User Experience Design & Customer Care
How much importance we should give for Customer Care in Design Process? This question has been a paradox for lots of budding user experience designers. Shall I give more importance to overall functionality of the application? Shall I give a specific page for Customer Care? How many modes of contact shall I give and which all? These are all the common doubts in the mind of a designer who wants to give a delightful experience to the user.
Does Customer Service matters?
We all know some brands as having a really good customer service. We all acknowledge the swift responses we receive from Twitter handles of different organizations and Govt. Departments. We love organizations that have good customer service team and give free mouth publicity to them, while we also like to rant about the bad customer treatment you got from organizations in public platforms to vent out your feelings. So yes, Customer Service matters a lot! It can decide the future of a Company. It can make a loyal group of Customers, as like Royal Enfield made with a different strategy.
A great Customer service should be Fast, Personalized and Transparent. It can make wonders for your application.
Why Customers Contact Organizations?
Service Problems
This happens when the outcome of the interaction is not as expected by the user. Eg: You did a flight booking and Money got deducted from your bank. While after sometime you get a mail stating flight was not booked. Now you check whether you got money back and this makes user to call the customer care department.
Roadblocks
You are working on a transaction and while at the end of transaction, system tells that you should change the mode of transaction to complete the task. This will surely irritate user. These kinda roadblocks make a user call the customer service. Only brand loyal customers stay with the brand after this kind of frustrating experiences.
Missing Information
A lot of users get confused with the terminology used in the applications. Ambiguous information or confusing data make a user pick up the phone.
Complexity Perception
A lot of users prefer to complete some task with the help of a customer care person. They have a perception that the process is too complex to do for them and they tend to take help. This is the case with investing in Mutual Funds or Insurance plans as common examples.
How to minimize load of Customer Care?
Contacting Customer Care reflects the failure of UX. So how to design with minimizing customer care load in mind?
Understand the Customer Journey
Brainstorm on these:
- What are the triggers for User to come to the application? Mention both internal and external triggers.
- From which all devices/channels they are reaching to application?
- Which all stages they go as they engage with product?
- What are the pain points for user in each stage?
Identify:
- Customer Expectations in each stage
- Customer Information needed in each stage
- Different Channels/Devices used by user in different contexts
- Transitions of User from one platform to another
How to Design?
- Design a comprehensive solution that spans for multiple channels and stay intact
- Understand and eliminate common reasons for contact
- Identify and eliminate common roadblocks and ambiguous terminologies
- Make customer service easily accessible with Guided approach
- Provide multiple channels for contact
So from your next project, give same importance you give to a critical functionality to Customer Service. Make the Customer never feel the urge to contact the Customer Care.
Let UX never fail the User!
The Best Customer Service is if the customer doesn’t need to call you, doesn’t need to talk to you. It just works!
Reference: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/customer-service-omnichannel-ux/
