
Servicewüste Deutschland — When customer experience is just a buzz word
Service Design, Customer Experience and Human Centred Design are on everyone’s lips, especially companies try to paint a picture of themselves being customer centric. But which companies do truly provide customer centric services?
Customers’ frustrations are double the CX Designers’ frustrations. I have returned from Australia six month ago and I still find Germany being what Germans call a “Servicewüste” (basically a country that lacks great customer experiences in services). Here are a few poor examples of poor customer experience out of many over the last few weeks - across multiple industries including finance, telco, utilities (Don’t ask about government services…):

1. My partner‘s Lufthansa Miles & More credit card benefits were changed, the only notification was send to her Miles & More online account which she never uses. So we lost our travel insurance cover but only realised it when we unsuccessfully handed in the overseas hospital invoice for reimbursement. Thank you & good bye Lufthansa Miles & More Credit Card.

2. When visiting a Sparkassen branch to get an appointment for a property loan, bank staff advised to go online, find the number of another branch and call them for an appointment — as the branch I visited was not providing these kinds of services. Obviously I left, to visit one of the other six banks within 200 meters to get an appointment there. Just like that, Sparkasse lost a potential customer looking for a loan of a couple of 100k.

3. Probably my highlight of a poor service experience, one of my deliveries went missing. So I called the DHL mail delivery hotline to be informed that they already knew my parcel was stuck and they also knew where it was located but I needed to file a formal complaint so they could further process my parcel. If DHL knew my parcel was stuck, why not solve the problem, inform me about the delay and apologise.
All of these examples show two common problems when lacking a customer centric mind set:
- Being pro-active — Often, customers cannot fully benefit from a product or service without extra effort on their end. Rather than companies being pro-active, customers are forces to take actions/acquire information. Companies need to be more empathic towards customers’ needs and pro-actively take action/provide information.
- Great communication — In today’s multichannel world of multiple touchpoints and contact channels between companies and their customers. A careful selection of communication channel, timing & content are critical for a great customer experience. These three things will define whether a message actually reaches its recipient, it is timely and relevant.
Don’t get me wrong, there are far more aspects impacting a great customer experience (e.g. like knowing your customer and her/his preferences) but I wanted to analyse these practical examples I experienced.
Customer experience how it should feel
In contrary I recently had two outstanding (micro) user experiences I’d like to share as well which were all about being pro-active & great communication:

- When I hit the “Send” button in my Gmail account, a pop-up notified me I had no attachment included in the email even though my mail stated ”see attached“. This tiny pop up was great in many ways:
- Being pro-active: Did it not happen to you at least once that you forgot the attachment in an email, how embarrassing. This smart little feature pro-actively reminds you and saves you from embarrassing moments if not worse things like missing out on a job — what a benefit.
- Being timely and relevant: The reminder only appears when your text states something like ”see attached“ and no attachment is included in the email. The pop-up only disappear when you hit the “send” button, no earlier.

2. WhatsApp does a very similar thing: When you are hanging up a WhatsApp call while it’s still ringing on the other end, the app will alert you in case the person picked up the moment you were about to hang up and ask you to continue the call.
- Pro-active? Yes.
- Relevant? Yes.
- Timely? Yes.
Why is this important?
Young companies, especially digital ones have managed to provide great customer experiences through customer centric mind sets — while long established companies seem to struggle with digital transformation and providing an excellent customer experience. People are increasingly choosing between brands based on the type of experience they have with a company’s product, service or system. According to a Forrester report from 2016, CX Leaders even grow revenue up to 29% faster than CX laggards, depending on industries.
Don’t be a CX laggard! Think customers first!
Source Header Image: https://eatdrinkplay.com/sydney/jacobys-tiki-bar-enmore/
