Product serviceability – getting it right from the start

The past few weeks has seen me buried away deep in thought working up proposals for our social media strategy beyond service, and so I’ve had less time than I’d like to blog. In that time, there’s been some pretty significant technology updates from Apple which I thought worthy of mention.

The iPad is of course now with us, and I’m very happy to have been able to get one. First impressions are excellent – the screen is just amazing, and I’m sure that as applications start to ramp up in volume, the iPad will become yet another iconic Apple creation that changes the way we use computers. Of course Apple didn’t invent the tablet, but they have done what they do best – nailed the customer experience way beyond what anyone else has to offer. And as usual, the near-perfect execution – I say “near”-perfect as I still think iTunes is one of the most cumbersome pieces of software out there – only serves to encourage you to use the iPad more and more, spending an ever increasing amount on apps.

iPhone 4, and the new iOS4, bring yet more goodies. iPhone 4 looks essentially to be a little iPad plus a phone (or maybe it’s the other way round?!), but the multi-tasking capability of iOS4 will be that which interests many. Once developers work out what they can do to get apps working together, a whole new wave of Apple hysteria will follow I’m sure.

So what can the world of customer service make of all this? I think there’s a few angles. As I said before, Apple’s obsession with customer experience is something that all service businesses need to take notice of. I’ve never had to contact Apple with a technical problem with my iPhone – it just works, and the 100+ apps I’ve installed over the last year have caused me a grand total of, well, zero problems. What Apple have done better than anyone else is make sure that whatever product they produce, it doesn’t come with an expectation for the customer that they’ll have to spend the rest of their lives getting support. I can’t imagine the product managers at Apple sit around working out how many millions they need to assign to customer service budgets for each and everything that they do just to cater for deficiencies in their products. Actually, I’m sure that must do that to a degree, however my point is that Apple have such an obsession with customer experience, with product quality, reliability and excellence, they really don’t need to have the multi-millions in reserve to pick up the pieces when things go belly-up. I don’t pretend that nobody has problems with their gear – this is technology, after all, and nothing is totally infallible, but the overall impact is surely significantly minimised versus some of their competitors for whom speed to market or complexity of functionality are more critical than seamless user experience.

For the rest of us, then, the subject of “product serviceability” is key. Product serviceability is where you design supportability into a product from its incarnation, based on the premise that an iterative process of product development including ever-increasing quality and customer experience gates will gradually drive out the likelihood of customer problems and thus support costs. You design products not to fail from every aspect of their use (i.e. from purchase to installation and into in-life use), but make sure that the service wrap that backs this up is extremely accessible, and relevant to your audience. Customers – bizarrely – generally don’t want to wait days for a reply to a support email or sit for hours in a queue pressing 1 for this and 2 for that, and so giving them simple, interactive ways of supporting themselves is critical – and again Apple excels in this area. Creating support communities where peer-to-peer customer-led support brings together experts and those in need is an extraordinarily powerful way of supporting products, and combining the aggregated intelligence of your sharpest customers with your own self-serve support capabilities is just great.

So I do wonder why more people aren’t taking notice of product serviceability. It seems to me to be pretty obvious. Design things not to fail, with a user experience that is world-class, tested to destruction and seamless in execution, but add in a well-designed and highly-specified support wrap that merges the best that you as a company can offer with the best that your customers can add and you’re well on the road to a far less stressful experience for your customers if things do go wrong. Take notice of what your customers want, and how they want to be supported. Are they likely to be YouTube users? Do they use Twitter, or Facebook? Are they predisposed to find information that is logically presented to them rather than be driven mad following a call centre script that can never totally answer every possible combination of support circumstances? Making your support wrap relevant to the media that your customers choose to use is critical.

Bringing together a relentless pursuit of excellent in product design, testing and execution with an innovative, intuitive and relevant service wrap won’t just save you money in the long term from reduced support overhead costs, but will lead to far more satisfied customers who buy more, and stay loyal. Just ask Apple.

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