Of all the major airlines, United has the best service out of Boston. The only other options if you need to travel all over the country are American, Delta, and US Airways. Those three options deliver far worse service than United does.

This means, if I was included in a UA Net Promoter survey, I’d give them a 7 or above. That’s a good score for Net Promoter.

My score is a great demonstration of why Net Promoter doesn’t work. You see, I hate United Airlines. With a passion. As airlines go, they are really quite bad. I fly them almost every week and almost every trip, I have some experience with poor service and a bad relationship. Granted, there have been some trips where nothing bad happened, but nothing remarkably good happened either.

However, my trips with American, Delta, and US Airways are much worse. I will continue to fly United until someone better comes along, but I don’t expect that to happen any time soon. (I do like Virgin America a lot, and JetBlue or Southwest, but they don’t fly where I need them go as reliably as United, so I can’t use them often.)

I’m not recommending United Airlines because I like them. I’m recommending them because they are better than the other choices.

Net Promoter isn’t scoring my loyalty, because I’m not loyal. (I’m trapped, which is quite different.)

It’s not capturing my overall dissatisfaction with the airline. In fact, if everyone answers the survey for the same reasons I do, they look pretty good.

I think Net Promoter Score is an ineffective instrument for measuring how your customers feel about you. A better instrument is something more rigorous, like the Gallup CE11 Customer Engagement Score.

The CE11 has eleven questions, which we weight (as a Guttman Scale), including a Net Promoter-like referral question. But that referral question is weighted low, with questions like “Do you think [the brand] would take care of you if there was a problem?” or “I’m proud to be a customer of [the brand].” There are businesses that I’d score high on these other questions, but United Airlines wouldn’t be one of them.

These days, many of our clients are relying on the Net Promoter instrument (and its close brethren) to assess how they are meeting their customers needs. We warn the teams we’re working with to be careful — they may not be getting a complete picture of what’s happening and how their customers are experiencing their designs.

One of Brian’s comments jumped out at me:

We took our knowledge and created, in a warehouse in San Francisco, an entire lobby made out of white foam core. We built it to scale. Then we brought in consumers to get feedback on the overall experience of the space. We didn’t want feedback on color choices, like blue versus red. Instead we wanted feedback on using welcome pedestals, rather than a clunky front desk. Our associates circle around the space rather than standing in one place, and we wanted customer feedback on that. And the foam core allowed for rapid prototyping. After we got user feedback, we could rip it apart and build it again to get the concept right.

It’s one thing to talk about the abstract notion of protoyping a web page or a dialog box. But to prototype an entire lobby experience? That’s pretty cool.

Not too different than what Apple did with the Apple Store. Who said an old-tyme business like Marriott can’t play the same game as the cool kids. See? There’s hope for us all!

Read the entire interview.

(Hat tip: Dana Chisnell)

Interaction with a product is more than how it’s used or how it behaves. It’s about a connection between two sides. One side is the customer, but the other side is much more than a product or service. To many people, the character and essence of a product and its company are identical. So, what is the essence of your product?

When your product behaves like a machine, your company is perceived to be a machine. It’s just another company – rigid, mechanical, and cold. Yet when your product displays a bit of humanity, your company gains a face and becomes another human.

In this webinar, you’ll see examples of how humanity exists in the design of products and services through humor, personality, and emotion. You’ll explore how just a little extra design effort and thought beyond functional needs can enrich the experience, reveal the company behind the product, and forge enduring connections with customers.

This presentation generated quite a buzz at Web App 2009. It’s a talk that’s sure to get you thinking
about your products, and how you foster the connection between your products and your customers.

In advance of the presentation, we’d love to hear from you. How do you gain an edge with your products? How does your organization show its humanity? Share your thoughts, questions, and concerns below.

Subscribe to our podcast via

This week I wanted to share my interview with Brian Kalma, Director of User Experience and Web Strategy for the darling of Internet retail, Zappos.com. In case you’ve somehow missed out on their meteoric rise to top of online retail, now conducting over a billion dollars in sales a year, then you’re in for a treat. I can’t think of a company with a more interesting case study in employee involvement and fanatical customer service. It’s really nice to see a company succeed for all the right reasons.

Zappos is a unique place. Every employee hired at their corporate headquarters in Las Vegas is required to go through the four-week customer loyalty (call-center training) course, including answering phones. So every employee has a strong grasp on the experience of their customers, from lawyers to VPs, managers to software developers.

You might be involved with a design team with a handful of designers or perhaps a large number of stake holders. Brian has a similar experience, with one notable exception. He regularly conducts web strategy meetings with an open invitation to the entire company. That’s more than 1,300 people! But design ideas are just the beginning. Employees are also encouraged to participate in other ways, from recording product videos, to being models on the site. In fact, all models on the site, which sells shoes, clothing, accessories, and more every day, are just regular employees.

On top of these duties, Brian also passionately supports Zappos’ social media outreach, where all employees are encouraged to look for comments about their company on places like Twitter and Facebook, and then actively engage with those customers, without oversight. For many companies, that would be a nightmare. Brian says it’s an amazing by-product of their dedication to their employees and their employees’ dedication to the customers. This is the basis of the Zappos culture, which Brian has to translate into content on their web site and use to drive sales.

And drive sales he has. 75% of their sales are from repeat customers, spending more than 2.5 times more in the following months than their initial purchase. And I asked Brian how he leverages their unique culture into their web presence to make these sales figures possible.

Tune into to the podcast for more details on the life of Brian at Zappos and their experience success stories.

[I should also mention that Brian is one of the expert speakers on our Web App Summit Proceedings disc, which we're now taking orders for. If you couldn't make it to the summit, this disc provides hundreds of pages of speaker materials, and 19 hours of presentation audio. Brian's 75-minute talk, Baking a Corporate Culture into the Online Experience is one of the 14 presentations included on the disc. The disc is a great source of information and inspiration for your work. Learn more about the Web App Summit Proceedings. You won't regret it!]

In what year (YYYY) did you graduate from high school?

But, what if the user didn’t graduate high school? (Little known fact: I didn’t graduate high school, so I’m a little sensitive to this question.)

Should the user enter the date they would’ve graduated high school? Should they make up a date? How will they remember something that didn’t actually happen?

It’s surprising how many security challenge questions are unanswerable like this. I doubt it leaves the user with a positive feeling about the experience.

Update: This is from the Vanguard web site:

Where did you and your spouse meet for the first time? (Enter the full name of CITY only)

What about multiple marriages? Widows?

To add insult to injury, the design replaces every letter the user types with a dot, so they can’t see if they’re typing the city correctly. (Again, I grew up in a city named Schenectady. Not something I’d want to type in the dark.)

If we want to see how brand engagement works, we don’t have to look any further than the Cuisinart Popcorn Maker.

Williams-Sonoma is featuring this intriguingly designed popper on their site. It’s received 3.6 stars from the 25 reviewers. Only 9 (36%) of those reviewers gave it one, two, or three stars.

Amazon is selling the exact same popper. Yet their reviewers have a very different take:

In the case of Amazon’s site, 18 out of 27 (67%) reviewers rated the device with one or two stars.

Why did twice as many people rate the product positively on Williams-Sonoma’s site than on Amazon’s? The answer is clear from these two reviews:

On the Williams-Sonoma site, this reviewer had a bad experience, yet gave it three stars:

makes great popcorn when it works

I got this as a Christmas gift and my whole family all fell in love with it. We used it several times a week. After a few months the hot plate stopped heating. So back to the store it went with no questions asked and I brought another one home and it too broke after the 3rd use. Back to the store I went for an exchange. This popcorn popper is so good I don’t mind exchanging it for a new one. The customer service is so awesome at Williams-Sonoma!

On the Amazon site, this customer gave the device only one star, having had essentially the same experience:

Makes good (not great) popcorn – but I’ve been through 2 now and Customer Support STINKS

I gave this unit 1 star because in the course of a few of months I’ve had two now that have broken. Here’s how it works when it breaks: you call customer support, they give you attitude, grill you as if you’ve done something wrong, they charge you $10 to ship the replacement unit and then you have to ship the broken unit back – so ~$20 to get a replacement for something under warranty. What breaks? There are 3 main pieces to the unit: the plug-in base, the heating element, and the bowl. The heating element detaches from the base, a very nice feature, but after about a month on the first unit the handles and clip that attach to the base broke. After another couple of months on the replacement the heating element stopped heating.

That’s two people reporting essentially the same experience. Yet one felt is was substantially better than the other, because of the customer support of Williams-Sonoma.

From the folks at Gallup, we learn that one of the key components of brand engagement is integrity. Does the brand always treat me fairly? If a problem arises, can I count on the brand to reach a fair and satisfactory resolution?

In this case, the first customer felt that Williams-Sonoma took care of them and the Amazon customer felt that Cuisinart was doing a crappy job by charging $20 to get a replacement and having a poorly constructed unit.

When there’s high brand engagement, customers are willing to overlook problems and still feel good about the product or service. Williams-Sonoma takes good care of their customers, even the product is defectively designed, leading to higher engagement and the customer’s willingness to overlook problems.