Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
Customer experience (CX) is finally gaining the attention it deserves, with 84% of companies seeing CX as a higher priority than they did two years ago. But there’s a disconnect when it comes to executing CX transformation, and the underlying issue is a lack of executive buy-in. In this on-demand webinar, the two of us […]
In last week’s episode of Forrester’s What It Means podcast, Senior Analyst Tom Champion explains why rebuilding trust with customers is not about brand hygiene but about growth, as more and more consumers show cynicism and skepticism towards brands and convert those feelings to actions. Podcast transcript Victor Milligan: Hi, I’m Victor Milligan. Jennifer Isabella: […]
July 27th marked Amazon’s first e-commerce official foray into the 640 million people strong region. It launched its Prime Now app in Singapore with a compelling two-hour delivery offering that signals a new era in the region’s digital landscape. We see the impact of Amazon’s move not only on the e-commerce and retail industries, but […]
The advertising headwinds have been gathering. The $7.4B lost to bad ads. The chronic underperformance. Major firms pulling millions from media budgets. Consumers actively avoiding ads. And yet the interruptions continue. There are bright spots: great storytelling from some brands, better channel orchestration, and the pragmatic application of programmatic. Advertising fueled the remarkable rise of […]
Well, this turned out to be very much a different post than what I’d first thought. Last Thursday, CIO published an article titled “Your Pebble smartwatch will live on when Pebble’s servers shut down” that had good news for owners of the Pebble smartwatch: But now that Pebble has been acquired by Fitbit and is […]
My last post, “Defense Against the Dark Art of Disruption”, went into some detail about notable failures in customer-experience for 2016. This week, however, I ran across a counter-example (h/t to Tim Worstall) showing that a little social media awareness and a customer-centric culture can make magic: A baby products company is launching a special […]
My first post for 2016 was titled “Is 2016 the Year for Customer-Focused IT?”. The closing line was “If 2016 isn’t the year for customer-focused IT, I wonder just what kind of year it will be for IT?”. I am so sorry for jinxing so many things for so many people.🙂 So far, the year […]
What’s the biggest problem with technical debt? In my opinion, the biggest problem is that it works. Just like the electrical outlet pictured above, systems with technical debt get the job done, even when there’s a hidden surprise or two waiting to make life interesting for us at some later date. If it flat-out failed, […]
Why would anyone worry about user experience for anything that’s not customer-facing? This question was the premise of Maurice Roach’s post in the Zühlke blog, “Empathise with your users or you won’t solve their problems”: Bring up the subject of user empathy with some engineers or product owners and you’ll probably hear comments that fall […]
Not one to normally publically gripe on a vendor, but a recent customer experience with an online purchase is a great example of why organizations can’t ignore data management investments.
I have been a regular user of a note taking app for several years. All my dicussions with clients, vendors, and even notes from conferences wind up here. I put in pictures, screen shots, upload presentations, and capture web pages. So, it isn’t a surprise that this note taking vendor wants to move me up intp a premium version. And, for $50 a year, it’s not a big deal for me to do even if it just means I’m paying for more space rather than using all the features in the premium package.
So, this morning, I click the upgrade button and viola! My order is taken and shows up in my iTunes account order history.
As this app is web, desktop, and device based and the vendor is born out of the app age, the expectation is that my account status should just automatically convert. I mean, every other business app I have does this. Why shouldn’t this one?
As it turns out, my purchased premium service is no where to be found. To get immediate support, as only offered in premium service, you need to be able to log in as a premium customer. So, instead of an easy and quick fix, I spend over an hour trying to get answers through a support site that shows the issue but an answer that doesn’t work. I also see that this is an issue going back over a year. I try entering in my issue through “contact us” only to find that I get routed back to the support forum and can’t even log a ticket. I find an obscure post where the vendor’s Twitter handle for support is listed and fire off a frustrated Tweet (which goes out to my followers as well which I’m assuming is not something this vendor would prefer).
So let’s break down the data management issue:
I’m not one to normally publicly gripe on a vendor, but a recent customer experience with an online purchase is a great example of why organizations can’t ignore data management investments.
I have been a regular user of a note-taking app for several years. All my discussions with clients, vendors, and even notes from conferences wind up here. I put in pictures, screen shots, upload presentations, and capture web pages. So it isn’t a surprise that this note-taking vendor wants to move me up into a premium version. And for $50 a year, it’s not a big deal for me to do even if it just means I’m paying for more space rather than using all the features in the premium package.
So, this morning, I click the upgrade button and voila! My order is taken and shows up in my iTunes account order history.
As this app is web-, desktop-, and device-based and the vendor is born out of the app age, the expectation is that my account status should just automatically convert. I mean, every other business app I have does this. Why shouldn’t this one?
As it turns out, my purchased premium service is nowhere to be found. To get immediate support, as only offered in premium service, you need to be able to log in as a premium customer. So instead of an easy and quick fix, I spend over an hour trying to get answers through a support site that shows the issue but an answer that doesn’t work. I also see that this is an issue going back for over a year. I try entering in my issue through “contact us” only to find that I get routed back to the support forum and can’t even log a ticket. I find an obscure post where the vendor’s Twitter handle for support is listed and fire off a frustrated tweet (which goes out to my followers as well, which I’m assuming is not something this vendor would prefer).
So let’s break down the data management issue:
If the key role of enterprise-architecture is that things work better when they work together, on purpose, how do we make that happen? And what happens when they don’t? (What follows here references various Tweets to, about and from the Australian…