How Do You Want to Contact Us?
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A simple "Contact Us" page makes me happy. There's nothing I find more frustrating when I need help from a provider than to find no phone numbers anywhere. OR, only finding a phone number when my issue isn't pressing and I'd rather just drop them an email.
An example of one I love is DirecTV's. A couple times I've had random questions about programming and equipment, so I drop an email. They've always responded within 24 hours. The handful of times I've needed immediate attention, I easily find a phone number (or many), and, luckily, I haven't spent more than a few minutes on hold before speaking to a human.
Cox attempts to do the same under "Customer Support," but I have to click a few times to get where I want, which isn't necessarily a bad thing as much as it's just not as straightforward. Same with Verizon, which has me choose which category my specific problem falls into; thankfully, they offer a "none of the above" option, which seems to always be my choice.
Apple clearly prefers that I call, plus I have to jump through some diagnostic hoops before I'm allowed to submit an email. Dell is the same way, except they won't let me email or join in a 24/7 chat unless I have a service tag. Sure, these are both logical requests of me, but I'd argue that they don't necessarily equate to a frustrated user as the most friendly or efficient.
Anyway, I've noticed that more behemeth companies are straying from what seemingly used to be the "Contact Us on Our Terms" pages, which had a choose-your-adventure style process that may or may not end with actually contacting the company. Maybe I'm just getting to be a more patient user, but as big businesses like CNN and Starbucks start making attempts to interact with their direct users, I'm betting that I wasn't the only person who found convoluted "Contact Us" pages maddening.
Learning Product Development From a Candy Maker
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A few years ago, Nina Wanat moved to California. After working as a screenwriter and attending law school, she figured out what she really wanted to do was attend culinary school. Nina decided to start a blog called Sweet Napa to, as she put it, "remember all that I was learning -- everything from preventing exploding pies to shaping chocolate dolphins."
It turns out this blog was more important to her upcoming business strategy than she most likely realized at the time. When she later conceived of her business idea to sell high-end candy bars ($5 a piece), her blog became the testing grounds for various recipes she was coming up with. She created prototypes for orange, whiskey, coffee , banana, and coconut flavored candy bars and solicited feedback from her readers to gauge their interest. Her transparency not only helped her see what worked and what didn't -- it also attracted a loyal base of readers. These people would become her first group of paying customers when she later launched her candy bar business at BonBonBar.com.
Here are three lessons we can learn from Nina:
- Be public about your product ideas. Don't develop products in isolation and then solicit feedback only after you've invested hundreds or thousands of hours developing a production-ready product.
- Business strategies should be focused, but not product-specific. If your business is contingent upon the success of a single product, your chances of success are much lower.
- Try out lots of ideas, but be selective about what you actually release to production. After trying all those candy bar recipes, BonBonBar had two candy bars available at launch (they have four now).
Do You Need to Change the Game to be Successful?
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At Refresh DC a couple nights ago, Sean Greene from LaunchBox Digital gave a piece of advice I first heard in business school and have caught a few times since. It's that when starting a new venture, you can't strive for incremental improvement; rather, you must aim for dramatic innovation.
To illustrate what this means, let's use the example of DVDs vs. Blu-ray discs. DVDs were a huge innovation that changed the way people interacted with their video playback devices; no more rewinding tapes at the end movies or fast-forwarding for five minutes to get to a particular part. Recently, Blu-ray discs have incrementally improved upon DVDs. With greater storage capacity, they can deliver full-length movies at a higher resolution. But they don't change how we watch a movie, they just make the experience a little better. Here are a few more:
- Nintendo Wii vs. Playstation 3
- Netflix vs. Blockbuster Online
- Twitter vs. Pownce
In those four examples, it's probably better to have been the innovator than the incremental improver. But, does a new company have to dramatically innovate to be massively successful? Think about these companies:
- Firefox - There were a ton of browsers before Firefox came around in late 2004. It's now used by about 18% of the market, but it didn't fundamentally change what a web browser was. To many who were hungry for something besides Internet Explorer though, it represented a better option.
- Facebook - Facebook serves the same basic purpose as a host of other sites, including MySpace and Friendster, which are both well-trafficked and older than Facebook. Users possibly looking for something less cluttered than MySpace or cooler and newer than Friendster flocked to Facebook.
- Digg - Slashdot was around in the late nineties. Digg launched seven years later. The big change was simply the lack of any editorial oversight as to what made it on the front page; not exactly Earth shattering innovation, yet they get about 20 million unique visitors per month.
From this small list of examples, it appears at least possible to be hugely successful by incrementally improving an existing product. But is there any potential downside to striving for dramatic innovation? Well yes; you can burn yourself out trying to come up with the "game changing" idea before you even get started. Sometimes, you need to get your feet wet before the really good ideas start to flow.
So, you shouldn't necessarily reject the idea of getting into a market that already has some competition, even if you don't (yet) have the game changing idea. You can compete if you have specific expertise in an area, passion for that industry, and a good team. Sean provided another piece of advice, which is that there's a lot of money to be made by hitting singles (profitable businesses), instead of trying to slug home runs (billion dollar acquisitions). And to hit these singles, you don't necessarily need to change the whole game.
Why Personas are Valuable
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Creating personas that are representative of the key audiences clients are trying to reach is baked into our process here at Viget. We undertake this process for a number of reasons, not least of which is to guide our decisions about priorities and to re-orient discussions when personal preferences get in the way.
How do we do it? Well, ideally, we’d have no budget constraints or time restrictions so we could survey at least three individuals from each audience group the client identifies. We’d gather quantifiable data about their likes and dislikes, record their demographics and goals, measure their actions and behaviors on various sites, and keep them in the loop so, upon launch, we have the perfect use cases for testing. Whenever the engagement terms allow, we love being able to conduct this intensive research so our clients have feedback straight from the horse’s mouth, as they say.
More often than not, however, we are on tight schedules and an overall estimated budget that doesn’t take into account the many weeks of intense research audience research requires. So, instead of scrapping the process all together, we compromise and create personas based on our local contacts plus internal and external assumptions—and it has proved invaluable for our clients.
In this typical process, we start by talking to clients about who they’re trying to reach, then we make some assumptions about those users. We assign them expected demographics, goals for using the site, desired actions we want them to take, and even a picture so we all know what that person might look like. We’ll circulate ideas to other staffers and identify potential contacts who embody these characteristics. We get staff and client feedback over the course of a couple weeks rather than a couple months, which is what more robust market research usually requires. In the end, our typical persona-generation process yields modified market research that’s pivotal to guiding the entire project without requiring excess budget and timelines.
Pennies From Heaven
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There are loads of people out there who want to help charities but don’t have a lot of extra cash lying around. Since we’ve all heard the hype of what social networks and pennies at a time can do, I figured I’d check it out.
I spent some time over the last few weeks using several Facebook apps that donate to various charities. I clicked my heart out. I sent plants to friends, I tended fish, I tested my vocab skills, I even sold my (old Hotmail) address to a marketing survey company for 5,000 extra grains of rice. What I’ve discovered is that it can be quite a workout to raise money this way. As an example, here’s the breakdown for an app that sends money to The Nature Conservancy—note that this is NOT a Nature Conservancy project; They are just the designated beneficiary.
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