Outside Innovation

How to Design a Customer-Centric Technology Architecture (for Business Leaders and Geeks)

Why is it so hard to design easy-to-use Web sites, mobile phone apps, and other customer-facing applications? Because you need to approach the design and development of customer applications differently than you would the design of applications that are designed to run your business. Whether you're a technologist or a business person who cares about the customer experience you offer, it's important to understand the subtleties involved in developing customer-facing applications.

The people that I admire the most, and the ones that I write about the most, have internalized a set of best practices for technology design and implementation that most of them don't even think much about. It's just how they do things. Over the decade that I have been following many of my heroes — the people who developed the original customer-facing applications described in Customers.com in 1998 — they have continued to evolve their companies' information technology infrastructure from the outside in. They always start with their customers' critical scenarios. They support these scenarios using different technologies, across a variety of channels and touchpoints. Their architecture evolves over time, but it's very consistent and elegant and simple.

In the fourth section of our Customers.com Handbook, we describe some of the elements that go into the design of truly customer-facing technologies. Some of these practices are the same ones you'd use to design or to think about any software development project. But you'll see that there's a subtly different spin. Customer-centric applications need to be designed to adapt and change constantly as customers' behaviors and needs change.

How to Approach Information Technology and Information Architecture for Your Customers.com^® Initiatives
A Handbook for Your Customers.com^® Initiatives—Part 4
By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO and Sr. Consultant, September 16, 2010

Trend Micro's Sales Tactic: Annoyance

By Ronni Marshak
SVP and Sr. Consultant/Analyst, Patricia Seybold Group

As faithful readers know, I recently purchased a new (to me, as the car lots say) Dell laptop. It came with a 30-day free trial of Trend Micro Internet Security. So far, so good. And at the end of the 30-day trial, a warning message popped up stating that I was no longer protected, and I should purchase a subscription. Fair enough.

However, I wasn't sure I wanted to purchase protection from Trend Micro, and I knew that I wasn't ready to purchase at that point in time. My options on the pop-up window were to buy or to "remind me later." I took the third option and just closed the window with the convenient "x" at the top right.

The next day, the Window popped up again, and I did the same. And the next day, and the next, and the next. I tried to figure out how to just say no, simply because I was so annoyed, but, alas, there was no way to do it that I could figure out.

Finally, because I couldn't take it anymore, I hit the buy button—maybe if I at least looked at the offer, the pop-ups would stop haunting me. I looked at the offer (which seemed fair, but, being the sometimes petty person I am, I was determined to protect my computer in some other way), left the Web site, and then, the next day, the pop-up came back!

Out of spite, I looked at a few competitive sites to see what they offered. I was somewhat dismayed to find that Trend Micro offered the best deal for a multi-year subscription. But another vendor had an almost equivalent price per year, so I seriously considered punishing Trend Micro for their irritating use of irremovable pop-ups by making the alternate purchase. Four things stopped me: 1) I'm cost conscious, 2) I like purchasing multi-year subscriptions so I can buy and forget about it, 3) Trend Micro wouldn't know I was punishing them, so I wouldn't get any real satisfaction, and 4) it probably wouldn't have stopped the pop-ups? So I bought the darned thing—just so it wouldn't keep nagging me!

Trend Micro made a few more major customer experience mistakes when I downloaded and attempted to install the software:

• The download process told me that I had to close certain applications in which I had multiple open documents and which I was actively working on. I didn't want to close at that time, but I didn't really see an option for how to postpone the download and then restart it at a later time.
  
  
• Then, I got some confusing messages about my system being incompatible, but there were no instructions about what to do—at least that I could find.
  
  
• So, I contacted Trend Micro at the support phone number on their Web site, but could not get to a person. I was just referred back to the Web site, which didn't help since I was confused.
  
  
• I finally contacted Trend Micro sales phone line because I had learned in the past that if a company thinks you'll give them money, they will let you talk to someone. The sales person did indeed talk to me and transferred me to the support center, where I got a person on the line. (So that transfer happened as it should, but it is part of the story, so I feel obligated to mention it.)
  
  
• The support person was helpful until I said that I had a Dell laptop. It seems that if you purchase Trend Micro for the Dell platform, there is a whole different support center. I asked to be transferred, but Gail, the customer rep, said I had to call them; she couldn't transfer me. When I got snippy, as I am wont to do when faced with seemingly ridiculous customer experiences, she got sarcastic, which, of course, is a great way to win friends and influence people.
  
  
• I called the other number, which turned out to be in another country, and was again told I had to be transferred, but this time the transfer went through. I asked the support person if he worked for Dell or Trend Micro, and he said Trend Micro. (So why did I have to go to another contact center, and why couldn't I be transferred? He didn't know.)

The ultimate result was that my software had, indeed, downloaded even though it hadn't told me that the installation was complete. All that time on the phone was unnecessary.

The one good thing: the pop-ups stopped. But, although the protection seems to be doing a fine job, nagging a customer until they purchase isn't a great relationship builder. They got my business, but they also got this write-up.

Success Stories from Girls in Africa Acting as Change Agents

It Takes a Child to Raise a Village — "my" latest book about bottoms-up, grass-roots innovation, is now available for purchase and sharing. You and your kids will read the first-hand, inspiring stories about how school girls in rural Uganda are teaching their families how to improve their living conditions and increase their incomes.  

You'll see their world through their own eyes and their colorful illustrations. Safira, Lydia, Ruth, Grace, Judith, Atwooki, Stellah, Ceophus, Zam, Faridah, Joyce, Grace, Sylvia, Natasha, Immaculate, Anna Mary, Rosemary, Sarah, Doreen, Mary Joyce, Hilda, Rebecca, Hannah, Rebecca, Ruth, Jane, Gertrude, Dinnah, and Noeline write about their "Back Home" projects. They show you how they taught their parents, their brothers and sisters, and their communities how to improve sanitation and nutrition, reduce domestic violence, and to earn more money!

By the time each of these girls graduates from the URDT Girls' School, their families' homes have become role model farms in their communities, and, these girls and their parents have become community leaders and respected change agents!

What's behind the incredible success of this rural boarding school is the brilliant structure that makes it "The Path of Least Resistance" for families and villages to systemically improve their living conditions, empowered by their daughters—young women who would normally be marginalized in their culture.

How has this grass roots innovation taken place, rippled out from a single girls school, and changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in western Uganda? Let the girls themselves tell you and show you how it's done!

The bound, printed soft cover version of this 112-page colorful picture book is available for sale for $100. $75 of that is a charitable donation which goes directly to URDT Girls School through the African Food and Peace Foundation, which is a registered U.S. nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization whose sole purpose is to support URDT and the African Rural University for Women. You will receive a receipt for the $75 contribution.

If you prefer to download the PDF from our Web site to read online or to print yourself, it's available for $25. Those proceeds will also go directly to the URDT Girls School through AFPF, and you'll receive a receipt for your donation.

This is a great book to use for a book club, a scout troop, or a class of school children. If you'd like to make arrangements for an affordable group purchase that will still support the URDT Girls School in Uganda, please contact me directly at [email protected].

Now, for a preview—watch Safira Nyesige tell her story. I had the honor of participating in the capture of this home visit and I was the one off camera doing the interviews. During the middle of our filming, it began to rain hard, so Safira's mom, Mauda Habasa, invited us into her home and I was able to talk with her in more detail. Not only has Safira helped her family become among the top producing farmers in the district, her mom has been an active participant in a grass roots participatory research project in Land Rights. (You can read more about the Land Rights project here.) All of this was catalyzed by Safira's initiative at the age of 13 when she convinced her parents to let her apply for the URDT Girls School!

What You Can Learn from Dell's Customer Support Snafus

Ronni Marshak and I had a heated debate about whether or not to publish our critique of Dell's customer support experience. We are embarrassed to reveal that we are as low tech as we are. But we decided that this story deserved to be told for two reasons:

1. Many of your customers are not early adopters. They are laggards. Yet they may be among your most loyal customers. So wouldn’t you want to treat them well?

2. As customer experience professionals, we all benefit from dissecting and analyzing bad customer experiences. We learn from what went wrong, so we can apply those learnings to our own situation.

As I tried to put myself in your (our readers') shoes, I became painfully aware that you might dismiss our bad experience with Dell customer support as irrelevant to you for two reasons.

1. We were dealing with a subset of Dell—the P&L for refurbished machines, not new ones. So perhaps not their biggest profit center.

2. We wanted Dell's help with a discontinued Microsoft software O/S and Dell isn't a software company.

So perhaps this is an "edge case" from a type of customer that, if you were Dell, you'd just as soon "fire" as unprofitable and more trouble than they are worth.

Here's why I think this story is actually an excellent example of how so many of us fail in delivering a good customer experience. As consultants, we actually see this same kind of scenario play out all the time with our customers' clients. Just because your customers are running on your older equipment doesn't mean they don't want or value support. We all use and re-use equipment until it literally fails—whether it's a laptop whose life we've stretched for 7 years or a steam boiler that has been in operation for 40 years. Often, older software is also used for a reason. People have invested a lot of money in tools that are designed to work with the older stuff. So migration is often fraught with added complications. Usually, in the real world, customers combine the old and the new in interesting ways. Companies that actually understand that fact of life and make it easy for customers to extend the life of their equipment and to migrate and integrate software or accessories easily will win the loyalty of an important group of their most loyal (laggard/pragmatic) customers.

The real moral of this story has nothing to do with the particular product group at Dell we dealt with. It has to do with Dell's lack of a cross-channel 360-degree support infrastructure. Dell isn’t the only company to have a lot of silos among its small but nimble divisions. But, for a company that prides itself on execution, it seems odd to me that Dell lets all of its silos get in the way of executing correctly the first time—thereby avoiding a series of mutually costly repeat calls. It also seems odd that there is apparently no good way for Dell's customer sales and support personnel to share a common set of knowledge, policies and procedures, as well as a common view of each customer's interaction history. I suspect that Dell isn't alone. As you read through Ronni’s tale of woe and her prescriptive advice, see if the shoe fits!

Google TV: Will It Spur More and Better User-Generated Content?

I have been intrigued by the flurry of activity surrounding both Apple and Google's most recent forays into television. It's clear that watching the programs and movies I want on my own time and on the go has become a common pastime for the digital crowd. It's also clear that the amount of bandwidth being consumed by increased video streaming and downloading will require different pay-per-use models. I will need to pay more if I consume more video. Otherwise, I'm clogging the airwaves for others with less demanding needs.

There are two things I find most intriguing about both Apple TV and Google TV (via the Android):

1. Combining Web video with TV broadcast video and on-demand movies changes our video watching behavior at home. We can much more easily merge YouTube type videos with favorite movies and TV shows.

2. It opens the door for MORE user-generated content. YouTube and other video sites already make it easy to upload and promote your own videos. Now, as WebTV merges with conventional TV in a Video On-Demand world in our living rooms, more families will gather around to watch user-generated, rather than network-produced and funded videos.

3. Open Source application development platforms, like Google's Android TV, will also make it easier for developers to provide all kinds of useful applications to both direct our attention to content we would otherwise miss and/or to mash it up and make it more accessible in interesting ways. BBC's long-running open source project, BBC Backstage gives some clues to what we can expect. (For more background on BBC's open source project, see Outside Innovation at the BBC.)

Recently, a friend visiting from Sweden purchased and took home a couple of Mac Minis for his two 20-something sons. I asked him how they would be used. He said. "My kids don't use TV. They just watch all their video content over the Web. It's just like phone land lines. They never had a regular phone line. Just a mobile phone. It would never occur to either of them to buy a TV set. They have big screens on the wall and they program the content they want to watch." My reaction: please send them to me and set me up so I can do that too!

Google Instant: A Welcome Evolution

Google Instant launched this week. I’m already a fan. I typically use the Google search bar in my Firefox browser, so for a while I have been happy with the utility of the auto-complete suggestions that were popping up in the drop-down menu below that search bar as I typed. Now, if I am on the Google search page (which I have added as a handy tab), I also see all the results pre-populating and morphing automagically as I type. Since I do a lot of “long tail” searches, Google Instant isn’t always guessing right at first, but for the most common short form searches—the utilitarian ones (look up the spelling of something, find a quick definition, get to a Web page quickly, check a current event), it gets me there quicker.

Change Our Search Behavior. Google Search continues to change our Web behavior much more than most other Web tools. We humans are often slow to adapt to new interfaces and to adopt new tools (like new releases of applications), or new User Interfaces (Apple touchscreen/gesture interface). Yet, there are Web-based tools that change “underneath us” that we tolerate although we may notice and grumble about it.

One characteristic of the human user interface evolution is that the UI/technology often changes the human’s behavior, not the other way around. Take the example of using speech to text or handwriting recognition. Although these technologies are touted to “learn” and adapt, what’s really happening is that you, the user, adapt by changing your behavior to get the “right” results. My husband points out that this is similar to the way that a good executive assistant “trains” his boss to provide him with the correct information in the right order to get things done most efficiently, e.g., “Book me a flight to Paris tomorrow on the 9 pm.”

Stop Over-E-Indulging!

Matt Richtel is a technology reporter for the New York Times whose "Driven to Distraction" series won him a Pulitzer Prize. He was interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR Fresh Air on August 24th. The interview changed my Blackberry behavior. I have started leaving it behind. The interview is worth a listen. Here’s a snippet from the transcript:

Matt said: "When you're constantly interrupted by email, you are experiencing stress. Stress equals stress hormones. Stress hormones take their toll on the brain. Specifically, cortisol gets released, and that can have an effect on long-term memory production… we're not sure yet what the cortisol release from heavy technology use does, but over time, heavy cortisol production can reduce your ability to form memories. So if you add up a whole bunch of shots of cortisol, you can create some memory impact."

Terry Gross: "Wow. So the picture that you're painting is the more data that we take in, the less we remember, the more stressed we are and the less creative we become."

In the interview, Matt describes a recent vacation with a group of neurologists who unplugged from technology and immersed themselves in nature to study the changes in their brains. Their conclusion: take an unplugged vacation and stop over-indulging in info-bites. It's addictive, unhealthy, and counter-productive. I'm going for a walk!

Security Alert: Don’t Use that Thumb Drive!

The word is out that one of the biggest military security breaches was promulgated by malware on a USB "thumb" drive in Iraq. And a more recent U.S. Dept. of Justice security breach was promulgated by leaving innocent-looking USB thumb drives in places (next to a Fax machine, in the men's room, on someone's desk) where people would pick them up and plug them in. (Don't do it!)

Privacy Concerns, Identity Theft, and Digital Breadcrumbs

Meanwhile, consumers are complaining about Google video and Facebook privacy intrusions while madly posting everywhere, including where they happen to be at this very moment. German legislators want to fine would-be employers for looking at someone's Facebook page. (How will they know you looked?)

Cloud Computing/Mobile Computing/Network Bandwidth, Green Data Centers and Telehousing

The stampede towards cloud computing/SaaS is happening fast. Nobody in their right minds buys computer servers anymore. You just rent them in the cloud. Enterprise IT buyers are hurrying to virtualize their data centers, reduce their energy consumption, and deploy virtual desktops, while scrambling to deal with security issues on the plethora of mobile devices their employees insist on using. Small businesses don't have computers (except laptops) anymore.

Many small businesses don't even have phone systems anymore. We all use VoIP, cell phones, and free apps in the cloud.

Everyone is consuming and creating video for both work and fun. Many people are getting rid of their desktop and laptop computers and relying on their smartphones connected to the cloud to manage their email, calendars, and information.

The result: a huge increase in bandwidth consumption and the need for more cheap data centers to house the bigger routers and the server farms required to power the clouds and deliver all that bandwidth.

Data centers, server farms, and big network routers all consume a lot of power for running and for cooling. Maybe that's good news for the beleaguered power industry (although most data centers produce their own power). Energy is actually pretty cheap right now, but that makes it hard for energy companies to make money or to invest. As domestic manufacturing production has declined, so has the demand for electricity. Yet our collective consumption of bits and bytes is on the rise. All this leisure time and working from home has resulted in a lot of Web surfing and video consumption.

The good news is that Amazon, Google, and other big cloud providers are investing in green data center technology to host their clouds. But green isn't cheap. Investing in renewable energy is more expensive than relying on existing coal-powered utilities.

As consumers, we should be expecting to pay more for green, renewable energy. We should also be willing to pay for access to high bandwidth (video on demand). Bandwidth is not free. It consumes power, computing and data storage, and generates a carbon footprint. And, for mobile devices at least, bandwidth is quite constrained.

Content providers—including bloggers, citizen journalists, as well as studios and networks—will continue to create more and more content for us to interact with, consume, and enjoy. As content providers, we expect unfettered access to the Net (Net Neutrality).

As consumers, we also want "free" access. But there are costs to produce, host, and deliver content. Those costs will be paid by content consumers or by advertisers on their behalf. It's a pull through business model. Information consumers value their ability to consume and to interact with media. They'll pay to do so. Will consumers also pay to upload video and content they've created? No; they want that to be free—powered by YouTube, Blogspot, and the "net." After all, they're investing their own Intellectual Capital in creating the content they're willing to share with the world. So, I predict that the business model will continue to be: produce and host for "free," pay to consume (by the drink for the content or by the megabyte for the bandwidth).

As we move towards more pay-per-drink media consumption, let's hope that some of those revenues will trickle into green data centers. We don't want the digital revolution to increase our carbon footprint, but to reduce it!