Google's Growing Pains of Becoming a Solutions Company

Things are a bit bumpy with the introduction of the Nexus One, with some customers complaining about difficulty of getting the phone running on T-Mobile’s network, slow connection speeds, and complaints over T-Mobile’s pricing policies for existing customers. The press is all over it:

Nexus One a Test of Google’s Customer Service

Nexus One Complaints Mount, Honeymoon Over

Google Nexus One Leaves Customers Sour

And so on… Ah, schadenfreude

This is the other edge of the solutions sword: when you set yourself up as a provider of holistic solutions and ecosystems, customers want one throat to choke when something goes wrong. Their expectations go way up about how everything is going to work, and they want a real person to talk to when it doesn’t.

Having people available to talk to is not one of Google’s strengths.

John Battelle as usual hits the nail on the head:

[H]ow many real live customer service reps does the company plan to have tasked to this product? That, to me, is a Very Important Question. It’s the essential human question that drives Google. I bring it up all the time. Community. Media. People. How do you make people scale?! How does Google, a company driven by algorithms and scale, find its Voice?

If I were Google, here’s what I’d do:

• Ditch my left brain rationality and get on the empathy train as fast as possible. Customers want to know they are being heard and understood, and that someone (a real someone, not an algorithm) is paying attention). We have to have real people lighting up the forums and manning the support phone lines, and keeping frustrated customers up to date on what we’re doing to fix the problem.
• Get Eric Schmidt, Marissa Mayer, Sergey and Larry out in front of this. Get them out there apologizing, being humble, saying that they are attending to this personally. Doesn’t matter if we don’t think Google is to blame - customers don’t care, they just want the problem solved, and we put ourselves out there with the target on our back, so it’s us who they’re shooting at
• Wrangle HTC and T-Mobile so that we can all be on the same page, and provide unifeed fixes. But Google should be the front, it’s our phone, and we own the problem. We’re promising an integrated product, we need to service it in an integrated way. All for one, one for all.

I’m confident that Google will get through these teething pains. But it is a good lesson for any company that wants to set itself up as a real solutions provider, and stretch into pieces of the ecosystem that it has not engaged in before: be prepared for a whole bunch of new issues, complaints, and expectations from customers that you’ve never had to deal with before.

This requires getting all parts of one’s own company working together, as well as all partners who helped bring the ecosystem to life. Not easy, but absolutely necessary. Especially, as is Google’s case, that they are playing catch-up to a market leader.

Good User Experience Starts with Good Employee Experience

A few years ago I was enjoying brunch with some friends at the Tavern at Lark Creek, which is rightfully known for excellent food and attentive and friendly service. Part way through the meal I had to excuse myself to use the bathroom. The bathroom was up some windy stairs, and was very nicely appointed, even more nicely treated than the dining room itself. As restaurant bathrooms go it was very pleasant, but I did not give it much thought.

At the end of the meal before hitting the road for a slightly long drive, I decided to make another pit-stop. This time I saw a downstairs bathroom, which was not as nice as the first one I had used upstairs (thought it was not by any means unpleasant). It became clear that I had taken a wrong turn the first time and had used the employee bathroom.

I could have chosen to be miffed that the restaurant didn’t ensure that the guest bathroom was as good as it could be. Instead, I realized that the quality of the employee bathroom was one sign that the restaurant cared for its staff, and recognized that taking care of the EX - the employee experience - is a prerequisite to a consistently high quality UX - user (customer) experience. They realized that “customer centric” does not mean ignoring employees. In fact it’s just the opposite, if you want to offer truly good service to customers, you need to start with treating your staff right.

As Olive Garden President David Pickens puts it, “It’s very difficult for the experience of the guests to exceed the experience of the staff.”

When you look at the company’s that consistently deliver superior UX - Zappos, Amazon, Google, Southwest, Starbucks back in the old days, Levenger, Niemen Marcus, the one thing they all have in common is that they pay huge amounts of attention to the quality of life of their staff, creating a culture and infrastructure of training that help their staff do the right thing, even when there isn’t an exact rule about what to do in a novel situation.

As an extreme example, read the letter that Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh wrote to employees when the acquisition by Amazon was announced. It is manically focused on the culture of the company and the worklife of the staff, superseding just about every other concern. “Culture” shows up 23 time in it, 7 times in association with “unique”, and 21 times with “brand”. In other words, Hsieh makes an intimate connection between the internal culture of the company and the external brand as it appears to customers - he recognizes that the EX is directly correlated with UX.

The Uninspiring Google Books

There have been some interesting discussions around the web following the departure of one of its key designers, citing an over-reliance on quantitative assessment of every design decision. Bruce Temkin of Forrester asks, does “Google’s design need to have more soul?” Helen Walters at Business Week interviewed Google’s Irene Au about their design challenges.

I have been using Google Books quite a lot in the course of researching my own book, mostly to check out previews to see if a particular book is worth getting out of the UC Berkeley library. (Actually I mostly access it through Sente, a rather good bibliography database program, which is able to surf Google Books and Google Scholar along with many other sites, and suck bibliographic information off them.) It illustrates some of Google’s challenges.

Here is what a typical front page looks like:

Click to enlarge

Considering that this is supposed to be the portal into the world’s printed knowledge, can you imagine a less inspiring presentation? There is no excitement, anticipation, sense of wonderment. As Google encompasses more knowledge, I sense a problem: it flattens everything to the same level. Google lacks nuance. (Its acquired properties stand out differently — YouTube, Picassa, Earth, Blogger.)

Now obviously Google is focused on simplicity and speed, and that stripped-down philosophy goes for its approach to aesthetics too. The Google front page is famously unadorned. But with Books they’ve made an attempt to give some starting points for exploration by showing a selection of publications. But they are a motley mix that bears no relation to my past browsing history or anything else that Google might glean from me. (I suppose there is someone out there who is interested in a combination of Jet, Lesbian Chic, The Nature of Statistical Learning Theory, The Nazi Doctors, and Waste Management.) So why bother putting them there? The chance of something being on that grid that is on the topic I’m looking for is one in a million.

Right now they are straddling a middle ground between Google front page and Amazon, and it’s not working. Pick a side - go rich or go minimal.