You are not your user
Not knowing who our users are or what they need is now so common in most organisations that we’ve learned to expect it. Our personas are caricatures, user stories are made up, user journeys are just plain fantasies, and that’s even if we talk about users and their needs. Sometimes we don't even get there.
In our last episode of the Bad Services podcast, we explored one of the most common barriers to delivering better services, the ever present issue of not knowing who our users are or what they need.
In most organisations there is an empathy gap. A disconnection between what we think about our services, and what our users actually experience in reality.
This is normal, we are not our users. By definition, the more expert we become in our services and the more we scale, the less qualified we become to talk on behalf of our users (if we ever were)
If 6 Years of running the School of Good Services has taught me one thing, it’s that the problems we see clearly in the services of other organisations are a LOT harder to spot in our own.
The saying that the hairdresser's hair is the worst (England), or ”Shoemakers are the worst-shoe” (France) or “The butcher doesn't inspect his own meat” (Netherlands) are common sayings for a reason. It's easier to spot fault in other people’s work than it is our own.
This explains why we have a disconnect, but it doesn't explain why we carry on that way. The bigger problem is that we experience this disconnection with our users in two directions. We don't see the impact of the decisions on our users, and in turn we don't see the connection that those experiences have on the problems we encounter as an organisation.
We see user contact, failure, increased costs and complexity and we attribute those problems to anything other than the fact that our services are not meeting user needs.
Those increased calls? Just lazy users looking for a quick answer (even though they've already tried online)
Those massive enforcement and late payment bills? Users not budgeting properly and ending up in arrears (not the fact that we didn't put them on the right plan in the first place, or issue clearly understandable bills…)
Or hey, maybe it’s a payment calculation error….
The list of things we chalk up to anything other than bad service design is endless and the reason why we do this is complex.
Sometimes it's because we have services that our users have to use, so we think it’s not important to design services that enable them to do that more easily, since they have to do it anyway. Sometimes we have users who are contentious, who we find it hard to empathise with. Sometimes our users are so unlike us that we can't imagine their lives and sometimes, our services are so bad that we only see our users on their worst day, failing to do everything we (with the benefit of many years of experience) think is straightforward and easy.
Bad services create bad relationships with users
This is a cycle that’s hard to get out of, and takes active work.
The first step is understanding why we have built a relationship that is either estranged, or far from supportive with the one group of people we should know and appreciate the most; our users.
If you want to delve more into why Bad Services happen, our book on it is available now.