This is because support and registration are the most important surfaces where a company and its customers touch, yet they’re where the user experience usually breaks down. Support and registration are even more important than sales because the sale is just the first date. Of course, relationships are hard, so many companies half ass it.
How Product Registration Should Be
A registration is good when I buy something and I don’t have to fill out any more paperwork. For example, at the Apple store they ask you for your email so they can send an electronic receipt. BOOM, instant relationship. They know what I bought, and my warranty is set up. No paperwork.
How Product Registration Usually Is
A registration is bad when I buy something and then have to:
- Find the warranty card among the the manuals and paper spam that come with most products.
- Find model and serial numbers to write on the warranty card (along with my address and plenty of personal data they want for marketing like, “How did you hear about this product?”)
- Find a damn stamp because they’re too cheap to include a prepaid envelope with my $300 camera. If I’m lucky I can save postage by doing data entry chores on their registration site.
How Product Support Should Be
To keep this short let’s just say, “support should be so good that it’s indistinguishable from magic.” Support should know who I am and what I bought, so if I search for driver updates, or speak to customer service via email, IM, or phone, they can serve me efficiently. And it couldn’t hurt if the customer service rep’s computer screen also said, “Nathan has spent $XX,XXX with us and has been a loyal customer for XX years.”
How Product Support Usually Is
Support websites don’t know me or what I’ve bought. I have to look for a model number like “WGRT8021154”, and if I accidentally close the page, the website forgets everything I just told it. If I email or call support, I’ll have to reenter anything I typed on the website. Not only is it hard to find my product’s support page, but then I have to enter all the personal information and serials that the website should already know. Oh yeah, and I have to do all this while modal dialog popups ask me to fill out a marking/satisfaction survey.
Bottom Line
Look. User experience, permission marketing, and customer service all boil down to relationships. My ideal customer/vendor relationship is like the bar where everyone knows your name. What big companies miss is that instead of using technology and bureaucracy to shield themselves from relationships, they can use technology to approximate the Cheers experience.