Overwhelming details (for customers)

As a reminder, I read this article1 with my morning coffee a short while ago, and it’s been a while since I’ve come across something that resonated so strongly with me. The perspective of the article is Customer Experience (CX), but there are profound truths for almost every role within a company — and especially for product management.

This is one of several posts I’m writing to share one particular truth that struck me, and how I’ve seen that bear out in my product management experience.

Here is my second: Poor employee onboarding leads to poor customer onboarding.

Poorly onboarded employees do not have the solid foundation that managers expect, and these employees are left to “wing it” on their own, and rely on peers (or assumptions) about how things should work. That leaves everyone appearing to be aligned on the surface, but below that surface, everyone is pointed in a slightly different direction. While it might not be significant misalignment, it often provides just enough friction on productivity that results are meager and underwhelming.

This then gets reflected in the products & services provided by those employees, and customers begin to notice. For example, with one employee focused on meeting deadlines, user-interface designs can end up being utilitarian and not intuitive. With another employee focused on quality, a critical feature might get deferred to a future release because it doesn’t work perfectly, and robbing customers of the key reason they chose the product or service. Examples abound where slightly (or significantly) misaligned employees impact the product or service in ways that make it harder for customers to enjoy it. None of this leads to the ideal euphoric experience for customers that leads to loyalty and positive word-of-mouth.

To combat this, companies often utilize marketing & customer success approaches that look very similar to the employee onboarding experience. There is a firehose of information blasting at them with very little context or “experience” to organize it and make it make sense. Lists of features, and settings, and configurations, and installation options, and add-ons / extensions / integrations, etc. are presented in rapid fire during the first few minutes of trying to use the product. Customers are left trying to “learn” all these new features, while trying to keep an eye out for the key features they really need to accomplish their goals, and not get lost along the way. This requires a lot of cognitive effort, and can be a bit draining.

As a reminder, studies have shown2 that people can only remember 3 to 5 items in short-term memory at any given time.

When customers are bombarded with dozens of bits of information during their initial product experience, they are absolutely not going to remember most of it. Without an opportunity to practice a few chunks of information in isolation in a real (or simulated) environment and transfer that learning to long-term memory, it just fades away.

Without the solid foundation that product managers expect, customers are left to “wing it” on their own. This friction in their understanding and use of the product often leads to poor satisfaction and more frequent interactions with customer service.

This dissatisfaction can lead to low engagement & use, and perhaps even non-renewal / replacement for a different product that seems to be better — or at least less cognitively draining.

Other posts in this series:

• Post 1: Overwhelming details for employees

• Post 2: Overwhelming details for customers

• Post 3: Misaligned incentives

• Post 4: KPI’s at scale

• Post 5: Everything is connected

• Post 6: Empowered guidelines

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1. I originally read this article in Apple News+ which doesn’t provide direct links to articles outside of the News app. I tried to find the article on Entrepreneur Magazine’s website, but found 0 search results for the title of the article as well as the author’s name. (Both seem like bad user experience choices to me, by the way.) I ended up finding the article on the website I linked to above as a last resort.  ↩︎

2. This research publication (The Magical Mystery Four: How is Working Memory Capacity Limited, and Why?) goes into some detail behind why this is true and it’s implications.  ↩︎