Happy Birthday, COVID. Sorry, your party was lame.
Jimmie Singleton
A whole year of pandemic living, how crazy is that! Over the last year, university AV and IT teams have been pushed to the limits of their abilities and forced to really think outside of the box. But at what cost did this stress affect the customer? In thinking of technologies for the customer, did we leave the user out of the process? I think yes. Let’s take a look at what we did and how we can fix it!
DON’T EXCLUDE YOUR USER
In the rush to get everything working this past year, tech managers across all universities had to make executive decisions on how to create a system that gets the job done but doesn’t break the bank and hopefully has a use in the future. None of this was necessarily wrong for the situation, but because the process was so rushed it left the user unable to provide feedback.
For tech managers, the technology was “easy”. How hard could it be? There are only 4 icons on the touchpanel, but what wasn’t mentioned was the 3 sub-menus that appear when you click 1 of those 4 icons. When you are tech-savvy and understand the inner workings of an AV/IT system of course it will be easy, but for a professor who would normally show up and write on a chalkboard, this could be extremely difficult.
If you normally design systems and processes without getting user input, STOP DOING THAT. If you ever wonder why your support tickets and calls are so high it is probably because your users don’t understand the system. If the user has input and feels valued in the design process, then they will be more likely to understand the choices made. And this is where someone would normally tell me “We can’t please everyone!”. Sure this is true, but where are we spending our time? Are we catering to the professors who actually want to provide input? If a user doesn’t want to provide input and be involved in the process then they have less reason to complain as they had the opportunity (and still do) to make changes.
Understanding the situation we were put in this last year, we were forced to make decisions. Now that we are at this point, what can we do to make up for the lost design feedback?
Intentionally Solicit Feedback
If you want to provide a superior customer experience, provide superior service.
This means going out of your way to do things that go above and beyond the customer’s expectations. To make up for this last year, one of the best things we can do is solicit feedback and get the customer involved in the process. Above, I mentioned that if users have the opportunity to provide feedback they should have less reason to write a bad review or call for support. This is true, but simply offering the option of providing feedback in a form is not the way to do it. How do you make your users aware of this and get the much-needed feedback? Conversation, conversation, conversation. Schedule a time with the user to discuss what the current experience is like and find out what you can do to make it better. 90% of the time it is an easy fix.
To follow up on that, STOP DEPENDING ENTIRELY ON SURVEYS! We all know which type of people fill out surveys, the ones who have a really great experience or a really bad experience. You need feedback from the middle group of people that have pain points but not enough pain to fill out a 10-page survey. Oftentimes, these surveys only provide so much information, and a service rating is great to put in a PowerPoint but doesn’t provide many action items to resolve the issues. Once again, the answer is conversation. I know I stress on this hard and you probably feel I am saying the same thing, but I see so many people (especially in IT) who are bad at this and don’t care to take the time to improve the experience. When a customer calls the support team, they are generally not happy due to something not working. This is not the time to have a 30-minute conversation on their pain points. Fix the issue and get them back to what they are working on. Later on, reach back out and let them know that. you would like to take the time to hear their feedback on what could be better. They rarely say no.
When they say yes, be prepared to hear things you won’t like. When you ask a customer what they think of a touch panel design, they don’t know anything about how long it took you to design it. All they know is that it does or doesn’t work for them. Have enough of these conversations and you will get a consistent set of data with action items on what could be better.
Many of us have a chance to come back from COVID with a fresh start with our customers. Take this time to make that experience amazing and do not skip steps.