What happens when a company doesn’t care about customers
Early in my career, I worked on a user research services team. One of my most memorable assignments was to review a bunch of unmoderated user testing recordings of customers shopping an online Black Friday experience.
One of the testers tried to find a gift for his wife, but he couldn’t do it. Then his oldest kid…nope, that went badly, too. Then his youngest kid…guess how that went. The site’s sizing guide was unhelpful. All. Three. Times.
And like most online blowout sales, things were a little disorganized. He reached his breaking point when “cabin socks” were included on the page promoting “Outdoor” items.
He slammed his hands down on his desk and he finally shouted:
“Son of a bitch, this company doesn’t care about me at all!”
It’s been 10 years, but I can still hear him yelling that in my head. In the moment, I thought it was sorta funny. Who gets that worked up over a bad web site experience? Chill, dude. It’s gonna be okay.
But over time, his words have stuck with me.
“This company doesn’t care about me at all!”
In the next few minutes, I’d like to try to unpack this customer’s comment and consider what we could learn from it.
First, there’s his use of “this company”.
He didn’t attribute the experience to a particular team or department. He didn’t say “the online team sure made a mess of this,” or “I wish the merchants had sorted this better,” or “it’s probably better in the store.”
In that moment, the Black Friday shopping experience was the ENTIRETY of the company. It had that ONE touch point, that crucial couple of minutes to forge a bond with the customer. And it failed. It failed as a company, even though only a handful of employees were responsible for that touch point.
As a user researcher, I’ve learned a lot about how customers perceive companies. They view them as a complete picture, a cohesive whole — even if they do realize, intellectually, that the whole company is comprised of 30, 300, 3000, or 30,000 individuals. When customers think of a company, they think of it as a great, big, collective thing that provides them goods or services.
Meanwhile, employees inside the organization are all too aware of the divisions. To us, the company is made of lots of little boxes or circles or silos, loosely connected in a network. We will never know or learn about some — probably many — of the employees who we work with. One team’s systems and tools don’t matter or apply to another team’s. Our view of the company is far from collective.
They assume we’re a team. We often aren’t. And that’s an uncomfortable fact that was laid bare in that moment.
Then, he talked about the company CARING about him.
Or rather, not caring about him at all.
Customer emotions seem to be an afterthought for most companies. A company’s employees are measured and rewarded by customers’ actions — conversion, click-through rates, sales, downloads, etc. — so that’s what gets focused on. Emotions fall into the background and aren’t considered on the regular.
But this tester demonstrated that the way a company makes him feel is powerful. There’s no shortage of research indicating that people make purchasing decisions with their hearts as much as, if not more than, they do with their heads.
Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of team KPIs. Would you like to guess how many of them measured a specific emotion? (Other than satisfaction, which is a dumb, generic feeling. Honestly, if you make someone a meal or give them a gift and they say, “Thanks, I’m very satisfied,” how does that make you feel?)
Consider an app that protects children’s digital devices from online predators. You’d hope that making customers feel safe would be their #1 priority, and it suffuses every design they build, every error message they write, every notification they send. But I bet they’d be more focused on a KPI related to app downloads or sign-up rates.
Or imagine a pregnancy tracking tool that spots early signs of a miscarriage. You’d hope that they concern themselves with keeping their users calm and reassured. But are they measuring that? Designing and testing and iterating with the goal of at least 90% reassurance rate? I would like to hope so, but they’re probably more focused on account cancellation rates or subscription sales.
I’ll admit that emotions are slippery. They’re messy. Most people are “only okay” at recognizing and processing emotions. But that’s no reason for companies to ignore them. When companies aren’t deliberate about their customer’s emotional states, customers will notice it. They may not say it, but they’ll intuitively feel like the company doesn’t care. And they’ll go look for a company that does better.
I’m a broken record about emotional intelligence in workplaces. When emotions aren’t an intentional focus, they get shoved aside to make room for the “more important stuff”, whatever that is.
We stop exercising our emotional intelligence muscles and let ourselves go, bit by tiny bit.
And since we aren’t focused on customer emotions (or emotions at all), we’re less compassionate to our colleagues and make every conversation about conversion or sales goals or average order value.
Teams burn out and churn away, and there’s nothing but cold hard numbers for the new employees who get onboarded.
There’s got to be a better way, and it starts by companies caring about their customers.
Imagine if you joined a company and there were three core emotions that the whole team was driving toward: interest, confidence, and trust.
Product roadmaps are aligned to improving at least one, and the teams report quarterly on their trust-building performance or their interest-inspiring score.
While testing a prototype, a user says “Oh yeah, now I’m confident, let’s do this!” and everyone observing celebrates (on mute, of course).
And because everyone has their ears perked, listening for these emotions, they’re more conscious of all emotions being expressed — not just by their customers, but by their colleagues, too.
In fact, the whole team is more open and honest about how they feel, and they have an easier time talking through issues when they arise.
Hypothetical, yes, but this is my hope — for companies to lead the charge in emotional intelligence by simply caring for their customer.
