Simple user flow errors in a time of PR crises and major delays

Yousuf Fahimuddin
Jul 24, 2017 · 5 min read
Your users irl. Also, you. Also, probably your supplier who lost their contract with you.

I ran into an interesting situation recently, will do my best to keep things as anonymized and scrubbed as possible.

A very successful small company with an excellent customer service track record was hit with a huge crisis: their supplier had completely dropped the ball on them and quoted them some very unacceptable delays. This was a company whose reputation and image was staked in the fact that customers usually received their orders within 2–3 days.

Realizing this crisis early on, they switched suppliers, a process that was supposed to take max two business weeks but ended up taking more than a month.

That meant customers, the vast majority being first time customers referred by friends, who were given the expectation of a 3 day turnaround, were facing delays of 3 weeks before their order even shipped from the warehouse. Clearly, not a situation anyone ever wants to be in!

This company, being small and coming from scrappy beginnings, had behaviors that betrayed their cash strapped origins which really exacerbated the crisis. Close to 10,000 customers over the course of the month wrote in angrily about the delayed order, and to keep them happy the company gave away free credits of anywhere from $5 to $20 per customer writing in asking about their order. This meant they lost anywhere from $50,000 to beyond $100,000 to deal with the crisis, never mind the amount lost in cancelled orders and bad publicity. For a small company, this is no joke.

Having looked at the customer situation and consulted with the business I saw some patterns that they could not see due to their understandable biases as the product owner. The reality was: customers were mad, but it wasn’t because their orders were delayed. As a matter of fact, many customers were quite happy to go to Target or Walmart to buy what they needed and didn’t mind the wait because the company’s reputation was so stellar.

The truth is, customers were upset because they felt they were being misled.

Getting the bottlenecks out of the customer journey when facing delays

The open segment is them making their orders. Easy. The bottleneck is not giving users a realistic idea of what the ongoing delays look like. The narrow part is your customer service department trying to keep their business.

From its scrappy origins, this company had committed a few small actions that were causing the users increased irritation. The delay blew it all sky high.

  1. Signing them up for a service that they needed to opt out of, rather than opt in to
  2. Charging user’s credit cards before shipping out their orders
  3. Failing to consider the customer’s journey from start to finish, and then looking at how that changed during the supplier crisis and adjusting it to the new temporary “reality”

All of this ties together into an insecurity on the company’s part to trust that their service is superior to others and that instead of burning through new customers to build out their single tiered loyalty subscription service, they could have created a customer journey that is so pleasant that checking the box for the monthly renewal would be a no brainer.

Charging the credit card before the order goes out was a powder keg waiting to erupt, and it definitely jived many users the wrong way. Many new customers felt they had been scammed.

Telling them that their order would take 3 weeks after they wrote in after ordering a week ago is different from telling them before or right after they order.

Some users were moving in a month, and many lived around their monthly paycheck — this order was a big part of their lives. This all snowballed into users writing in to tell the company that they provided a bad experience and that they would never shop there again, in spite of free account credits. These simple mistakes added to the frustration of the situation.

The third part was the most egregious and easiest fixed error. Users were writing in saying that they received an email upon completion of their order stating they should expect to receive tracking info in 24–48 hrs. This one line in their confirmation email shifts the pain point from being the fact that the company they ordered from is experiencing delays from their supplier, to being why is it that their tracking code hasn’t come in yet? The blame falls squarely on the company in the customer’s eyes in that situation.

This was likely the biggest mistake because the company inadvertently put the user in a situation where the only course of action left was to reach out and ask why they had not received their tracking number yet, which for the company created an un-winnable situation. The user is anywhere from frustrated to incredibly upset at that point in their process, some of whom had disabilities and needed their order, and the solution to provide credit does not solve their problem. Their problem now is that they were under the impression that the product would be there in 3 days but now understand it may take 3 weeks. Many of them had planned their lives around the arrival of their order.

Had the company provided a readjusted customer journey in the face of the delays, they could have saved money and retained customers by mitigating the level of frustration the user feels.

Conclusion

Happy days.

It’s important to understand the customer journey when dealing with a back breaking crisis like having your main supplier completely disappear on you. As a company you’re dealing with your own struggles trying to get orders shipped out before they pile up, but you also have to consider how your users are experiencing the delay. Your ability to keep that in mind determines how much revenue you bleed and how far you get set back once the smoke clears and things turn back to normal.

Yousuf Fahimuddin

Written by

#UX Research at Facebook. Startups, freelance, small clients big clients | Ethereum hodler | #usability | #userexperience

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