Design Like You Give a Damn

- from Gizmodo -

“I’m tired of this. This sense of permanent discomfort with the technology around me. The bugs. The compromises. The firmware upgrades. The “This will work in the next version.” The “It’s in our roadmap.” The “Buy now and upgrade later.” The patches. The new low development standards that make technology fail because it wasn’t tested enough before reaching our hands. The feeling now extends to hardware: Everything is built to end up in the trash a year later, still half-baked, to make room for the next hardware revision. I’m tired of this beta culture that has spread like metastatic cancer in the last few years…

Clearly, the problem is the development process and the time to market, with product cycles shortened and corners cut to keep a continuous stream of cash flowing in. The rush to feed these cycles with increasingly more complex engineering seems to be at odds with shortened development and quality assurance processes, resulting in beta-state first-generation products.”

– from Mark Hurst (Good Experience) –

Netflix is investing in telephone customer service, based in Oregon,
to provide the edge they need in building an all-around good
customer experience, to beat Blockbuster. An interesting strategy
for an online company.

Here’s a NYT story - http://urlx.org/nytimes.com/5937f - that
discusses the investment:

> Netflix [decided against] other lower-cost places in the United
> States and overseas, because it thought that Oregonians would
> present a friendlier voice to its customers. Then in July, Netflix
> took an unusual step for a Web-based company: it eliminated
> e-mail-based customer service inquiries. Now all questions,
> complaints and suggestions go to the Hillsboro call center, which
> is open 24 hours a day. The company’s toll-free number, previously
> buried on the Web site, is now prominently displayed.

Netflix teaches two lessons here in customer experience management:

- Fix the site first: For an online company, the website is the
primary experience. Netflix did the right thing by optimizing their
site first, and then looked to optimize the secondary experience -
customer service requests, which only crop up after the customer has
gone through the site experience.

- If you invest, do it right: Netflix invested not just in “more
call reps” (which may have been nice in a press release but not
great in reality) but in a more expensive domestic call center. And
not just any domestic call center; it found the best city for its
needs - polite Portland, Oregon.

The outcome of the Netflix-Blockbuster battle is yet undetermined
(the latter has size and retail locations as advantages), but I like
Netflix’s ongoing commitment to customer experience.