I had another unfortunate customer experience
that set my mind in motion: I went to a store to buy an item, knowing exactly
what I needed and exactly where it was located, and was stopped on my way four
times by employees asking me if I needed their help. I didn’t need their help and was becoming
increasingly vexed by their constant interruptions – and probably overly so
because I was on my lunch break and needed to make the purchase quickly and get
back to the office and felt they were slowing me down.
My sense was that they must have had an
employee meeting that morning, where the manager stressed the importance of
being helpful to customers – that, or the store had a shoplifting problem and
the managers knew that offering to help is a subtle way of letting people know
they’re being watched – and though this made it a little more understandable,
it was no less vexatious to be constantly interrupted while performing a task
with unsolicited and unnecessary offers of help.
This irritation lingered after I returned to
the office to participate in a design session, in which a group of people (most
of whom weren’t designers) were gathered to address a problem with an acquisition
flow. The problem with the flow, which
was quite obvious, was a vague and slightly offensive question on the page
where there was a high drop-off rate.
Reword the question, provide some in-context assistance, and the problem
would likely be resolved.
Unfortunately, this is not what happened: one
of the non-designers in the room insisted that the question had to be worded
exactly as written for “legal reasons” (in addition to being a non-designer, he
as also a non-lawyer, and I’ve never seen a legislation that mandated the exact
wording of questions) and that the in-context assistance needed to be displayed
for all users, rather than “hidden” behind a help icon. So everyone who visited the page, even the
70% who would have answered that question without assistance, would have to
read a couple of paragraphs before proceeding (or likely, would read two
sentences, skip the rest, and ignore any other text presented in the rest of
the flow).
Obviously, this was a terrible idea – but the
person in question was the fair-haired child of a powerful executive and could
do no wrong, so he had to be appeased in spite of the damage it would do. This happens all too often, and it pains me
to inflict bad design on the customers, but in the long run I expect I will be
able to fix it, as this solution would not cure the drop-out rate and I will
make a case for a better solution in future.
But I digress …
The point is that after having a horrible
experience in a retail store with employees whose unsolicited offers of
unneeded help were irritating, I returned to the office to find a similar
practice taking place in the online channel, and had to swallow that as well.
I’d belabor the point further, but I expect it’s
already been made, and going on about it would turn a useful observation into a
rant. Service means helping the
customer, but good service means knowing when help is needed and – more to the
point – recognizing when help is not needed and staying discreetly out of the
customer’s way.
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