Good experience is not a new idea
I just read David Armano’s post “Experience, Social, Word of Mouth. Is it All Just Advertising?” on the “Experience Matters” blog. Once again, an excellent post, but this time I was struck by one of the comments.
David Cushman wrote:
good customer exp, whether delivered by human or device, is all it takes to delight us into becoming advocates in a world sadly lacking in said good exps. but brands will learn and then we’ll take what delights us for granted. would the cycle start over i wonder?
I agree with the first part. Whatever tricks or techniques may be used to establish branding for a business, product, or service, the most effective approach is to simply provide a good experience. Or is it not that simple? All businesses talk about it, but as Mr. Cushman notes, a good customer experience is still rare and still notable when it happens.
However, he then goes on to say, “brands will learn”, and unfortunately that’s where I disagree. Doing the right thing is not a new idea — oh wow, look at this, why didn’t we ever think of it before? — something we’ve just discovered and now all businesses will be jumping on the bandwagon. If there’s any bandwagon, it’s the one businesses have already jumped on where they all talk about customer service, and quality products, and providing a good experience, and “your call is important to us.” Too bad they don’t get off the wagon and do something. I do not foresee the day when “we’ll take what delights us for granted.”
Excellent news, I suppose, for any business that does know how to provide a good experience.
Or do most of us really know how, and the magic is in caring enough to actually do it?
Hiding from actual contact
In my previous post I wrote about information missing from a website, or at least very difficult to find. The information was absolutely crucial to the organization and to the users of the website. It was missing not so much because the information wasn’t important, but because the website owners assumed that everyone already knew the answer.
Their mistake. Not only did I not know the answer, but the first person I asked, and who gave me the correct information, later began to wonder and went to the same website to (try to) confirm what he’d told me.
That was unfortunate, and probably not all that uncommon. After all, a similar website in a different country also managed to hide the same information four levels deep.
But there are a great many sites that leave out or obscure important information, and sometimes it seems to happen on purpose. All too often the hidden information is the very reason users have come to the site in the first place.
How to contact the business. Phone numbers. Email addresses. Contact forms.
It’s a simple question of usability. I would guess that contact information is one of the most common reasons people visit a website. As such, a link to contact info should be clearly provided up front—ideally near the top of the home page. Sort of a sincere way of saying, “Your visit is important to us and if you want to get in touch, damn it, we want to hear from you.”
In reality, what happens? If a company doesn’t already have your business, they make it easy to contact them. Links, phone numbers, forms, whatever you want. On the other hand, if it’s a situation where the company is likely to already have your business or they’ve already sold you their product, well, it’s perhaps not quite as important and so maybe you have to jump through some hoops.
That’s the way it is on many sites and we’ve all run into the problem. And as lowly consumers there may not be a great deal we can do about it.
Except this—be aware, be very aware that businesses do give at least some thought to their websites and if easy and useful contact information is not clearly provided, it’s because the business designed it that way. A conscious decision was made.
Green, green, we’re green they say…
When you’re still in the midst of it all, who’s to say when a tipping point has been reached? Twenty years, or maybe fifty years from now, we’ll know—but from this particular vantage point it seems we’re finally reaching a mass awareness of global environmental issues.
It’s been a long time coming. We had the Energy Crisis in the 1970s, significant concern over acid rain, holes in the ozone layer, and yet somehow it seemed that we never quite put it all together and took it seriously. Whatever happened, and it was undoubtedly a long, long series of various issues and events, there is now a mainstream green momentum that seems unstoppable.
It can’t be a bad thing that many, if not most, of our major ad agencies and their clients are looking for ways to get involved. Sure, we might sometimes sneer a bit at everyone jumping on the bandwagon. For example, last fall Brian Morrissey of Adweek posted on AdFreak: “But of course advertising, at its heart, is about feeding mass consumerism, which is the main cause of the pickle we’re in with global warming to begin with. The same agencies that are preaching about green initiatives would, I’m sure, fall all over themselves the next time there’s a review to make ads promoting gas-guzzling SUVs.” However, there’s no question that every agency has significant personnel who sincerely care about global warming, animal extinctions, resource depletion, and future generations. And now we’re starting to put some muscle into marketing the environment.
One real danger is that we’ll overdo the effort with a flood of showy but minimally effective marketing initiatives, effectively overdosing the public with too many servings of environmental awareness junk food. If so, we might find that like any sudden fashion, the interest will wane and give way to the next shiny distraction.
How do we use our considerable marketing expertise to tackle the problem efficiently? Will more and more websites, television ads, posters, and movies do the job? Is more always better? Or is that approach how we created the problem in the first place? More, more, bigger, bigger, until the audience just doesn’t care anymore?
Take any one promotion or campaign by itself and yes, we’re impressed. Good work. Today I saw the very clever and professional Wild Snowman by Avenue A | Razorfish. Beautiful. I sent the link to several co-workers. And I know it took real energy, talent, time, and money to produce that piece.
I also thoroughly enjoyed this ad from the “Unscrew America” campaign (a project of GSD&M’s Idea City):
But what if we have dozens and dozens of websites, ads, etc. like these? Too much of a good (or feel-good) thing? I think there’s a real danger here, with so many agencies all pounding away at the same message. The challenge is to recognize that we’re all on board, that there are a lot of us and that we need to focus on more directed efforts to have maximum effect.
For example, what if one ad agency offered to work with school districts to create environmental education promotions and activities? This would require working with teachers to determine approaches that would fit into and complement the existing curriculum and thus actually be used. Another agency could research the best ways to save energy in a variety of workplaces (offices, stores, factories) and provide employers with posters and other materials to help educate employees about practical ways they can contribute at work. These are just samples of ways in which any agency might specifically direct and achieve greater impact by not duplicating the work of others.
The bottom line is that environmental issues are important and we finally have the public’s attention, but we shouldn’t all spend our time producing award-winning work about turning off light bulbs.