The brands creating the best digital experiences right now think outside the interface. Paul Dawson explains why.
Even when you work with world-class brands (retailers, mobile phone companies, finance companies, all sorts) they still ask who in the world does digital customer experience the best. I tend to answer that nobody, in my humble opinion, has really got everything right. There are loads of sites that do a small number of things well, but nobody has the whole package.
Our philosophy of Total Experience Design aims to draw out the magic things you do to make a complete customer experience, regardless of the channel in which it’s executed. So it happens that, quite often, we’ll note that the best thing some companies do on the web isn’t their website. It might be a product, an innovation, a service, or even simply an attitude.
Zappos is one of those brands that do at least one thing exceptionally well, and that’s customer service. The Zappos story is well documented, and we often talk about the number of blogs, Facebook groups and Twitter comments that laud their attitude to their customers and the things they do to make their customers’ experience much, much more delightful than their competition.
The most poignant story is that of a woman whose mother had died. She needed to return some shoes to Zappos, and because she was obviously much more concerned with her mother’s death, was going to be late returning them. How did Zappos respond? They sent a UPS truck to pick up the shoes at their expense (normally you have to take them to a depot), and shortly after, sent her a bouquet of flowers.
The blog post in which she documented this ends:
"IF YOU BUY SHOES ONLINE, GET THEM FROM ZAPPOS.
With hearts like theirs, you know they’re good to do business with."
I was asked this same question by the guys from the Windows Live team at Microsoft as we were hanging out on the roof of Tao nightclub in Las Vegas at MIX09 (you meet all the best people there). So I wheeled out my Zappos story for them.
I got an email from Angus the other day titled “Zappos really is the bomb” – apparently this is some quaint Australian or American phrase for "really jolly good".
This is the story as it unfolded on Twitter. I tell it here to illustrate exactly how a service promise can translate into everyday life, outside the big stories that get told over and over.
@jsenior posted this to Twitter – it’s a recommendation on some shoes:
@anguslogan, who is known for having rather tasty taste in shoes responded:
@jsenior responded:
And it was at this point, that @zappos_service waded in with this:
Which linked to the offending, er, I mean, inspirational shoes – for sale at another store, and not at Zappos.
To which, Angus naturally replied:
Quickly followed by an email to me and two others to re-tell the story.
When you get things right in creating a relationship with customers they respond emotionally in a way that out-does logic and rational thinking any day. When it comes to choosing where to look for (admittedly rather crazy) shoes online, where is Angus going?
So, even if you’re a bit shoddy at keeping the website up to date, or you can’t quite beat the competition at delivery prices, if you can do service like this, customers will forgive you. Why? Because they love you!
How does Zappos do it? They ingrain customer service right from the start in everyone who works there, and they empower staff to make decisions and use budget to help customers – which is presumably money they divert from above-the-line advertising (and that’s easy to justify, given the serious word of mouth marketing they get as a result).
To make sure they get the right people working for them, they even offer to ‘buy out’ new trainees: They offer them a bribe to leave, on the spot, after a week or so of training. Those who survive are the ones they want. Those who take the bribe are equally happy, but not ‘Zappos material’.
The challenge is to look at the overall customer experience, end to end, and to plan experiences that delight throughout – not constrain yourself to an interface.
