My Ancestry.com Nightmare: Improving CX/UX
I couldn’t help but think of my colleague Debbie Levitt’s memo to me the other day (do they say memo anymore?) She’s a master at CX/UX and I was lamenting how stupid my experience with Ancestry.com was along with so many other public records sites on the open web this past Friday. Those sites make you feel like you need to take a shower after the experience cause it felt so scam-ey.
You see I was trying to do something simple. Find the marriage license of my grandparents. 50 websites later (or that’s how it felt) some off a county website, some off a library site. All legit but nightmares to navigate. They started searching criminal records, court cases, social media history, birth records whirring away chugging at background asking me where these folks lived and how old they were but not giving me anyplace to say ‘they’re dead.’
And of course, there was no place to go to actually just search for a marriage license. Instead, I was going to get my grandfather’s Twitter history. Except that he was born in the late 1800s. There was no Twitter….
I decided I’d had enough when Ancestry came up. I figured well — they’re a name brand. Well — they’re authoritative. Well — they’re trustworthy and they said they had marriage licenses.
So I signed up for a 14-day trial. Except that once I got in it looked like Salesforce on a bad day. Cluttered, ‘big iron’ overkill, and every button and report you could fathom with one exception. A simple place to search for simple things.
It wanted me to start setting up my profile and my family tree. I don’t care about my family tree. I needed a marriage license — I know my family tree! It was so complicated my eyes rolled over. Impossible for a simple thing. Search marriage license, put in parameters, and voila.
But no such luck. Some tech wizard in the bowels of that organization with no product management or UX/CX bone in their body dreamt up the user experience I was supposed to have without regard to what I actually wanted. Gee a family tree might be nice this coming Christmas. But at the moment what brought me there had nothing to do with it. And can’t you tell from my search navigation? Google took me right to you for heaven’s sake!
Fed up, I tried to cancel my trial 15 minutes after signing up, and finding that on the website was like finding a rare bird while hiking the amazon. I was lost. No fine print. Plenty of ‘how to’ unsubscribes but with no links to click to actually do so. I was in an infinite loop — an adage I learned when I took programming in college — and an infinite loop is never ever good. Ancestry was doing everything it could to prevent me from leaving and I got mad.
I then found the help desk phone number and when they picked up I said I wanted to cancel. Why? Your site is a nightmare to navigate. I’d be happy to send you some tutorials. That’s just the problem. If I need tutorials your website is a nightmare. I’d be happy to….. I do not want anything right now. Please cancel my trial. But. Please cancel my TRIAL NOW. That is all I want from you. Firm. They finally deposited a cancellation number my way.
They did it and then proceeded to send emails which I’d just unsubscribed to. Never ever again.
So short of calling one of my clients and asking to search their public records data I called the counties where my grandparents were born. I put an email through and got a response in 24 hours. Promising. I could put in an ask at their website I was told. I went there — turns out they don’t accept a safari browser for record requests. Internet Explorer only. This my friends is our tax dollars at work. I was told I could visit. That won’t work. Can’t travel to PA from CA in a pandemic. Or I could mail. Hmmmm. No address given. And no place to call. So I submitted another email and we shall see……
Ladies and gentlemen. If you would like to have a digital presence these days think prospect and customer first. Map out all their journeys. And forget the training manual. Guided tour maybe but in the age of Google search bars and the iPhone, the last thing we need are manuals. Has anyone looked at the manual of a new Porsche lately? I dare you…. If you need a manual the product is doomed.
If you want to improve your CX/UX Strategies to Reinvent the Customer Experience come visit Debbie Levitt, Outsell Partner, and Chief Experience Officer, Delta CX at our upcoming Outsell Signature Event, co-produced with JEGI. Here’s the description of her session. Compelling or what? I can’t wait to see you there. We can all do better. Register today!
CX/UX Strategies to Reinvent the Customer Experience — Wednesday, November 11 at 4 pm PST.
In an era of faster, faster, faster, our workplaces are sacrificing product, service, and experience quality to “just ship it” or call it “done.” We fired the R&D department so we could follow models that guess, cut corners, and skimp on important tasks. We quote Steve Jobs and Walt Disney, but then emulate startups, who fail roughly 90% of the time.
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