Customer Rebound

Most firms, or at least many, are very good about user experience for any interaction that it is in their immediate interest to accommodate, and completely dreadful about any interaction that isn’t. It’s very easy to sign up for cell phone service, and very difficult to cancel your contract. It’s very easy to purchase an item and a department store, but very hard to exchange it if you later find it’s the wrong size. There are many examples.

A remark I hear fairly often is that companies purposefully make these transactions very difficult so that people will just give up. It’s a justifiable perception, and the motive for firms to do so is unmistakable … but I’ve never been called upon to purposefully make a transaction harder to complete.

I must admit, the notion has its appeal to splice together some of the awkward and difficult elements I’ve seen into a single, horrific task flow that will completely defeat all attempts to successfully complete it, just as an exercise in absurdity that will cause a great deal of grief to people I will never see. But then, I’m a little bit evil that way.

But the truth is that I have never been involved, nor heard from anyone who has, in a design process in which the business requirements were to make the transaction as difficult as possible for the user so that they will give up and the firm can keep their money. It just doesn’t happen that way, at least not on purpose.

What also doesn’t happen is that a firm shows much interest in investing a single dollar or allowing any employee to devote a minute of their time to considering how to make those transactions easier. They’re as difficult as they are not because of attentive design, but for lack of attentive design. Simply stated, if it weren’t for user experience professionals, every transaction would probably be that clumsy.

But this is where the core of the accusation is supported: firms choose not to spend any resources making such transactions easier on the customer because there is no ROI. That is, they don’t purposefully make them harder to keep the customer’s money, but they don’t purposefully make them any easier (though perhaps intentional neglect is the moral equivalent of purposeful harm if you know it to be so) because it doesn’t make any money for them – which seems like a roundabout way of saying exactly the same thing.

The problem for user experience professionals is convincing firms to spend budget on transactions that don’t make them any money – no ROI , no resources. The closest I’ve come to succeeding is to suggest that the firm take a look at its rebound rate: the number of customers who closed their accounts but reopened them later. If the last impression made on a customer is a negative one, the chance of their bouncing back is significantly diminished – or conversely, that if the “exit” task is made less painful, the number of returning customers would be increased.

Naturally, that idea didn't get very far at all: it was promptly rejected, and employees were forbidden even to discuss the idea any further.

I still think that would bear out in reality … but I would likely need some hard numbers to revive it from the trash heap, at least at this particular firm. I’ve not seen any research into the phenomenon, for or against, so my sense is the idea has not been given much consideration anywhere outside of the industries such as retail where it seems to have taken root.