Convenience and Friction in Customer Experience

Another major theme in German CX is friction. Sometimes you arrive at a business that is supposed to be open, but it isn’t. Sometimes there is a note, sometimes not. There is a phone number…but nobody answers. There is a website but it doesn’t work and the contact form is broken.

Even worse for the CX is the boomerang effect, where repeated follow-ups are needed with the same person or organisation. Emails often bounce or just go unanswered forever. How many hours have I spent crafting well-written emails in my best German only to find they go straight into the void? Too many to count!

The lack of response can mean almost anything. Either they don’t know (or care) how to respond, didn’t get around to it, or passed the task to someone else who didn’t know (or care) or get around to responding. Think that task can come off your to-do list? Wrong! It keeps coming back around again while you chase after people and there you have it again, Ärger.

German businesses can be surprisingly oblivious to CX friction. They can be slow to change and they expect customers to absorb nearly unlimited frustration. But why should customers put up with your unmotivated employees or clunky business processes?

Friction acts like a ticking timebomb ready to go off when the chance arises. As soon as a competitor begins to offer people a better service with less friction, those unhappy customers will take the first opportunity to bolt. Dissatisfied customers have no reason whatsoever to be loyal to your business. Sooner or later, somebody is going to please that customer more than you and then it will be too late to win them over.

Exhibit C: Vodafone

Vodafone used to be our mobile service provider in Germany. In the few years that we were customers, the entire family was subjected to never-ending marketing calls. We asked them repeatedly to stop calling us, to no effect. Finally, we had to go into a Vodafone shop and complain in person to get any relief.

These people called us like their very lives depended on it and ignored all requests to be left in peace. This was not an accident – someone in sales and marketing had to decide that customer harassment was the way to meet their targets. I would love to know where in the marketing Bible it says that massively irritating customers is Job #1. It’s hard to imagine anyone believing that such an awful Customer Experience would be good for business.

At that point, we were already understandably upset with Vodafone and then a new issue appeared – something that busted the relationship like a pinata. Vodafone had engaged with third-party providers that we didn’t need, want, or even know about. One of them used deceptive mobile website pop-ups (e.g. “You have just won…”) to trick one of our children. Clicking on this pop-up activated a subscription that added new charges onto our monthly bill. So we complained to Vodafone customer service and…they didn’t do a thing.

They just gave us the phone number of their third-party provider (scammer) so we could go deal with it ourselves. That was both irresponsible and risky. Since our customer relationship was with Vodafone, this third-party provider had much less to lose by damaging the relationship, but their conduct was always going to reflect back on Vodafone, who certainly did have something to lose.

That’s exactly how things played out. It took some arguing but the third-party eventually agreed to refund the charges. Ultimately, getting the money back didn’t erase years of accumulated friction. The damage was done.

Key takeaways for Vodafone:

• Always respect customers’ wishes in how they wish to be contacted, how often and for which purposes

• Aggressive marketing to customers is inappropriate and counterproductive

• Do not require customers to contact you over and over again to fix the same problem

• Choose third-party providers carefully and make sure that they reflect well on you

• When a customer has a complaint about one of your partners, it’s your job (not the customer’s) to fix the problem with urgency

• Do not tolerate unethical conduct from your partners

• Do not exploit your customers’ children – ever

Exhibit D: O2

At the earliest opportunity, we switched our mobile service to Vodafone’s competitor O2. So far, our experience with O2 has been straightforward and positively uneventful. We’re happy with the service and they certainly don’t disturb my calm in any way.

I never thought that boring could be a great Customer Experience. It turns out that it can be if one of the benefits of the service is peace of mind. O2 has been as reliable as the O2 I’m breathing right now, so I don’t have to think about them at all. Maybe we’re just lucky as it could have been a very different experience. But there is this one little thing that we still miss…

Here’s what Vodafone got consistently right: they made it incredibly easy to look at our bill. Every month, Vodafone would send us an email with the invoice attached as a PDF file. We only had to click once to open the email then click once more to open the file, and voila!

Now to see the O2 bill I have to click to open the email, click on the download invoice button, wait for the O2 website to load in my browser, log in and finally click on download. That’s 28 keystrokes for O2 compared with two for Vodafone, so it’s much less convenient. For most of the past year, O2’s invoices couldn’t be viewed or downloaded from Chrome either, so there were even more steps involved to open up a different browser and try again.

Key takeaways for O2:

• Boring can be a great experience if it means that everything is running perfectly

• One of the best benefits a service business can provide is peace of mind

• Less is sometimes more in CX (i.e. customers don’t always want to interact with you)

• Look for ways to streamline processes and eliminate unnecessary steps

Where does German CX go from here?

To offer an excellent Customer Experience, you just need commitment to putting the customer first as your starting point. In that respect, Germany still has some catching up to do. Talk is cheap – it’s easy to say words like “the customer is king” (Der Kunde ist König). It’s much harder to live those words and act upon them faithfully.

This is where a stoic attitude towards frustration, and worse, Ärger, is a strong disadvantage. CX requires a plan to deliver excellence and the vigilance to see it through, correcting and improving as you go. Where Ärger is the norm, complacency and lack of accountability tend to follow. No one feels responsible for the things that go wrong, so no one takes responsibility for making things right.

The habit of thinking about another person and what they need is a skill that has to be learned. Despite decades of progress in user-centred design almost everywhere else, I’ve seen websites for German restaurants that give long family histories, and pictures of the dog, but forget to mention their business hours. It just didn’t occur to them that customers would want to know when the restaurant is open.

Some businesses websites still feature tons of colour pollution, scrolling GIFs, flashing words, and spinning icons. Some have entire sections missing or use 1990s-era animated under construction” gifs where the content is supposed to be. Sometimes it’s like the entire profession of user experience never happened here.

These are not just small business failings. Global brands with big IT budgets can make juddering errors as well. I once spent over two hours trying to book a service appointment on the Bosch.de website. This involved entering details in a multi-page service form. Each data field had very specific formatting requirements but no guidelines or hints to say what they were. Get it wrong and the entire form would reset and you had to start over from the beginning.

Brand differentiation is increasingly driven by CX rather than price. Amazon’s exceptional customer service is having a profound effect on consumer expectations, even in thrifty Germany. To make the big leap forward into the present, German businesses will need to focus on delivering great experiences.

Convenience and friction are two areas with the greatest potential to upgrade German CX, but to do this, businesses will have to decide that no amount of Ärger is normal, natural, or tolerable when it comes to their relationship with customers.