Customer trust is easy to break
At Omnicell, part of my role as a principal designer was to improve user experiences across digital platforms and physical products for the IV Compounding line of business.
Early in my tenure, I noticed low customer satisfaction (CSAT) numbers related to a specific part of one platform. Due to a security breach, access to the Analytics product was no longer accessible via the platform for customers. For customers to gather data on their IV compounding operations, they had to contact Omnicell employees.
The button/link remained on the landing screen as you can see in the image shown below. To most folks, this seems small but the button didn’t take the user anywhere. When clicked, it took the user to a generic ‘not found’ page. Not only is this a lazy way of handling a sensitive situation – which made it that much more aggravating to customers – it was a huge miss in terms of communicating with a user base that hungers to be treated with respect.
Instead of embracing the challenge when access to the Analytics product was shut down, the button-to-nowhere remained a sign of an organization leaving an opportunity to build trust on the table. I saw all of this as an opportunity to show customers Omnicell cared enough to keep the button linkable but to add a landing page instead of leaving the user hanging.
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Upcoming sprints were loaded with work. I noticed huge opportunity to help here, too as much of the work was scoped in ways that were cumbersome and lacking visuals like wireframes and development details. But in the case of the Analytics button, changing it was not included in upcoming work, it was either perceived to be more effort than the engineering team had capacity for or an item that was of lower value than other tasks or product folks hadn’t clarified ownership or all of that was more the case.
The screen shown here is where the user lands after authentication. The first button on the left in the second row is how customers previously accessed the Analytics product.
The plan to make it better
I proposed two possible design solutions, drafted some content for the page to be added and wrote user story details then forced it into the next sprint. I communicated with the product manager and as a team, we decided that making some of these changes wouldn’t risk our release timeframe. The user story got written, the wireframes and page details were finalized and customers got a working button that took them to a page that informed them of the progress being made on the development of a new Analytics suite.
The results
About 30 days after implementation, we saw an uptick in CSAT numbers directly related to those design decisions. There was also direct customer praise for addressing these items that had previously been neglected. At a time when trust in a company is low, there are ways to help shore up every ounce of corporate good will as long as you’re willing to go to bat for the small stuff that does matter.