Damaged Joy: Fixing Digital Experience

By Taz Lake

Digital Transformation? But are you doing what is right for your customers?

Customers want their service with minimal interruption to their daily lives. Despite your strategy, they know your company at the operational level.

And your company is just the worst.

Doing the basics right for digital initiatives becomes more difficult as complexity increases, especially where web technology is involved. Fixes and improvements are par for the course. Yet many companies are still surprised by this reality. The value of plentiful monitoring, continuous improvements, automation and operational effectiveness cannot be overstated, especially in the new world of digital. Your customers care and so should you.

They are watching. They expect excellence. And you may be damaging their joy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Taz Lake
• Release date: Mar 25, 2019
• ISBN: 9780578477404

Taz Lake

Taz Lake is a technologist, writer, educator and advisor.  He has been involved in technology strategy and implementation for over two decades and has served multiple Fortune 500 companies.  He has been published online in the Huffington Post, Advertising Week and CMS Wire. Taz earned an MBA from Georgia State University with a concentration in Information Systems.  He also holds an additional MA from Wheaton College for Intercultural Studies and Communication, as well as an undergraduate degree from Duke University.  He lives in Atlanta with his wife and daughter. 

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INTRODUCTION

So, are you doing the right things for your customers in the digital space? Maybe you’re just doing things wrong. No customer wants to call your business. Customers don’t want a better IVR. They don’t want your latest chatbot. They want you to provide the service they are paying for with minimal interruption and heartache to their daily lives. They want your company to do its damn job.

No one should be proud of having huge support call centers — no one.

Giant call centers don’t show you care about customer experience. It tells customers your product or service experience is a failure. A call to support is a failure. When did you last look forward to calling the teams at your cable company, utility, computer support or insurance provider? What about the IRS, Social Security or Medicare?

Reducing problems and issues, reducing calls and inquiries should be the underlying motivation for true customer experience and satisfaction.

People just want your s*** to work.

That statement runs counter to our normal perspective of adding more and more features and capabilities to our existing businesses and systems. Doing the basics right is valuable, but it is also more challenging as complexity increases in the world of digital. It requires plentiful monitoring, continuous improvements, and operational effectiveness. Sadly, leaders don’t win awards and recognition for making it work. I’ve been in more than a few meetings where people say, No big deal, that is their job.

Be careful with that approach. Your customers are watching. They expect excellence. And you may be damaging their joy.

HOW WE GOT HERE

The origins of the Internet as we know it goes back to the creation of DoD’s ARPANET. From there we go to the invention of TCP/IP. Then in 1990 to the World Wide Web (WWW). That’s the visual interface you access through your computer, whether buying the latest gadget or convincing yourself (incorrectly) that you have some rare form of cancer. By making access and creation of information available to everyone with a computer, the democratization of information exchange emerged.

But the marketers hadn’t taken over quite yet in the early ’90s. When the WWW arrived, people came at it from different directions and backgrounds. The web was new and exciting, experts were sparse, and the possibilities were exciting. There were technical writers, creative designers, programmers, marketers, brand ambassadors, UNIX system administrators and more.

Then the supposed webmasters came. These were the mythical beasts. The Centaurs. The one-person wrecking crew. They could do it all and solve all the problems and issues that would arise. That was me in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Following this, specializations began to re-emerge as complexity increased. We moved away from static sites to dynamic sites. There was no way for one person to know everything. There wasn’t a need for only database admins or programmers either. There were language specialties — front-end, back-end, network configuration, system configuration, security, testing and so on. The emergence of apps in the web browser meant they had to work in various browser sizes. The appearance of mobile meant even more view sizes. From here, marketing technology, e-commerce, and social media emerged.

Now it is ubiquitous, and we call it The Internet. Whether we mean the web, the actual connectivity, social media or whatever. If you’re only a little younger than me, you expect it to be there all the time. The thought of being without a connection to check sports scores or Snapchat causes you real mental