Usability During a Recession

If you’re not busy conducting usability projects during a recession, then maybe you’re not selling usability the right way

During a recession, or a decline in the economy, most companies look for ways to decrease spending. However, here’s a secret; at the same time, many companies look for ways to increase their online sales. Why? Because often a web site is a company’s lowest cost acquisition channel, compared to higher-cost acquisition channels such as brick-and-mortar stores or TV spots or direct mail campaigns. So in a recession, smart companies look to generate additional low-cost sales to make up for the decrease in other, potentially higher-cost acquisitions, and are often very keen to optimize their online channel.

Usability for eCommerce web sites

It’s during a recession that you can most easily make the argument to a company to conduct usability testing. You should be saying; “Hey, we should be doing everything we can to make sure our website is working as well as possible, to optimize conversion and capture every sale possible!” What Senior Vice President of Marketing or Advertising wouldn’t respond positively to that message, and want to know more about how usability can increase online sales?

Usability for Customer Service Applications

The same is true for customer service web sites. Making improvements in customer service web sites can help increase the number of “saves,” meaning the number of existing customers who were considering dropping the company or it’s products, but instead, because it’s now easier to deal with the company through online self service, stay on. This loss of existing customers is also called an attrition rate. Why should you care about customer attrition and attrition rates? Because it’s a well-known fact that keeping customers costs much less than trying to acquire new customers, and usability can help decrease (improve) that attrition rate!

Usability Fixes the Leaky Bucket

This optimization of customer service web sites follows the same general principle of “fixing the leaky bucket.” Not heard of that? Think of the water pouring into the bucket as new customers. Think of the water in the bucket as your existing customers, and think of the water leaking out of the hole in the bottom of the bucket as the customers who leave your company. Companies must have an equal or greater amount of water (customers) entering the bucket than leaving the bucket, otherwise the company runs out of water (customers) eventually, and goes out of business.

In general, it’s cheaper for a company to retain customers by fixing problems that cause customers to leave (fix the leak) than it is for companies to spend money to acquire new customers (pour water in) to replace the customers that left. So what does all this mean? It means, usability can be used to improve your customer service web site, to help hold onto more existing customers by fixing problems in your customer service applications that might be the tipping-point that causes your customers to decide to leave. Spending money on advertising to acquire customers is much more expensive than using usability to provide a better customer experience, “saving” customers who might have left your company through unnecessary attrition.

Craig says: “Usability is the wood and nails that will help fix your leaky bucket.”

Quick Inexpensive Usability Testing

So when it comes to your eCommerce web site (or web customer service applications), how do you optimize the experience to make sure it’s working as well as possible, so that your conversion is as high as possible (or attrition as low as possible)? Well, it’s by conducting quick, cheap, usability projects that identify loss-points, and provide recommendations for improvements that will optimize those loss-points, and thus optimize the user experience and add (or save) customers cheaply. That’s how!

3 Tips for Selling Usability Projects

This means selling and conducting low-cost usability testing and usability improvements for your web site. Your usability improvements will help maximize sales or existing customer saves.

Now, remember my 3 little tips for selling usability during a recession, and you should find yourself very busy indeed with more usability projects than you can shake a stick at (or a leaky bucket!).

Usability Sales Tip #1 – Use the words “low cost” often when describing usability

Make sure you use the words “low-cost” (or “cheap” or “inexpensive”) often when describing your potential usability projects. Why? Because “low cost” (or “cheap” or “inexpensive”) is a golden word during a recession. And you can safely use the term “low cost” with your usability project because compared to other acquisition methods, like direct mail or TV spots, or even web-based advertising, usability testing IS the lowest cost, AND has the biggest bang for the buck. Need convincing? Here’s how you can “prove” this to the company…

Usability Sales Tip #2 – Usability is Amortized, Advertising Isn’t

Let’s assume your SVP of Marketing wants to increase web site sales by 10%. A reasonable request considering in a recession the Execs are looking to increase low-cost channel sales. Assuming the SVP of Marketing increases spending on advertising to generate the additional web site sales, the additional spending may indeed increase sales, but as soon as that additional spending is cut off, those additional sales will begin to fall off as well. Advertising money is not amortized over the lifetime of a web site, because advertising-generated sales decrease when advertising is cut-off.

With usability however, the temporary increase in spending for the usability project has long-lasting results that impact the web site long after the additional usability spending has ceased. That’s because the usability improvements in the eCommerce channel are permanent and will continue adding additional sales for as long as that web site lives. Spend low-cost money on usability now, and you reap the benefits of additional sales months and years later. And because you can amortize the one-time cost of your usability project by all the incremental sales generated over the remainder of the life of the web site, usability’s cost-per-sale will easily be the cheapest, even compared to online advertising. Advertising simply cannot say this.

Usability Sales Tip #3 – Usability Decreases Customer Attrition

If your company is not interested in improving the eCommerce web site with usability (those crazy fools!), don’t forget that there’s still plenty of opportunity to sell usability to your customer service channel owner. In a recession, there’s increased pressure to hold onto every customer. Conducting low-cost usability testing and improvements that make it easier to do business with your company will help hold onto more customers, helping to decrease the attrition rate. This will make your customer service owner a hero, or may at least potentially save his or her job. And remember, as with the eCommerce website, the customer service application can spend money on usability once, and reap the benefits for months and years to come. The “cost per save” in this case is amortized over the lifetime of the customer service application, meaning it’s a fraction of the original usability cost. Bring this fact up to your customer service channel owner and you’ll be in a good position to have plenty of usability projects to conduct.

Recession Equals Usability Projects Galore!

So now you’ve had a chance to understand why I believe usability can help a company during a recession. I hope you’ll agree that rather than being a doom-and-gloom period for usability, a recession actually offers a plethora of opportunity for you to sell low-cost, quick usability projects to a firm. Now more than ever, usability can rise to the occasion and help make a difference for an eCommerce or customer service web site. If you’re not busy doing usability projects now, it may be because you’re not selling usability the right way. So now that you’ve got a few of my tips get out there and sell that usability, you’ll have usability projects galore!