Back in dark ages when you had to physically go into a store to get your problems solved or your questions answered, you were in the best possible position to be truly heard and understood by the company. Standing face-to-face with a CSR triggered that person’s need to completely understand you – your issues; your concerns; your demeanor; your nature; your personality; your needs; and the context of the situation – and then appropriately solve your problem in a way that best suited YOU, the individual. Since no two people are the same, it makes sense that no two customer service interactions were the same.
Fast-forward to 2010 and think about all the different mediums through which you can now engage a company for customer support: the store employees, phone, email, live chat, Twitter, Facebook, text/SMS, GetSatisfaction.com and other support forums. 
It doesn’t take much to see that there’s been a widening “understanding gap” between you (the individual customer) and the CSRs directed to serve you. When it would have been laughable to see a CSR try to repeat the exact same customer service interaction for multiple people that walked into his or her store in a given day, it’s now standard practice for e-mail and live chat support for many companies.
The test for today’s companies is whether or not they can stay committed to the concept of truly understanding the needs, wants, problems and required solutions for each individual customer. Technology can assist this process or work against it. It can be used to gain information about a customer’s likes, dislikes, preferred methods of communication, attitudes toward products or services, etc. – all of which will ultimately enhance the customer experience and the overall service quality. On other hand, technology can be leveraged to provide measly 140 character “answers” or stock email template “solutions” to problems that really call for in-depth conversations over the phone or in-person.
While the “face-to-face” age of customer service required companies to truly understand you (after all, you stood directly in front of their CSRs!), today’s technology-driven consumer marketplace has no such requirements.
Which companies in your world go the distance to integrate new technologies with exceptional live customer support to truly understand the people they call their customers?
The above picture serves as my inspiration for writing this blog today. I was browsing around on Fingerhut’s website, and upon looking at the homepage I knew what I was in for. The main blue navigation tab at the top tells me the main categories of products that Fingerhut sells, and drop-down categories appear for each, as shown under “apparel.” I looked just below that, where I can shop the newest items, their catalog, clearance, customer connection, and web exclusives. Below that, another label that appears on every page while browsing the site advertises Fingerhut’s Valentine’ Day Gift Finder. To the left, I have the option again to shop by category, but this time there are no drop-down subcategories, which makes me wonder why it’s there at all. Below that I can shop their specialty stores, which is nifty. I glanced at the bottom of the homepage after scrolling down only to find the ability to shop by category yet again! I had to wonder what to make of all this, why would a website be so redundant with its navigation tabs, especially when it needs to have an attractive and sleek homepage? Surely all this clutter must be user-friendly, right?
ABtests.com, an online usability researcher, conducted a case study with 2053 transactions of the Official Vancouver 2010 Olympic Store homepage. They hypothesized that too many banner spaces create clutter and that secondary, or what I refer to as the vertical, navigation, is difficult to navigate. The following are the three versions of the homepage:
Homepage Snapshot: Control
Homepage Snapshot: Version A
The results were not surprising; Version A resulted in a 12.54% less bounce rate ( the percentage of initial visitors to a site who immediately leave the site for a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site) and an average order value increase of 5.16%.
In this case, it shows that sometimes for navigation tabs, less is more. A clean, sleek homepage like Version A performs better than a cluttered, overwhelming Version B. For a website like Fingerhut that has its main navigation tab three times over, it would not hurt to undergo a little spring cleaning before springtime shoppers bloom and the winter shoppers return from their flight home to the website.
Homepage Snapshot: Version B
