INNOVATION SPECIAL ....................How To Turn Customer Complaints Into Innovation

How To Turn Customer Complaints Into Innovation
 
When you deal with customers, you might hear more complaints than praise. Maybe it’s simply human nature to dwell on the negative. Or maybe customers believe that, as the adage goes, “The squeaky wheel gets the grease.” But don’t be dismayed. Customer complaints can be a source of valuable feedback for improving the user experience of your products—if you’re willing to dig for it.
Mine The Value in Customer Complaints
What benefit can an unhappy customer provide? If one customer is complaining, likely many others feel the same way, but will remain silent and take their business elsewhere instead of telling you. So when a customer complains, they’re providing helpful feedback that you wouldn’t have received otherwise.

For example, in 1996, a farmer in the Sichuan Province of China wrote to the Chinese consumer appliance maker, Haier, to complain that the water hose of his washing machine kept clogging. As the repairman serviced the machine, he learned that the farmer had been using it to wash sweet potatoes because no other machines were available for this purpose. Haier headquarters heard of the incident and, upon further inquiry, found out that many people were using its washing machines for sweet potatoes and clothes. So the company enhanced the washing machine to meet both needs. The first ten thousand of these machines sold out immediately.eet potatoes and clothes. So the company enhanced the washing machine to meet both needs. The first ten thousand of these machines sold out immediately.

Dig Deeper into the Customer’s Needs 

You’ll gain even more valuable insight if you make it a point to engage with customers continuously to truly understand their needs. Making the effort to know your customers’ mental models, emotional blocks and drives, and their ecosystems can provide huge payoffs.

You can achieve both cost and time savings when you engage User Experience (UX) before development begins. In her video, The ROI of User Experience, Dr. Susan Weinschenk from Human Factors International states that 50 percent of a development team’s time is spent fixing problems that are avoidable when proper User Experience methods are employed and fixing a problem after development is 100 times the cost of fixing it during development…

Google GOOG +0.28% has taken this approach with its Google Glass rollout. Google Glass will not be officially available to the general public until sometime in 2014. But starting in February of 2013, they began the Glass Explorer program that made Google Glass available for beta testing. As Google has implemented new features, it has also expanded the Glass Explorer program to gain feedback from additional users.

Digging deeper into customer needs is one way to mine customer complaints for gold nuggets that may lead to innovation.

In another example, a major e-commerce company conducted usability tests with customers making purchases from its site. The site included a form that required customers to register before they could complete a purchase. The form would enable repeat customers to purchase faster, and the team thought first time-purchasers wouldn’t mind registering to speed up subsequent purchases. UX testing revealed that shoppers did not like the form—and it prevented a lot of sales. By changing the location of the registration and making it optional, the number of customers making purchases increased by 45% and the site saw an additional $300 million in sales in the first year.

How to Create a Better User Experience

Of course, achieving these types of results requires expertise. To succeed, you need to work with UX practitioners who have a proven track record and a deep understanding of human-computer interaction. A seasoned professional will help guide you to success by applying the right techniques to the problems you’re seeing and setting up a strategy to help you achieve your customer engagement and user experience goals.

By working with your customers you can:

1. Gain insights for improvements and innovation from watching customers use your products.
2. Evaluate new ideas early and often with low-fidelity prototypes.
3. Be more agile and get the right ideas to market faster.
4. Make your customers feel important, build stronger relationships, and increase brand loyalty.
5. Create a customer for life.

Happy customers will come back for more and will bring others with them. So if you don’t already have a User Experience team to ensure that your products or services are meeting your customers’ needs, consider bringing in experts to get you started. You’ll find great resources to learn more about User Experience at www.uxpa.org and www.humanfactors.com.

Albert Einstein once said that any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction. Working with your customers and following proven User Experience practices is a step in the right direction.

Jacqui Miller, SungardAS

http://www.forbes.com/sites/sungardas/2014/03/28/how-to-turn-customer-complaints-into-innovation/