Title: Idiots, Drama Queens and Scammers: Improving Customer Service with UX
Context: If making customers happy ??? truly happy ??? was everyone???s primary responsibility, everything else would just fall into place.
Synopsis: We spend so much time designing and building products for our customers, but how do we really feel about them? When they come back with a complaint or a (stupid) question, do we sympathize or do we roll our eyes and pray to the gods of commerce for better, more informed customers? Isn???t our job ??? and perhaps our sole job one could argue ??? to make customers happy? That???s a whole lot of rhetorical questions for one topic so instead let me say: if your customers aren???t happy/satisfied/content/not-pissed-off-on-a-regular-basis then you are not doing your job. Oh, now you have a rhetorical response? Customer service isn???t your responsibility? Really? Well, you are flat out and plainly wrong. It is your main responsibility. I???m not saying that it???s your responsibility to sit there and accept abuse from customers or give them something just because they claim to want it. No, I am saying that every design decision you make, every feature you put into the product, every honest, non-condescending and heartfelt response you offer in return to a customer???s question is core to the relationship that your business forges with the people that they sell to now and hope to continue selling to in the future. In the end, customer experience is merely a subset of the overall user experience which gives us both added responsibility in this area as well as increased opportunity to influence it. So go do that really, really good.
Best Bit: ???Zappos makes a concerted effort to prevent customers from ever being unhappy in the first place. And that???s a good policy, because unhappy customers are expensive.???