The Struggle between Short-Term Profits and Remarkable Customer Experiences

If you are working at the interface with customers you have probably been in this situation before: Should you make a decision focusing on short-term profits and accept customer experience trade-offs or should you focus on delivering a truly remarkable customer experience? When you look at this problem from an abstract point-of-view the answer seems to be clear: of course you should focus on the customer experience.

Yet if you are facing an operational decision whether you should increase the number of agents in your customer care center or if you should save costs because service-levels are still “good enough” you know that this question is more complex. One has to accept that there are times when you are not able to deliver a remarkable customer experience and I personally believe that consciously accept these situations as outliers is not a problem. But there is one area where you should not accept trade-offs: strategic decisions.

Don’t let operational goals interfere with strategic goals

If you are truly committed to delivering remarkable customer experiences you have to form your design decisions with the customer experience in mind. Kevin Mattice has written an article where he calls designers to be arbiters of truth who protect the customer experience.

Designers should be arbiters of the truth: They should be the kind of people who stand up and tell it like it is, and that usually calls for courage. Fixing a bad customer experience requires the courage to admit that something’s wrong, and it only comes from a willingness to be transparent, to be open and honest, to communicate, and to be accountable. Good design is all that, and good designers are as transparent as they can be, even if it hurts them. Sometimes it does.

Now you might say this is a mundane statement. But just have a look at the integration of MySpace with News Corp and you will understand that this is not just an empty call to action. At News Corp strategic design decisions have been made with a focus on short-term profits instead of the long-term customer experience. If you have been wondering why MySpace lost its edge over Facebook make sure to read the article “The rise and fall of MySpace” in the Financial Times that brings light to some decisions made at News Corp. Here is the section that was most eye-opening to me:

[…] Former MySpace executives say News Corp dragged its feet over implementing Ajax, a program that allows users to send a message, an e-mail or to post a comment on their friends’ pages without having to open a new browser window. Facebook was quick to embrace Ajax but MySpace did not follow suit, partly because to do so would have reduced the number of page views the site generated and therefore its advertising revenue. “It would take five steps to post a comment or send a message, so five different pages would open,” explains another former executive. “There would be ads on each of those pages, so we were making money. We went to News Corp and said: ‘We want to change this but in the short term our revenues will drop.’ It became a long back and forth. [They] were pushing back – they wanted to make sure we weren’t going to drop our revenue numbers.” (emphasis added).

News Corp, meanwhile, contends that the request to adopt Ajax came at the beginning of 2009 – when Facebook had already established its supremacy. In other words, it was too little, too late.

Such a decision is hard to comprehend but the responsible advertising manager might have said: “Well, if we change the system now, revenues might drop now and I risk losing my job. If we keep it this way, we might lose revenues later on, but at least I will keep my job for now”.

Conclusion

Consciously making operative decisions to accept a trade-off on the customer experience can be accepted if they are indeed based on operational conditions – increased call-center activity or short-term product and service problems. Nevertheless strategic decision should never be influenced by operative goals and responsible managers have to ensure that employees are able to openly communicate – to speak the truth – when short-term profit gains might have a negative long-term impact on the customer experience.

Read the full article “The rise and fall of MySpace” in the Financial Times

Read the full article “The Clear Way” by Kevin Mattice