Cast & Hue welcomes former Zappos user research & customer insights executive Maggie Young
While new to our team, Maggie Young is not new to the world of customer experience. She has previously led user experience and research teams at Zappos, UserTesting, and Citi, and now joins us as our Senior Director of Strategy.
To help you get to know her better, we asked Maggie some questions about her perspective on customer experience, her work history, and what she’ll be doing in her new role.
You’ve worked at some interesting places, like Zappos. Any interesting stories you can share?
Well, I got a Nerf pistol from our CTO when I graduated from the infamous Zappos 30-day new employee bootcamp. That was fun. But I quickly realized I was way overmatched by the machine guns and modified guns with giant ammo drums that many of the rest of the team had. So my strategy became stockpiling ammo.
Also, every year during the holiday season all employees have to spend time on the call center phones to ensure that wait times were up to our standards. This turned out to be a huge boost to those of us championing customer experience. When your CTO or CMO is navigating your site and handling customer problems, it’s easier to get things changed. Exposing executives to real customers is almost always eye-opening for them. It’s too easy to think about customers as a lump of data instead of real people.
What was a UX or customer experience problem you encountered or helped fix at Zappos?
I worked on so many improvements and new features while at Zappos! But there are two that stand out:
New feature feedback
To get more feedback, we added a small link next to new features on our website. It was a simple text link with a tiny cartoon critter (it was Zappos!) that said, “This is new — how’d we do?” We’d then ask them how much the new feature helped and if they had any other feedback for us. Our development team loved it! They got feedback within minutes of a new feature launch.
Fixing a play button
At Zappos (and really it’s true for most ecommerce), we saw a huge increase in purchases and order size when visitors watched product videos. So improving them was a big deal. Once, while testing the content and style of our product videos, we noticed that a number of participants struggled to start the video because the “Play” button was too subtle. Needless to say, the play arrow was redesigned and launched that day.
Sometimes it’s small things like a link or play button that can make the biggest impact.
What’s something most people don’t know about Zappos that they might be surprised to learn?
Shopping addiction is actually a real concern for management when recruiting new employees. Zappos employees get a very significant discount, deliveries come to your desk within 24 hours, and you are always exposed to new merchandise. Imagine what could happen if someone couldn’t control themselves!
We actually had to do a small intervention with someone near my team that was getting multiple deliveries every day.
Speaking of previous work experience, you’ve also worked at Citi. What were some of the obstacles you had to overcome there related to user experience? How did you overcome them?
At Citi we faced several obstacles. First, as customer experience pros and researchers we all had little to no experience in the financial industry. There were benefits to that (an outside perspective) but also difficulties — like learning to work around/with all the regulations. Also, the business was transitioning from a waterfall development method to being more agile. The transition created some confusion and growing pains.
To overcome these obstacles, we put in place a couple of practices:
1. Show customer pain to executives
We used videos and audio recordings to actually show executives how a poor experience was affecting our customers. For example, we might record user tests of a specific feature or product that needed to be improved. Then we’d show them a highlight reel of people struggling to do what they needed to do. It helped when we validated these findings with data from other internal sources too — call center, web analytics, app reviews for example.
Those types of videos are hard to argue with. And it helped executives build empathy by moving past just hard data to real human understanding.
2. Quantify results
We focused on improving the experience of the most basic and frequently used flows. But before making improvements, we benchmarked how we were doing, measuring things like how long it took a customer to complete their task and how many people could actually complete the task. Then we’d make improvements and re-measure, showing the results of our work.
This had multiple benefits. First, we were able to justify our resource requests by showing good results. Secondly, the quantified results helped unite teams and get them excited about what they’d worked on — giving us momentum for the next project.
What are some of the biggest learnings or takeaways from your time at these big brands from a user experience perspective?
No matter where you are, from technology startups to major retailers, wireless providers and technology giants — it all boils down to asking the right questions, listening, learning and telling customer stories. It didn’t matter if the customer experience program was very mature or if we were working with a lone voice in the product team, it’s about the human connection.
In your experience, why do some companies, like Zappos, successfully develop a very customer-centric culture while others often fail miserably? Why don’t more companies copy Zappos?
I think it’s all about walking the walk. You cannot mandate customer centricity from above. And you can’t push it up from the front line employees, either. You have to embed it in the culture of the organization. It becomes a way of life and is reinforced in every touch point and every team.
Hiring and onboarding the right employees is key but so is celebrating customer successes across the organization. And measuring and improving customer experiences right along with revenue and other business KPIs.
You call yourself a customer experience evangelist. What does that mean to you?
A lot of people think of customer experience work as data, spreadsheets, and charts. But few people are inspired by those things. So, as customer experience practitioners, it’s our job to not only do the data collection and analysis, but also to find better ways to communicate it.
We have to humanize the data however we can. That’s why I’m a big fan of personas. They help everyone in the organization understand users and make decisions with customers in mind. It becomes less about individual opinions and more about what our customers need.
Let’s talk a little about your new role. What will you be doing as Senior Director of Strategy at Cast & Hue?
Many companies want to be customer centric but don’t have the experience or resources to create the culture change that’s really required. I’m looking forward to helping clients tackle those problems.
You can’t just say you’re customer centric and expect it to happen. You have to live it every day. That means every employee feels a sense of customer experience ownership. All channels, all touch points, all the time. I’ll be helping our clients understand, act on, and measure their experience to create real change.
Before we end, is there anything else you’d like to share?
I think the idea of experience as brand is so important. Consumers have consistently raised the bar on what they expect from companies. If you’re still worried about what you want to tell them instead of what they want or need, you’re in big trouble!
Have other questions for Maggie? She’s doing an AMA (ask me anything) on our LinkedIn page on August 24, 2017 at noon EST (9 a.m. pacific, 10 a.m. Arizona). You can submit questions for her and RSVP for the event here.
