The Disservice of Customer Service

"Our version of a perfect customer experience is one in which our customer doesn’t want to talk to us." - Jeff Bezos

Of course Jeff is talking about the intuitive, convenient, self-service nature of amazon.com (see full interview here). Working for a product company, I completely buy this philosophy. None of our customers purchased our products such that they would need to search our website, or contact us to resolve issues or help them use the product. Each and every time they do, we are already reacting to a problem, a problem they should never ideally encounter. It seems that if one is to truly take Customer experience to it's inevitable conclusion, the right level of customer service for any company, other than a service company, is clearly none at all.

Of course, we need to be there to catch our customers, it is impossible to be 100% fool-proof. Amazon realize this too, and in fact they have great customer service when you need it, which is rare, and so likely a very cost effective solution too. The challenge is that, it is a very thin line between developing a customer service function that is a rarely required, but highly effective safety net; and providing a crutch to allow for inferior product usability, and/or business processes and policies. Very few companies get this and indeed Jeff can be justifiably proud of how effective amazon.com has become in creating such a simple, intuitive and problem-free experience. It is quite likely, the most convenient ecommerce website ever, handling almost every eventuality in a slick intuitive manner.

Amazon.com have been very careful in making sure that it is the need to access customer service that is removed, and not the access itself. It is in fact quite easy to access customer service on Amazon.com, and extremely pleasurable, just not required. Working for a product company, I would be so bold as to declare that a key measure of successful experience design, be it UX or CX, be it the product itself or the company's business practice, should be our effectiveness in allowing a customer to get up and running, get proficient and stay proficient in using our products with zero interaction with our great customer service teams. Achieving that measure at as close to 100% as possible, would truly be a guarantee of a great experience!