Every time I run by that building I think of the Broken Windows Theory. In 1969 a Stanford psychologist left cars that appeared to be disabled in two different neighborhoods in the US as part of an experiment. The first neighborhood had a history of petty crime and vandalism. Predictably, that car was stripped of everything of value within 24 hours. The other car, however, was left in what would widely be considered a safe, upscale neighborhood. For more than a week that car went untouched. Things got interesting however when the experimenter himself damaged the car. Once the car had the appearance of neglect, it wasn’t long before “well-dressed, clean-cut, seemingly respectable individuals” were observed further vandalizing the vehicle. This experiment got a lot of attention at the time and eventually formed the basis for many socio-economic and criminology policies and strategies.

The main takeaways from the study are that problems should be addressed while they are small and that apathy breeds more apathy. In the case of the apartment building, I always wondered what the inside looks like. The apartments could rival anything in the city in terms of luxury. But how many people will never step foot inside because of how the outside looks?

Unfortunately, examples of broken windows in the physical world are plentiful. But they also exist in the software world, albeit in slightly subtler forms. They can show up behind the scenes as poor coding practices or technical debt and in more visible ways like usability issues or inconsistent user interfaces.

If the owners of the Executive Manor building care so little about the appearance of their sign, what can we infer about the care and maintenance of parts of the building we can’t see? Likewise, the attention to detail, or lack of it, in your software product communicates your brand standards to customers. All the little things add up to the overall customer experience. People do notice. If your Website or software looks outdated, will your customers assume that the technology is outdated as well? Can it be trusted with their personal and/or payment information?

One concept we discuss often here at ITX when crafting customer solutions is the idea of a loyalty ladder. In a nutshell, this is your customer’s journey across different thresholds with your product or brand. It starts with the first indicators of trust (subscribing to a newsletter, purchasing a product, etc), moving up to loyalty (deciding to do business with you again), and finally reaching advocacy (making a recommendation to others).

While you sometimes hear stories of a single instance of exceptional customer service creating a brand advocate, the reality is the more reliable and sustainable way to move customers along the ladder to advocacy is through small but regular and positive micro interactions with your product or brand. It’s these micro interactions, or the little details, that create a memorable customer experience and set your brand apart from your competition. As an example, my wife and I returned from our honeymoon to a bottle of champagne from our landlords. It was a small gesture from them but forever memorable for us.

Be thoughtful and intentional even in routine situations like asking for personal information from customers and when writing the copy in transactional emails for order receipts and newsletter subscription confirmations. These are the types of small but regular interactions your customers have with your company and are opportunities to impress. Being memorable in these small moments is especially important if they’re not entirely positive for the customer, such as when one of your Website visitors is looking for something and reaches a 404 page. A thoughtful 404 page with a search box or links to relevant suggested pages is more helpful and memorable than the standard “File Not Found” text.

Focusing on this level of detail does require a significant amount of time and energy but it represents a worthwhile investment in your customers’ experience. It’s likely that your competition is already making this investment. Nearly 25% of Fortune 100 companies and 10% of Fortune 500 companies have Chief Customer Officers in their C-suite who are responsible for the customer experience.1

Every brand that has created a truly positive and memorable experience for its customers has done so by paying attention to things their competition has not. What you don’t want is to be remembered for your “broken windows”.

1. Trevail, Charles. “It’s Time to Rethink the Chief Customer Officer Role”. AdAge.com,http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/rethinking-chief-customer-officer/303146/.

Originally published on the ITX blog at https://www.itx.com/ITX-Blog/Article/414/The-Broken-Windows-Customer-Experience

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Slides from a presentation I gave to the local WordPress Users Group recently on e-commerce basics and some important factors to consider when choosing an e-commerce solution.

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Like superheroes, they’ve partnered to create a super company called Level Five Associates. Level Five Associates’ uses their combined experience leading teams at the highest levels of military, civilian and non-profit organizations to provide companies and organizations with leadership and strategic planning to produce measurable outcomes through a culture of innovation and trust.

Luckily for us mere mortals, they’ve started blogging and sharing their leadership tips. Their first post, Why Level Five Associates? is online here. It’s pretty introductory right now but be sure to sign up for their email list to get the best of their thoughts and ideas delivered to your inbox twice a month.

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I suppose it would’ve been pretty easy to call somebody and tell them where I was going and when I expected to be back. But people are busy and that put the burden on them to remember when and if I checked back in. So what if I could automatically remind them?

I was drawn to computer programming because I like breaking problems down into pieces and solving them. So I sat down over the course of a couple of weekend nights and wrote a program to do just that. In a nutshell, my idea would allow you to choose a specific time when you wanted the system to check in with you. At that time you would let the system know you were OK by responding to it. If you didn’t respond, the system attempted to check in with you a few more times to avoid false alarms. If the system didn’t get a response after three tries it would notify an emergency contact you’d already established and let them know where you said you went and when you said you expected to be back.

The iPhone was released around the same time as I was working on this but apps weren’t as ubiquitous as they’ve become. So my application was designed to communicate via text message. At the appointed time, you’d get a text message reminding you to check in with the system. If you responded you were considered OK and that was the end of that. If you didn’t respond within a few minutes, the system would send another reminder text in 10-15 minutes. It would try checking in with you one more time before sending a text to your emergency contact letting them know they should try to get in touch and verify you were OK.

All the people I told about it were super excited to try it. Athletes wanted it for the same reasons I did. But most people also had other ideas about how it could be used. A single woman thought it made a great “safety net” for dating.

Previous to this I had no experience working with short message service (SMS) or any kind of mobile communications. But in about two weekends I had learned enough to build a working prototype. I designed a logo. I even talked to an attorney about potential liability and spent several hundred dollars to incorporate.

But I never did anything more about it. I wanted it to be better than it was. I had a list of other cool things I thought it needed to do. And I didn’t know how to do them. So instead I did nothing.

And every once in a while I get an email from somebody with the name of an app or a link and a note that says something like, “isn’t this like that idea you had that one time?” And the answer is usually, yes. Yes it is. Like Kitestring or bSafe or Nirbhaya. All apps that were featured recently in this Elle Magazine article. There’s even a company from Israel in my local tech incubator working on something very similar. But mine was more than an idea. Everything actually worked. And I wonder how some things might be different now if I had just launched with what I had instead of waiting for things to be perfect. Because what is perfect anyway?

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The National Museum of Play

The Strong already had several web properties built with Drupal that their staff had training with and was familiar using but needed a better mobile experience for parents visiting The National Museum of Play with their kids. For busy parents on the go, the mobile site had to be quick and easy to use; focused on where it is, when it is open, and their current exhibits. We were able to build an attractive, easy to use mobile experience that tied in content from their existing website, keeping the two properties (mobile and desktop) in sync and preventing their marketing staff from having to enter duplicate content.

About The National Museum of Play: The National Museum of Play is part of The Strong in Rochester, New York. Established in 1969 and based initially on the personal collection of Rochester, NY native Margaret Woodbury Strong, the museum opened to the public in 1982. Since then it has refined and increased its collections (hundreds of thousands of items), and expanded twice, in 1997 and 2006. The collections of the National Museum of Play include hundreds of thousands of historical objects related to play, including the world’s largest and most comprehensive collection of dolls, toys, and games.

Geva Theatre

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Greentopia

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Kate Wolcott from k8creative provided the design and I created a custom theme to implement the design. The redesign uses their existing CMS (WordPress) so none of the processes have changed for the folks tasked with publishing content and maintaining the site. But the redesign is much modern and open and the content has been restructured to make it easier for visitors to find what they’re looking for.

Please visit the TEDxBuffalo website for more information on attending, participating, and sponsorship opportunities.

You can see the original TEDxBuffalo site here.

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Pegasus Early Music is a non-profit whose performances “…encompass over 400 years of music – from medieval to romantic – played on period instruments.”

A large part of the motivation for the redesign was to move away from a content management system that was no longer supported by its creator and had been heavily modified to meet the group’s needs. Since the existing site had been around for a while, it was important to keep a lot of the great content that had been created, and indexed by search engines, over the years. But the site a slightly dated look that could benefit from a little facelift and a little reorganization of its content.

Pegasus Early Music fans can visit the new Media page to listen to clips or watch videos from a variety of Pegasus concerts throughout the years. Embedded Facebook and Twitter feeds provide at-a-glance updates of what’s going on with the group.

One of the trickier aspects of the redesign was reproducing the custom programmed ticket purchasing functionality. Each season, Pegasus Early Music hosts around half a dozen performances featuring a variety of different performers. Most performances are a one-time event but there are some repeat performances which give fans a choice of dates, times and even locations to see a particular concert. So it was important that any e-commerce solution be able to accomodate an event that allowed customers to choose between a handful of different options. To make things a little more complex, fans can also purchase a series subscription, which includes tickets to all the concerts in a given season. Again, the series subscription option would have to allow customers to choose between dates if a given performance was taking place on more than one day. Since trust and ease of use are large parts of any successful e-commerce effort, it was important to Deb that the ticket purchasing process be as simple and seamless as possible.

In addition to allowing fans to purchase tickets, the purchase functionality is also tied into a calendar feature. Any concert events that Deb creates are automatically added to a Concert Calendar area in the left-hand sidebar of the site that allows visitors to easily browse and see what events are taking place on a monthly basis.

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The biggest motivator for the redesign was that Jason at BFLO Harbor Kayak wanted to offer his customers the convenience of booking their rentals online. Now he’s set up with reservation system that allows staff members to create recurring events for their weekly kayak tours and standup paddleboard lessons. Some of the other features include the ability for staff to set attendance limits for tours and lessons to maintain a positive experience for the attendees. Jason and BFLO Harbor Kayak staff can also offer early-bird registration discounts and other price promotions. Customers can see the dates and times tours and lessons are available in easy-to-read monthly calendar format. The changes are paying off and BFLO Harbor Kayak had several fully booked tours and lessons, all online, within days of the new site’s launch.

All in a mobile-friendly package!

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I partnered with Buffalo-based graphic designer Amber Rampino to build this WordPress site based on her designs. The theme itself has some built-in interactive and easy to use functionality like slideshows, rotating client testimonials, and an FAQ with collapsible accordion sections to save space. Personally, I think the custom Five Star logo map markers on the locations page are cool. All of course in an attractive, functional design by Amber!

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