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How the Microsoft Excel website dramatically improved customer satisfaction
Those who are most likely to make unbiased cognitive assessments are the clinically depressed.
Jon Elster
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Once upon a time there ws a website... Production is king The customer is dictator Johan from Lithuania Time to let go Bad linking leads to ruin Lessons learned 10 million pages and countingI have heard it said that there are roughly 10 million pages on the Microsoft website. Nobody really knows for sure-which tells a story in and of itself-but that is an agreed-upon estimate. Of those 10 million pages, some 3 million have never been visited by a human being. That's pretty much half the population of Ireland in webpages that nobody has ever visited. It would not be wildly unreasonable to ask why Microsoft created these pages in the first place.Sometime in 2005 I got a call from a Microsoft manager who told me that Microsoft was suffering from "extreme content proliferation." Their model of letting everybody publish whatever they wanted whenever they wanted hadn't worked very well. The reality is that giving control of a website to a content author is a bit like giving a pub to an alcoholic. It's happy days. All that stuff that couldn't be published in print-including all the stuff that could be published in print-can now be easily put up on the Web. Inevitably, it leads down the road of ruin.
A different kind of analysis is needed; one that is not focused on the volume of pages or the volume of visitors.
Once upon a time there was a website …Once upon a time there was a website, and a very good website it was. It had high hopes and lofty ambitions. It had a vision to:
Publish lots of cool content. They started publishing lots and lots of pages. Things were good. Page views were increasing and the manager encouraged them to publish more good pages. "We can do better," the manager said. So the web team focused on publishing more, better, faster. They had become the quintessential web team. It felt good. Time went by. A pattern developed. It was all about publishing. The website grew and so did the number of visitors. At one level, the website was really successful. It had lots of visitors and lots of page views. And that looked like success. And that was what was communicated to management. "We have lots of visitors and lots of page views. Everything is increasing. Things are good." But then someone came to the web team with a different way of analyzing success. They did a different kind of analysis that is not focused on the volume of pages or the volume of visitors. This analysis is based on finding out whether customers are satisfied or not; whether they are able to complete the tasks they came to the website to complete. It turned out that customers were not satisfied. They complained about how "it's not what I want", and "I can't find it", and "I don't like it." The web team was taken aback. All this hard work and the customers are still not satisfied. How could that be? They shook their heads and decided to redouble their efforts in order to find a solution. They figured that some of the problems must be associated with the content that is already on the website, so they decided to revise and improve it. They reckoned that another problem was that their customers couldn't find the right pages. So they decided to really optimize their website for search engines. They added lots and lots of keywords to every page; lots and lots. They worked hard on the title tags to make them keyword rich. Then they thought that another reason for customer dissatisfaction is the links. So they decided to redesign the navigation and add more links. Links like "See more" and "Related links" and "Buy this", and "No, really, you need to see this," and "You might even be interested in this." And they added these links to the homepage and sub-homepages and to document pages and to any pages they can find. It was hard work but they felt good after all this effort to help the customer. Because they really do want to help the customer. Their hearts are in the right place. Surely all this effort would lead to increased customer satisfaction. The team waited excitedly to hear.
We are managers of our customers' time as they seek to complete tasks.
Production is kingWe live in a world where production is glorified. There is a cult of volume. For millions of years it has been about how many cows you owned, how many acres of land you had, how much your factory could produce, how many lines of content or code you could write. Those who produce have value; those who don't, don't. Productivity is the essence of capitalism. It's about producing more stuff with less people. That's what it's all about. It's deeply ingrained in management thinking; it's in the genes.We solve problems. If it ain't broke we don't fix it. We are inherently and naturally reactive and project driven. We are launch-and-leave cultures. It's about the new and the next. There is nothing cool or positive about continuous improvement of something that already exists. The hero invents the new, creates something that nobody has ever thought of before. The beauty of human beings is we are not forced to follow an inevitable path. We can, with enough effort, retrain our brains and put a brake on the drives of our genes. We don't have to listen to that incessant voice that says "produce, reproduce, consume, produce, reproduce, consume." We live in a digital world, a world of content. However, most organizations are totally unprepared and unwilling to manage content professionally. The Web is seen as an "IT problem." Perhaps it is seen as a communications challenge. Sure, it's a challenge and that's why it's so exciting to be around right now. We are realizing that we should not be managing technology or content, but rather our customers' experience as they seek to complete a task. That it is not organizational productivity that we should focus on (unless we're managing an intranet). Rather, it is customer productivity that should monopolize our attention. Customers are spending their time on our websites and the best thing we can do is help them waste as little time as possible. We are managers of our customers' time as they seek to complete tasks.
One of the most important things to manage is dissatisfaction with a specific task
The customer is dictatorThe aforementioned web team had done all the things that quality web teams have been trained to do in order to make the website better. They had worked on and revised the pages; they had added lots of links and keywords. This was a genuine effort to make things better. Many web teams would have done nothing at all to the pages that already existed; they would simply have kept publishing new pages.It didn't work. Things didn't get any better. For all that web publishing work, customer satisfaction remained flat. And the website had grown larger and was now even harder to maintain. What to do? At least the web team now has the right metrics. It measured the satisfaction of customers who have tried to complete tasks on its website. Not general satisfaction, but satisfaction with a particular task. Most websites are measured-if they are measured at all-on extremely crude and often totally misleading measures such as the volume of visitors and pages. These truly negative and misleading measures actually encourage worst practice on the Web-the production of lots and lots of pages. So, this web team is way ahead of most web teams. But they are still stuck in a rut. The web team in question is the Microsoft Office Content Publishing group that manages the Office.com site, and one of their focus areas is the Excel content pages. They needed a breakthrough, a new way of working, and this breakthrough came when they realized that one of the most important things to manage is dissatisfaction with a specific task. "It is not sufficient to only work towards increasing satisfaction," Maya Subramanian, Business Development & Strategies Analyst states. "In fact, lowering dissatisfaction is more critical." Instead of only measuring satisfaction with a task, why not also measure dissatisfaction? Why not quantify all the people who were unable to complete their tasks when they came to the website and try to identify what it was that caused them to fail? It's one thing to show how many people completed the task because of a particular piece of content, but how many people were confused by the content and unable to complete the task as a result? And, just as importantly, did this piece of content hurt the completion of other more important tasks? The team established two basic objectives:
Every time you add, you add complexity.
Johan from LithuaniaThe Web is littered with good intentions. There is a webpage that answers-or at least attempts to answer-every question that was ever asked, and many that weren't. And this is the crux of the matter. How do you manage all this stuff? How do you make sure it works, that it helps people solve tasks? How do you keep it up to date?There is an even greater problem. Every time you add, you add complexity. Adding the answer to one question can make it harder for someone to find the answer to another. As the volume of content increases so too does the complexity, and the magic search engine will not always sort it out. Let's say your website has answers for questions A, B, C, D, and E. Question A gets 80% of the demand. Question E has a somewhat similar title to Question A but has a very different answer. Twenty percent of the people who want an answer to Question A end up on the page for Question E. They get the wrong answer and they leave very frustrated.
As the causes of dissatisfaction at Microsoft Excel were investigated it became clear that some content was just getting in the way.
Time to let goIt's hard to let content go; to send it into retirement. In fact, it doesn't seem right. It's not intuitive. It's rarely rewarded, either. At Microsoft-as with practically all organizations I have worked with-the mechanism of reward is geared towards those who create, code, write, launch, ship, publish. We produce things. We're human. It's hard to accept that on the Web we're in the business of service, of solving problems. It's much easier to see our jobs as creators of content rather than solvers of problems.After a lot of discussion, the team decided to launch an effort called "Weeding the Garden." "Organizations need to understand that "weeding" is work," Laurel Hale, Excel Content Publishing Manager states. "It takes time to weed intelligently with the best interests of the customer in mind. Therefore, content publishing managers need to allocate time in their schedules for this valuable work." As the causes of dissatisfaction at Microsoft Excel were investigated it became clearer and clearer that some content was just getting in the way. But the idea of actually deleting that content was a really hard concept for the web team to accept. Some had never deleted before and didn't even know how to go about it. "Taking things away isn't the right thing to do. We should fix them." Some things should never have been published in the first place. If there's something wrong with a page it should be fixed or removed. It's not good enough to say you'll get to it. Fix it now or take it down. It's important to understand that poor quality content is worse than no content. If you give someone the wrong directions there's no point in saying: "Well, at least I gave them some directions." "OK, they aren't useful, but certainly there's no harm in just leaving them there?" Oh yes there is. Old content builds up over time. If you are not regularly reviewing and removing the amount of out-of-date content will grow and grow, making it increasingly difficult to find fresh and useful content. Customers see content from a totally different perspective to content producers. They don't seek out content in volume. They don't think a site is good just because it has lots of content. It has to have the right content. "Our original team agreement was to remove or expire pages as a first resort, so we looked at the traffic patterns and customer feedback to figure out what was happening," Laurel Hale states. This took courage and a lot of convincing, because removing content was anathema to the Microsoft culture. What we search for is not always what we needLots of people were searching for "remove conditional formatting". So, it was decided to publish a dedicated page called "Remove conditional formatting", which explained exactly how to remove conditional formatting. However, this new page "Removing conditional formatting" began getting a lot of customer dissatisfaction ratings. So the web team revised it. Still lots of dissatisfaction. On the surface, the page looked fine. The information was clear and well-written. However, as Laurel explains, "Many customer comments for the "Removing conditional formatting" article indicated that they weren't really looking just for removing conditional formatting, but really needed to figure out how to use the feature-how to apply it, how to remove it (yes), and how to change conditional formatting once it was applied-most likely this is what led them to search for how to remove it. Sometimes customers look for one thing, but really need something else, or something more." Sometimes, the words people use in search are just a hint at what they really need. They may end up on the wrong page because of the words they have chosen. If you don't do your research properly you could draw some false and damaging conclusions:
Bad linking leads to ruinLinking is the essence of what makes the Web the Web. There is no more important skill for a web writer to have. Linking involves thinking about customer tasks and journeys. Where do customers want to go and what's the best way to get them there? As with everything, too much linking leads to confusion. Giving a person a wrong-or badly worded-link is like giving a driver bad directions. You will waste their time and make them very annoyed.One of the early initiatives from the Excel team was to add lots more links to the pages. This clearly wasn't working and they realized they needed to take a quality not quantity approach to link writing. As a result of studying customer behavior, the Excel team noticed some interesting patterns. Lots of customers were searching for help on Excel PivotTables. They'd get to the page on Excel PivotTables. On the page was a "See Also" heading, below which was the following link: Ten tutorials about creating PivotTable reports for Excel Services Some things you need to know about the above link:
When you are writing for the Web, always start with the most important words. Lead with the need. Begin with the essence of the message; the most important element. In the original link the most important element is Excel Services. The tutorials are for Excel Services, not Excel, so we should start with Excel Services. And, of course, an even more important point is whether people would know the difference anyway. A great many people might think that Excel Services are services connected with the Excel spreadsheet program. This is a classic example of how the language used to describe the tiny task (Excel Services), impacts on the ability to complete the top task (Excel). "They see a link to this topic, and go there," Laurel explains, "only to realize this topic is about Excel Services, not Excel, and get very, very mad at us! So we removed the "See Also" link to this topic from the general PivotTable topics. We also removed it from the Excel Table of Contents. And what was the result? Page views fell by over 77%. Dissatisfaction fell by over 15%" 
By taking a top tasks approach, many of the pages saw a satisfaction increase of 15% or more.
Hiding pages from searchSometimes getting found is not a good thing. Particularly if what's getting found has been found instead of what should have been found."The Excel Function Reference was notorious for generating dissatisfaction," Laurel states. "We couldn't remove these pages because they are mapped to the user interface for the product. We started looking at customer feedback and realized that the wrong customers were finding these topics. For example, English teachers, who wanted to add numbers were finding the IMSUM function. Administrative assistants, who wanted to print address labels, were finding the ADDRESS function. Students, who wanted to set the print area, were finding the AREAS function." So, the Excel team deleted all the individual function pages, bringing them all together into a single page called "Math functions". "When customers searched for "sum numbers"," Laurel explains, "the basic topic appeared at the top of the search results." And instead of seeing another search result called "IMSUM function," they would instead see a search result called "Math functions" and not click it. Of course, the experts who needed these math functions would understand the title of the result and click it.  So, managing the long neck-making it easier to complete top tasks-does not always have to make it more difficult to complete tiny tasks. By clearly directing people to the top tasks of sum numbers, set print areas, and print address labels, and keeping them away from the function topics, dissatisfactory usage of the function topics dramatically decreased. "Dissatisfactory function reference page views decreased by 42%," Laurel explains. "Satisfactory page views increased by 423%!" That's impressive. This is Microsoft. And it's not about technology. It's about psychology. What the Microsoft Excel team achieved is at heart based on a better understanding of their customers. This is not a technological issue but rather a human one. In an age where more and more is done with the aid of technology, it has never been more important to understand how people behave as they interact with this technology and what their true needs are. The Excel team "weeded" 50% of the Excel pages. "Six months before weeding, approximately 10% of all page views were dissatisfactory," Laurel states. "Six months after weeding, dissatisfactory page views dropped to barely 3% of total page views." For years, satisfaction with many pages on Excel had remained under 50%. By taking a top tasks approach, many of the pages saw a satisfaction increase of 15% or more. That's pretty dramatic. Lessons learnedAccording to Maya Subramanian, the key lessons learned were:
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Customer Carewords is a unique scoring technique enabling customers to tell you in precise, statistical terms their top tasks when they arrive at your website. More |
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