Most online transactions finish with an automatically generated email summarizing what you just did. This can be as simple as a note letting you know you changed your password, which in turn also would alert someone that didn’t that someone else did, and it can be as complex as summarizing a large product purchase that details when a service may be provisioned and or products shipped (e.g., a cell phone). If you get this right, you have a happy customer that just did business with you in the most profitable way we’ve found to date. If you get it wrong, you erode your margins from customer service requests and most often take a hit to your brand from bad publicity due to your frustrated customer sharing their troubles via Twitter, Facebook, Yelp and the like. Now, your seemingly great direct channel business becomes a nightmare.
How do we minimize the negative publicity, maximize our margins and potentially even create some free marketing from happy evangelizing customers?
Think end-to-end and have cross-department teams define, craft and implement everything together. This includes everyone from the user experience designer to the folks in finance.
Recently I purchased a couple of complex product/service combos online. Having just moved, I ordered cable from Comcast for my new apartment. Additionally, to have a phone that could make calls and see the full web, I switched to an Android phone from Verizon Wireless. In both of these cases I had a pretty good online experience and a fulfillment process that worked out reasonably well. Though, had I been a different kind of customer, I can see where there are some friction points in each company’s end-to-end eCommerce processes that could create trouble for them.
Comcast
Comcast.com starts off seemingly organized. The main navigation provides for quick access to specific content around the primary categories of interest for either a prospective customer or returning customer: Learn, Shop, Programming, Customers, About. Everything else around this navigation is trying to sell you, which is what it should be doing. It’s trying to get me to convert to their service by enticing me with insight into all the great programming they have and incredible deals that are presented in such a way that not only provide the traditional call to action, but also create a sense of urgency. The rub is when I go into the next level of detail.
“Learn” does its job by providing me basic details on what they’re offering, so I’ll skip over it and speak to “Programming” for a moment as that was my next place to investigate as a prospective customer. Having experienced AT&T’s U-Verse for a year, I became accustom to having every television channel known to man. Having also decided that I wanted to spend less on TV in the new apartment, I wanted to dive into the programming packages to see which ones on the cheaper side still included specific channels that both me and my fiancée watched regularly. Armed with knowing what channels I wanted to make sure I had, I clicked “Programming” then “Channel Lineup”. Now, I understand that this might change depending on my region, and that Comcast wants to begin capturing insight about me as a customer, but I do get annoyed having to provide my address so early on. Following this was where I about lost it. The list that is displayed, with a drop down filter menu, was unmanageable and terrible at allowing me to compare different packages to see what channels I would get. I had to open multiple windows and Alt-Tab back and forth to see what was in each and then keep track of the specific channels I was looking for on a notepad. This small trivial issue is where not getting it right opens you up to the publicity/marketing challenges. During this visit a customer may tweet about this sloppy experience or tell their friends on Facebook how difficult it is, at which point someone may respond directing them to explore the competitor. If this happens, then that one day where everyone (employees responsible for the site) was in a meeting and gave no attention to this page or just assigned it out to someone to build without thinking of the user flow, the revenue already began to erode.
Once I decided I was going with Comcast and what package I would order, I switched to the “Shop” menu and dived into the bundles knowing that I wanted Internet as well as TV service. This was a clean experience that gave a good summary of each “package”. The missing elements were being able to compare packages and find other critical details such as whether HD was included or if I would get a DVR. Not finding this information (again a spot for a marketing issue), I decided to start the buying process making the assumption that it would come eventually. At this point, the whole process fell apart. Not only was it unclear whether or not I needed to add these extra items, but I ultimately had to start a chat session to complete the transaction. No, really, my “eCommerce” experience was finished with a person. The real irony was that when I was having trouble getting my questions answered and getting through some network issues, I tried calling in and the call center person I talked to said they couldn’t help me with online orders, and if I ordered from them they wouldn’t be able to offer me the same discounts. Really?! Ok, so now I’m forced into an online purchase process that interacts with a human (higher cost) and I’m only allowed to chat with them?! This was where I almost decided to go with DirecTV (if they had a better Internet offering I would have).
After it was all said and done, I had a technician installation scheduled with a set-top box on order and service provisioning kicked off. Great, now I can setup my online bill pay and be done with it, right? I go to email…nothing. There aren’t any emails summarizing what I did (think $$$ if I call back in for help), and it took me almost an hour to navigate around the site and figure out how to get to my account details, learn what my login was (took me calling customer service) and setup my bill pay. It was a terrible finish. Oh, but they probably covered the costs of this experience by charging me that technician install rate and a start-up fee. And cable companies wonder why we give them a hard time.
Verizon Wireless
Verizon wireless, as with any telephone company selling online, has a complex eCommerce challenge as they not only have to try and explain their overly confusing service plans they invent to try and increase ARPU, but also have to get you to pick a phone and then provision a number of systems in their back-end to allow that phone to have the right phone number, be able to make calls, receive voice mail, SMS, access the internet, etc. It’s not easy. That said, you’d think they’d be the experts on end-to-end process thinking as they have so much to get right. For the most part, they did pretty well. Verizon’s site explains their plans well, allows you to compare service plans and phones and ultimately add things to your cart in such a way that you are really clear on what you’re buying and what you may be missing [they do a great job of showing you all the little add-on features (think up-sell)]. The piece they missed? Well, for one they didn’t summarize my order in the email or give a link back to the store to see the details, but best of all they didn’t think through the shipping delay for my new Android phone and had a pretty empty status of, “Your order has been processed and will be shipped based on inventory availability and shipping method. You will receive shipment notification and tracking details via email.” The other missing piece was lack of instruction on how to create my online account. It was fairly easy to figure it out online, but having that be part of the order summary (or better yet, in the order flow), would have made it easier and Verizon would likely increase the percentage of customers that a.) setup automatic bill-pay and b.) become more of a self-serve customer.
Most eCommerce sites focus on the conversion and order check-out process. Only the best consider the end-to-end customer experience. So, get the process flow diagrams going or pin up the butcher paper and map out your customer processes!
