This is a post about managing the expectations of your users. Maybe better put, it's delivering on the promises that you make your users. I think customer service is the most vital part of any "business" relationship (any relationship where I'm giving someone money to obtain a product or service). In this case, I'm looking for a hotel for a bachelorette party I'm giving for my best friend so that all the drunken women attending it will have a place to crash instead of driving home. I've enlisted the help of her fiance, because he travels a lot and has hotel points. I've got a few options and all I'm looking for is how many points it will take at this particular hotel to get a free room. Now, there's going to be more than a few women at this party so the chances are we are also going to have to pay for rooms above what the hotel points will provide.
So Holiday Inn's website doesn't give information about how many points each hotel costs without logging into their system (maybe their first mistake?). I'm a member of their club but have long since lost my membership card so I can't log in. But then I noticed an option on the left hand side of the screen that says I can chat with a representative.
Perfect! I can find out the answer to my question without logging in if there's a live sales person! So I open it and type my question....
But when I hit submit, I get an error message!!!!
Alright, this is just unacceptable. Now I'm annoyed and I still don't have the info I was looking for and I'm strongly considering taking my gaggle of drunken women to another hotel to crash for the night because my expectations have not been met.
So how does an experience on a hotel website relate to higher education? It's simple - you need to come through for your users. If you give them an option to do something online, make sure it works otherwise it's very easy to turn them off and you'll lose the sale (and yes, an enrollment or a donation is a sale). Give them what you promise them and nothing less.
I'll give a specific example - a friend and I were on an admissions website the other day. There was a link that said when a user clicked on it, they would find out what GPA and SAT score they needed to get into the school. However, when you clicked, you didn't get any numbers at all. "We take everything into consideration." Well, that's really helpful. It doesn't meet the expectations that the websites have laid down for the users. They could have just as easily edited the specific text in the link to be more accurate, but elected not to. So now the user, having anticipate receiving the information they were looking for, aren't any more knowledgeable about the admissions standards at that school.
Meet expectations. Keep promises. Have good customer service. These are basics that are all too often overlooked. Make sure they aren't overlooked on your site so that you don't give users an easy excuse to walk away from their purchase.
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