Meeting the expectations set by customers and exceeding the features of preceding models can be a daunting task for any organization when the product in question is already close to perfection. With the bar already so high, Apple was still able to come up with some really nice features and here is a list of a few I personally liked –

Take  pictures while recording a video – How many times we have been met with this dilemma of still shots to video of an event. It is nice to know that now we can do both together. Android got this feature sometime back and now it is good to see that Apple has the same as well.

Panorama – 28 megapixel stitching together to form a panoramic image would be really beautiful. Again Samsung Galaxy S3 range and the new Nokia Lumia range boast of similar feature.

Microphone – Separate microphone when you are using the front or back of the camera. This along with noise cancellation should definitely lead to better voice quality.

Safari – Safari can open the same windows as are already open on your mac. Now this is a good feature for unified experience.

Siri – Personal assistant seems to be more intelligent. If you ask her, “ Which is the best movie?” She responds saying that it is a very subjective question. Apple had to do something about this after Siri had been telling users that Nokia Lumina was the best phone. Siri now has the capability to book you an open table for 4 in any city as it is integrated with OpenTableapp.

Passbook – This is a completely new addition. Passbook can collect all your e-tickets, boarding passes and loyalty card details at one place. You can even e-shred the boarding passes. How cool would it be to actually see the pass being shredded?

Gaming – iPhone 5 has the concept of time shift multiplayer, which means that you can actually play with your friends while they are not online. I am not sure how it would work though.

Racing – Demo of Real Racing 3 on the legendary race arena Laguna Sega showed full console quality in hands. Features like reflections off the side of the car, rear-view mirrors and lens flare promise to make it a more engaging affair.

Apple claims that iPhone 5 is 1.5 to 2 times faster in almost all applications and has a much longer battery life.  Though the new features are not at par with expectations, we would see millions queue up to buy the new toy. Wall Street Journal thinks the device could actually boost the gross national domestic product of the US by up to an astonishing five percent.

 Alarm Clock with Weather forecast and meeting update – Alarm clock that wakes me up and reads out weather forecast for the day for me along with my meetings. A device that can understand my speech, respond accordingly and can also sync to my calendar in real time.

Networked Digital Frame – A large size photo frame, which has the technology to connect to multiple facebook, picassa and flickr accounts. I can configure it to download the pictures uploaded by my closest friends and family. That way I would not need to connect to my machine. I would have real time updates right in my living room.

Phone Apps -

Status Update – An application to notify me every time there is an update from selected group of friends. And with a command, it can read me updates as well. So I do not need to scroll down my home page on facebook or visit my friend’s pages individually to make sure that I have not missed on the happenings in their life.

Mobile Money – I really want the freedom to pay anywhere from my phone. I wish the banks and telecom companies are faster in delivering a mobile wallet to me.  Imagine, there is no need to carry so many cards and cash. You just have your phone and you pay using your phone. Your Nol card is also configured in your phone. So next time you travel by metro, you do not have to stand in the queue to buy a ticket or recharge your card. This mobile wallet can be connected to a credit card or straight debit to my account.

Car Apps –

Wifi –  A wifi in my car at reasonable price.

Online Music – Once I have wifi in my car, I want to have the ability to stream music from my itunes (using cloud) or simply from any music site.

GPS – My GPS updates itself, especially at a place like Dubai where roads change every other day. The seller can increase the cost of the initial device, but please save me from this need to update the software.

Parking Spotter – Imagine having a device in your car to scan ahead and spot the free parking spot for you. Life would be so easy if this happens.

No Passwords Please – Websites use fingerprints or face recognition.  This would eradicate the need for me to remember endless passwords. And my online identity would be much safer.

Projector Phone – A device to convert my smartphone to a projector, without compromising the quality or animation of my presentation.  I can either save the presentation on the phone, or connect my machine to it.

I wish that my fairies (all those designers and application developers) are somewhere listening to me and would grant me my wish. Amen!

Their initial video released a few days back has some star power as well, to grab consumer’s attention with cameos from the likes of MC Hammer, Kurt Russell, Ronnie Lott and Gary Vaynerchuk.

Needless to say, I did get curious after watching the video and decided to check it out. So her is my experience –

Getting started – Airtime does not need any software to be downloaded. And since airtime is built on Facebook, you simply log in without wasting time to create an account.

First Look – I must say that it looks impressive. Developers seem to have given attention to user experience. The picture quality was nice and you share nice screen with the person you call, as shown in the video.

How it works? – It pulls in your friend’s list from Facebook and gives you the option to call any of them. In case they do not answer your call, you can leave a video message as well. It pulls in your “interests” as well from your Facebook page and you can find people with similar interest. Airtime gives you the ability to connect with people you do not know based on your geography/interest.

Incentive – It uses gaming methodology of badges to encourage people to use the app.

It looks pretty impressive from the first look. But when I tried to actually make a call, I could not connect to my friend. I could see that we were connected, but there was no video and audio. When I tried reconnecting, I could not disconnect my call. I had to log off completely. Also logging off from Airtime, logs me off Facebook as well which should not be the case.

I am sure these are all teething issues and would be creased out in no time. It would be interesting to see what happens in UAE now. With Skype already integrated with Facebook, Airtime is another icing on the cake which users have been crying for. Let us wait and watch!

Dubai being the mall city of the world, there was a common concern among people about the future of malls if more people opted for online shopping. With Dubai mall hosting 54 million visitors in 2011, I am sure that the future of malls is not in immediate danger.

Online models are cheaper for sellers as well as buyers, so there is huge incentive for both to switch to online model. Low barriers to entry have lead to explosion in e-com sites. And group buying websites like Groupon, Living Social and Cobone are luring more people to buy online.

Under such a scenarios, the key for any retailer to be successful is the marriage of its online and brick-and-mortar identity. I love to shop online and if it were possible, I would even buy my groceries online. Just that the current websites do not deliver me the fraction of experience I would like to have.

Why do I shop online?

Shopping online saves me time, is comfortable, gives me privacy to look at a product(s) any number of times, lets me look at bargains easily (there are apps which let you compare the price of a product at various website), and avoids the need of human interaction which I mostly find sub-standard.

Must haves of Online Experience

Before we delve into the future of online experience, let us have a look at some of the must haves to deliver a positive customer experience.

Website Design – A cluttered page, which makes me search for basic information is an instant put off. Products should be well laid out and categorized with various search filters. Developers have to pay attention to delivering a superior user experience.

Website Speed – 40% online shoppers start shopping somewhere else if page takes more than 3 seconds to load. Amazon has found that its sales drop by 1% with every 100-millisecond increase in page load time. The objective is for online experience to be similar to shop experience where the customer walks easily from one aisle to another in order to find a product. Similarly while browsing online, customer should be able to move to next product without a lag.

Contact Information – I feel uncomfortable to shop from sites where contact information is buried in pages. That tells me that the company does not want the customers to contact them.

Availability of Information – like Shipping/Return of goods has to be handy. This lets customers decide beforehand and saves them from last minute surprises.

Easy Return Policy – A friendly return policy makes it easier for customers to trust a website and make final purchase.

Security – When customers use their plastic online, they want to be 100% sure that the information would not be misused. And lag on security can cost an organization its whole existence.

Future of Online Experience -

In future the online retailers would have to deliver a customized experience aggregating data from sources that are relevant to customers.  Social shopping is catching up fast. These websites use gaming models of badges and incentives to motivate people to share information about their latest purchases. The e-commerce website has to be integrated with such shopping websites as well as social networking websites.

Complement stores to online experience – As I mentioned above, the success for a retailer depends on effective marriage of its online and brick-and-mortar identity. Imagine that you visit a website, select all clothes/accessories you like and then at checkout, you have the option of buying online or buying at a store. You select buying at a store and when you visit the store, your online cart is waiting for you; everything as per your size. You have the freedom to try the dresses and change items at that instant itself, if needed. This is a win-win for both retailers and shoppers.

Shopping Suggestions – While you are browsing online, a retailer has so much information about you. Your clicks determine your liking and your interest. With proper use of analytics, it can suggest you similar products or matching accessories. It is so intuitive; still very few websites use it effectively. It is like how intelligent is the sales person to gauge your taste and suggest you stuff accordingly. Once you get such sales person/analytics, you are a winner. You can customize your offering as per the liking of your customers.

Trying clothes online – Imagine the website has the ability to capture your image using the camera on your machine or has the option for you to upload a picture of yours. You can then try various clothes on your picture and see how you look.

Seamless Networking – Ability to integrate with social networking/shopping sites and come up with names of your friends who have bought similar products. If your friends have commented on those products, the website should be able to pull them out for you.

Mobile optimized website/Apps – With users accessing more and more websites from their smartphones, the websites have to be mobile optimized. Finding a way to present information on a small smartphone screen or a tablet would be another key to success.

No Password please – Websites use face recognition. This way there would be no need to remember endless passwords.

This scenario looks very nice, but it involves umpteen numbers of websites to talk to each other and hence involves privacy concerns. I do hope that organizations are able to keep the customer experience in mind and genuinely work to create trust between them and with the customers. I do look forward to a leap in my online shopping experience.

LC beauties converted my bad experience to a WOW by owning up their mistake and their speed of service. All my other products arrived perfect and I do not even know the name of those suppliers. And here is a supplier, LC Beauties who caused me pain, but used this as an opportunity to create a positive brand image.

Is your organization geared to change bad experiences to WOW?

Till a few days back, I had to strain myself to recollect any such experience. But in last 15 days, I visited a few places and experienced a sense of joy. Today I will share one such experience with you.

I was to visit a friend’s house first time for dinner. So it was obvious that I had to get some token for their house. On previous occasions, I have visited some “so called” upmarket and funky home fashion stores and found the sales people to be really snooty. It always amazes me when I see such a behavior. Maybe when I walk in, wearing my jeans and tee with hardly any accessories and makeup, they feel that I cannot afford the stuff they are selling. Why should the service I get be a factor of how decked up I am? This is a sad, but absolutely true. Anyways, last time, I bought a very expensive piece from one such shop and when the person on the counter packed it for me, I was shocked. They did not have the right size of box to pack the piece. The box they gave was actually coming off from places. And to top that they charged me AED 1 for the bag as they were going green and the bag they use is biodegradable.  I was in utter disbelief! Why could they not include this one dirham in the pricing? Or why they were so miser that they could not give away a bag even after such horrendous pricing. Even with all this I went ahead and paid, as I really liked it and was in urgent need. But that day I vouched never to enter that shop again. So this time when I needed to buy a gift, I tried “Pottery Barn”. As soon as I entered the shop with my friend, there was a gentleman who explained us of a few promotions they were running. We went around admiring the good things they had. The place was well stocked, with things as well as sales people. If we needed something, there was someone even before we could ask. People there gave us space and time to look around, but kept a good eye on us, just in case we needed something. Everyone around greeted us with a nice broad smile. We felt so welcomed in the shop. We picked our gift and asked Mirza (sales person) to pack it. He showed us the box he would pack it in and asked if that was fine. We told him that we would collect our pick in sometime and left the place to shop around. While packing, Mirza had a question, so he took time and effort to call me and ask me his doubt. At most places, people would just wait for you to come back and then they would ask you the doubt. He respected our time by calling us. After sometime we visited the shop to collect our buy. It was so nicely wrapped kept in a trolley with brochures for their store. A person came with us to drop it till the car. I left the place with a need to visit them again soon. I will always remember the friendliness and service to the staff there.

For my work, I meet a lot of people responsible for Customer Experience in organizations. All of them talk about the challenge the face in making employees more customer-centric due to the transitory nature of population in UAE. I am happy to see that there are some organizations, which have been able to do that successfully.

Delivering WOW

The first step to deliver WOW is to decide where you would like to deliver the wow? Which TouchPoints you would like to focus on? Which TouchPoints would differentiate you from competitors and give you most advocates? Once you decide the TouchPoints, you need to define the exact experience you would like to deliver. And then work inward on people, processes and systems to deliver that predefined WOW. A wow experience can be delivered by focusing on some very simple things as well like addressing people by their name when they call your contact center, calling back customers after an interaction with your organization to know how their experience was, increasing the speed of service, empathizing with them or using technology to create personalized experiences and designing services keeping the customer persona in mind. As I write this, there are so many experiences that come to my mind. Maybe, I will write another blog for that.

Delivering WOW consistently

There are a few challenges in delivering WOW to customers on a consistent basis like developing a WOW culture across the organization and keeping employees motivated at all times. Also, delivering wow every time raises the expectations of your customers so you have to surpass your own benchmarks. This can be a daunting task for any organization and the key is to keep employees engaged, sensitize them to customer issues, create a sense of belonging, empower them and design processes for formal and informal rewards. And while doing all this, be sincere to your customers as well as employees.

Bottomline: Delivering WOW needs an active outside-in approach. It is not an outcome of your processes or a CRM system.

1. Control your rage – Do not call a contact center/service desk or talk to a provider when you are still angry on the situation. Let the storm pass. This will help you to better explain your point.
2. Consolidate your thoughts – Before you start speaking, gather your thoughts. You can even write them down so that you can refer to them when you talk to the other person.
3. Call people by name – This will give you magical results. Wherever you are, call the people who serve you by name. Next time, you are in a restaurant; call the steward by his/her name when they come to take your order. You will get a personalized treatment. Ask your taxi driver his name and call him twice by his name during the drive. He would be so happy and will drive more safely.
4. Separate people from the organization – When you are mad at a situation, tell the person attending you that you are sorry for being harsh and that your grudge is against the company and not that individual. The minute you would say that, people would open up, suggest you ways to solve your problem and go out of the way to make sure your issue is closed.
5. Ask for commitment – Most common answer we get from service people is, “ We will look into it as soon as possible”. Do not let people go by making such loose statements. Ask for specific time and day.
6. Follow up – Keep an account of the exact follow up you did. This would strengthen your case if there is a need for escalation.
7. Escalation – If you think that the people at front end are not able to resolve your issue, feel free to escalate. Remember, they get their salaries from the money we pay to the buy their products. So you have every right to speak with them, if the need be.
8. Treat people as human – Talk to them nicely, treat them with respect and appreciate their work.
9. Drop Names – Do not hesitate to suggest that you would take your business to a competitor if things do not improve.
10. Appreciate – Last but not the least; appreciate people when you get good service. When we get bad service, we tweet and write blogs. But when we get good service, we forget to acknowledge. Make sure that you appreciate the person who served you, if possible drop a feedback with person’s name or mention their good work to their supervisor. The person will always remember you and would be motivated to give good service to others.

Finally I got to reading it and I must admit that I found it hard to keep it down. Two nights I woke up in the middle of the night to finish it as I wanted to quickly know the ways of Zappos. The company talks about creating emotional connections with customers. While reading the book, I felt emotional at so many instances. At every example in the book, I felt  it was supreme service, nothing could go beyond it and yet the next one touched me more than the first one. There was no end to the number of times I felt wowed. I almost felt deprived that I cannot order from Zappos since they do not deliver international.

I can go endlessly about what all I loved about the Zappos experience (actually been driving my husband crazy sharing stories from the book). But let me pause here as we all know how great Zappos is. I would like to share some beliefs that this book strengthened -

Leap of Faith – When you put trust in people, you get extraordinary results. There might be some who would take undue advantage, but the merits of trusting far outweigh the downsides.

Devotion – When you put your heart into something, devote yourself completely, you create greatness. There are ample examples of this from Zappos – Tony Hsieh devoted himself to create a service organizations. All his decisions were based on the principal of creating wow for the customers. The Zappos team devotes themselves day in and day out to deliver happiness around, be it by looking for a particular shoe for a customer, dressing like a Gnome, blowing bubbles or talking to a customer for more than 7 hrs.

Competition – Genuinely keep your customers at the center of every decision you make, no one will be able to touch you.

Attitude first -I wonder each time I see organizations advertising for an opening mentioning all skill sets, and not a word about the traits they are looking for. They even go to the point of relevant market and industry experience. This tells me that they do not want to invest in training and want the person to start churning from day one. Keeping skills above attitude is certainly a short term strategy. Contrary to this, seeing organizations like Zappos who seek culture fit before anything else, is a hope.

Emphasis on ROI – Businesses are made to deliver profit, but looking at ROI for each expense might not be a good strategy. Executives should take some decisions on instinct, which will bring them closer to their customers and will ultimately bring in more bucks.

Service Velocity – The speed with which you service the customer….loved the term.

Awesome reading the book, will go to the web now to check the online goodies with the book. I strongly recommend it to anyone looking for ways to bring in customer centricity in their organization.

First case was at Health Bay Polyclinic. It is a private medical clinic, located in attractive modern premises in Umm Suqeim, the heart of Dubai’s expatriate community. They provide medical services in all major fields like OBGYN, Pediatrics, Family medicine, Internal Medicine, Dermatology, ENT, Podiatry etc. My first interaction with them was a year back when I developed a corn in my foot. I googled for a podiatrist in Dubai and got directed to Health Bay. I called them, smoothly got an appointment and met Dr Ann Roberts who was too good to be true. She scraped the corn off my feet, without me feeling even ticklish. I was wowed considering that the last doctor I went to had operated my corn. Since then, I have sent many people to Dr Roberts. All was well till sometime back when the clinic decided to be more customer friendly and included a call center to give appointments. It took my friend 30 minutes on two occasions to get through to them and get an appointment. This was a follow up visit so she had to go to the doctor there. For a new case, I would be personally too disinclined to call them till they decide to do something about the issue. Hope they are listening!

Second example is from Arenco. I have stayed in Golden Sands for 2 years before moving to my current residence. I also have friends in other building of Arenco and none of us ever had a problem in the maintenance of the building until now. I was shocked to know of their latest process to log a complaint. Resident have to personally go to the reception, fill a form and submit it. All forms are consolidated and sent to some building where the head of maintenance sits. So your issue takes much much longer to be addressed compared to old days when you called up and someone showed in max 3 hrs time. I hope these organizations understand that we were in the experience economy and service velocity does matter.