Customer experience is product experience.
I speak for my customers/clients. At least, that’s what I have been doing for years to improve the product experience. I do not actively lookout for experience gaps but if they are obvious, I make it a point to show where a business/product is going wrong- call it bad UX. It’s easy to understand the explicit problems of the users when the product manager is defining the customer’s needs and wants. But the key advantages for improvement lie when you understand the implicit paint points of the customers. The implicit paint points may occur more harm than you think for product growth, if not taken into account. Implicit product needs are hard to discover and require iterative task analysis and human factors knowledge. This is when customers come into play to make you realize those implicit requirements. All of a sudden your requirement discovery needs to go beyond the documents and the communication channels.
The case with my Groupon experience today:
I bought a coupon from Groupon for basic teeth cleaning. Their merchants started to cross-sell before even providing me the core service (teeth cleaning) that I paid through Groupon. When I asked for the service I was supposed to get, they refused to do the basic cleaning and offered me an expensive one ( I wonder if they do this to every client). Of course, I refused to take the expensive service (Note: the whole point of Groupon advantage is missing here). They wasted about 3 hours of my work time. I reached out to a Groupon customer representative with this issue and they offered me a $10 credit.
I was not looking for a $10 credit. I needed more justification for this. I bought a coupon with the expectation to receive a service that will save me some money. Instead, this experience made me lose money without receiving the service. Was it Groupon’s fault? Maybe not. It was their merchant with poor business practices. But the merchant was partnered with Groupon and I (the customer) used the Groupon platform to make the purchase. Groupon’s product team couldn’t capture the end-to-end UX. I told Groupon to take the $10 credit back and reevaluate their business practices as well as their terms and conditions with their merchants.
Groupon not only failed to understand the value of their customers’ time, they failed to understand their very own business.
Product and customer experiences are correlated. They feed each other for positive growth and vice-versa. How strong is your experience strategy? Does it tie well with your product and business practices? How far do you go into the value chain? Are you really in the mind of your customers? Groupon surely has a weak strategy in this case.
I still find there are huge gaps and room for improvements in customer and product experiences for many good companies out there. If finding customers’ pain points was easy, you would have solved it by now. Till then go deep, explore and see if you can architect the best business/product experience.
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