Microsoft Answers: The Wrong Answer to Customer Wants
How do you respond to the questions, comments, issues, and complaints of thousands or millions of customers who have gotten used to Internet-speed responses? And make it feel genuine and personal?
Most companies have realized: you don’t. Or rather, you can’t.
Solutions like Lithium, Get Satisfaction, Telligent, and SuggestionBox offer ways to solicit customer feedback easily and harness your customer community to do a lot of the answering and helping for you.
Microsoft decided to build their own solution, and it’s a great example of how a product can include all the right features but provide an entirely unappealing user experience.
I don’t know what user research Microsoft did, but between surveying users and looking at other solutions out there, you might come up with a list of features like this:
- Ask specific questions about my computer’s configuration or software
- Look up error messages or documentation
- Answer questions
- Learn new things by tracking a specific user’s answers or answers on a certain topic
All of these features – and probably more – appear to be part of Microsoft Answers.
But there’s a big difference between what users ask for, and what users use.
Become the user and take a look at the homepage:
Where do you start?
What is there to do here?
There’s a lot of text and a lot of links on this page, but nothing to catch the eye. No prominent call to action.
Now let’s imagine why a customer would come to this site:
Sara, a new Windows Vista user, just installed a Windows Update patch and now is seeing some scary-looking error messages. What should she do next?
Luis, who has set up data backups and cleared malware for all of his family, enjoys answering questions. How can he contribute to this community?
It’s not about what customers ask for. It’s about what they want to do and the experiences they want to have.
The customer doesn’t care about your business. If it’s not obvious that a product or service is going to meet their needs, they have no incentive to spend their time figuring it out.
Sara wants reassurance that her computer isn’t going to go berzerk and lose all her data. Luis wants to feel useful. Neither of them are likely to tell you that directly – you need to watch, ask open-ended questions, let the user narrate.
So what could Microsoft Answers do to help customers do the things they want to do and have the experiences they want?
A few thoughts:
- BIG search box. Giving 20%, 30%, 40% of the screen real estate over to a search box sends the message that asking questions is what you’re supposed to do.
- BIG calls to action for the other main activities: register, find questions to answer.
- Be more dynamic. The homepage feels like a Yahoo directory page, circa 1998. An AJAX widget that showed live questions as they were asked would create a feeling of activity and responsiveness.
- Help constructing the question. Newer users may find it hard to ask the question in way that gets answers. A tag cloud showing technical terms and error codes that are frequently mentioned is an easier way to browse.
- Highlight recency. Computer problems are cyclical – following a worm or a patch update or an upgrade. Make it easy for customers to see what’s happening now.
- Claim your expertise. For people who love to be helpful, give them a quick checkbox way to indicate the types of questions they’re good at answering – then immediately feed them a relevant question to answer.
Growing a community isn’t just a technical challenge – it’s a psychological, behavioral, experiential one. You can seed a community with great content, but it won’t take off unless it feels inviting and responsive.
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