One of the biggest problems with products, whether they be a software application, web application or physical appliance, is that they are often complex to operate. Many have been designed by engineers, technical people who are very often out of alignment with the very customers who use their products. To add insult to injury, most products are supplied with instruction manuals which often resemble encyclopedia and even worse, have not been written for their intended audience consisting of terminology and jargon only those people that developed the products can understand.
From a customer perspective, the most common situation when products do not work is that assistance is sought from the organisation who sold the product or from the manufacturer. The provision of customer assistance, either answering emails, messages or phone calls, is a major cause of work within any organisation. Trained resources are required to attend to customer queries and these interactions must be appropriately managed to ensure quality and an appropriate level of customer satisfaction. These services comes at a significant cost. So how can we reduce the cost of product support? The answer is we need to remove the cause of the problem by improving the quality and usability of our products.
How can we improve the quality and usability of our products?
Our goal in improving the quality and usability of our products should be to make our customer lives simpler easier and more successful and this means we need to make it easy for customers to do what they need to do. In order to achieve this, we first need to know what customers really want and to do this we need to identify what are customer's successful customer outcome is. By identifying this seemingly simple piece of information, we can ensure our products are designed to help our customers achieve this goal. Products must have a clear purpose and should be designed to fulfill a customer need.
Once the successful customer outcome has been established, we need to understand what the process is and the steps customers go through to achieve the outcome they desire. Our products should then be designed to simplify the process customers need to perform to achieve every desired result. We should reduce the burden on the customer by minimising the number of customer interactions and this can be done by analysing the moments of truth. By analysing the moments of truth, we should then look to remove or improve each one, until we have significantly improved the customer process. We can continually look to improve the customer experience by performing this analysis again and again.
The CEMMethod
Our aim as product providers should be to create smart products designed to deliver successful customer outcomes. Smart products are those which learn from the customer process, whilst dumb products lack the necessary design to evolve. The techniques used to analyse and improve the customer experience of products are available to you through the CEMMethod. So if you are looking to enhance the quality and usability of your products, our consulting and training services provide you with the necessary techniques to achieve your goals.