can digest from this.
One of these relate to the issue of educating the user – subject matter I have written on before – the successful ecommerce site must understand that it cannot just ignore the education part of the process.
An educated user is a better user.
I can recall from the early days of Expedia one characteristic we found was that early users who successfully managed a transaction were both good evangelists for the product and were highly likely to do it again in the near future.
What we didn’t address at the time because there was so much low hanging fruit was the people who started down the purchase path and then abandoned the process.
So for me the other part is more interesting, namely the corollary to a successful transaction.
In a business that has a horrendous Look to Book ration, we need to understand the reasons for abandonment.
Sadly the data in the iPerceptions report doesn’t address what I believe is a specific issue for our industry – ie that we (site owners) force users into the purchase path in order to verify the offer information.
This is a good way – sometimes the only way for the consumer to validate the exact request.
Of course, search doesn’t work like this and hence the disconnect in the way we handle our customers.
We need to do a much better job here to give the user a sense of confidence that what he is seeing is real and actually there so he doesn’t tie up resources in the purchase part for which he HAS NO INTENTION OF COMPLETING.
Further we need to do something for the user that when he starts down the purchase path – for real or just for information – that we can provide to him an easy way to get the information that he needs when he most needs it.
Let me give you some examples:
If I get stuck, I need a place to go. The chaps at smart agent software companies using either robotic software like NextIT’s Smart Agent know this to be true and Alaska and now Continental Airlines have successfully deployed it.
It reduces the amount of unsuccessful transactions, but that is the problem – only part.
A full service transaction needs a tool like live chat (from something like LiveAgent) or a telephone number to respond more personally and completely to the site customers’ needs for information.
So my site shameful issues are three fold:
Sites don’t make the availability of support information easy to get to. It’s almost NEVER contextual
Access to a reasonable FAQ or interface for Q&A that provides a way for me to help myself is sorely lacking in all but a few sites
If this fails there is nothing that irks a user if he cannot get to a person to solve his problem.
What ecommerce companies seem to miss is that an educated user is your best evangelist. The disdained customer is the one who is going to be vocal to his personal and online social network.
Is there a remedy for this?
An emphatic yes and don’t be afraid to deploy a solution mix.
Whether you are big or small – you can do this and build value to your brand.
The ability to interleave customer service with social media demands these type of capabilities. So my advice to you is as follows:
Stop creating useless help pages and make the help resource useful and reachable. Also lessen the complexity and reduce the sheer volume of content to support help. Also MAKE SURE you have a good search engine to find the help. Lord help me if this isn’t one of the worst areas of online for Travel or any other category
Deploy a self help tool that is like Ask Jen on the Alaska site. All it does is act as an interface to the data you can already see explicitly in other part of the site
Don’t be afraid to deploy a chat or call center solution. And its OK – it doesn’t have to be 24 hours. It can be at set times. Just set the expectation simply and clearly.
And finally PLEASE don’t piss me off with the following:
Don’t make me enter my data again or repeat it to you – I don’t care why you do it – it demonstrates how much you just don’t care for me or my needs.
Always follow through on what you can do – or be clear that you cannot. It is OK to just say no. I will hate you if you lie to me or make me jump through hoops only to find that there was nothing you could have done in the first place…
So please do this and make users like me happy. I will reward you with my business.
Here is some advice for the customer service challenged.
Travel and self service should be made for each other.
In most cases they are. However there is a significant disconnect of what to do when a user reaches a problem/issue that he cannot resolve himself.
On average – and I am not quite a typical user – I hit the “Contact Us” button on a website at least once a day only to be very frustrated.
Well, I used to think that maybe I was special but apparently not so.
I am also not the only person who gets frustrated, according to iPerceptions. I have used the iPerceptions study material before and found it to be a mine of information.
The latest study on Q2 data was released last month. There are some very interesting nuggets that we can digest from this.
One of these relate to the issue of educating the user – subject matter I have written on before – the successful ecommerce site must understand that it cannot just ignore the education part of the process.
An educated user is a better user.
I can recall from the early days of Expedia one characteristic we found was that early users who successfully managed a transaction were both good evangelists for the product and were highly likely to do it again in the near future.
What we didn’t address at the time because there was so much low hanging fruit was the people who started down the purchase path and then abandoned the process.
So for me the other part is more interesting, namely the corollary to a successful transaction.
In a business that has a horrendous Look to Book ration, we need to understand the reasons for abandonment.
Sadly the data in the iPerceptions report doesn’t address what I believe is a specific issue for our industry – ie that we (site owners) force users into the purchase path in order to verify the offer information.
This is a good way – sometimes the only way for the consumer to validate the exact request.
Of course, search doesn’t work like this and hence the disconnect in the way we handle our customers.
We need to do a much better job here to give the user a sense of confidence that what he is seeing is real and actually there so he doesn’t tie up resources in the purchase part for which he HAS NO INTENTION OF COMPLETING.
Further we need to do something for the user that when he starts down the purchase path – for real or just for information – that we can provide to him an easy way to get the information that he needs when he most needs it.
Let me give you some examples:
If I get stuck, I need a place to go. The chaps at smart agent software companies using either robotic software like NextIT’s Smart Agent know this to be true and Alaska and now Continental Airlines have successfully deployed it.
It reduces the amount of unsuccessful transactions, but that is the problem – only part.
A full service transaction needs a tool like live chat (from something like LiveAgent) or a telephone number to respond more personally and completely to the site customers’ needs for information.
So my site shameful issues are three fold:
- Sites don’t make the availability of support information easy to get to. It’s almost NEVER contextual
- Access to a reasonable FAQ or interface for Q&A that provides a way for me to help myself is sorely lacking in all but a few sites
- If this fails there is nothing that irks a user if he cannot get to a person to solve his problem.
What ecommerce companies seem to miss is that an educated user is your best evangelist. The disdained customer is the one who is going to be vocal to his personal and online social network.
Is there a remedy for this?
An emphatic yes and don’t be afraid to deploy a solution mix.
Whether you are big or small – you can do this and build value to your brand.
The ability to interleave customer service with social media demands these type of capabilities. So my advice to you is as follows:
- Stop creating useless help pages and make the help resource useful and reachable. Also lessen the complexity and reduce the sheer volume of content to support help. Also MAKE SURE you have a good search engine to find the help. Lord help me if this isn’t one of the worst areas of online for Travel or any other category
- Deploy a self help tool that is like Ask Jen on the Alaska site. All it does is act as an interface to the data you can already see explicitly in other part of the site
- Don’t be afraid to deploy a chat or call center solution. And its OK – it doesn’t have to be 24 hours. It can be at set times. Just set the expectation simply and clearly.
And finally PLEASE don’t piss me off with the following:
- Don’t make me enter my data again or repeat it to you – I don’t care why you do it – it demonstrates how much you just don’t care for me or my needs.
- Always follow through on what you can do – or be clear that you cannot. It is OK to just say no. I will hate you if you lie to me or make me jump through hoops only to find that there was nothing you could have done in the first place…
So please do this, and make users like me happy. I will reward you with my business.
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