C'mon now - the customer isn't in control. On Google, Amazon and the algorithmic plight of the super-user
- Summary:
- The customer is in control? That's an extravagant universal claim - and a recipe for disillusionment. In this Friday roast-and-think, I lay out the true sources of customer power and the predicament of the super-user, who has been sold some Florida swampland.
The CX gurus and gadflies insist that customers now have the power:
Or McKinsey:
"The customer has unprecendented power."
So let me ask you - do you feel powerful when you are spending a day flying with Delta/United/American? Or when you check United Airline's stock price, and realize, despite the triumphant clarion calls of social media vendors, that all the Twitter shaming when United killed a passenger's dog had absolutely no long-term impact on United's stock price, which is up almost 40 percent this year?
Do you feel powerful and in control when you are checking Gmail, and you, along with every other Gmail user, paid account or not, receive a one-size-fits-all UX downgrade redesign?
Two guys in the customer experience game I respect are Paul Greenberg and Esteban Kolsky. During my CX spleen vent at Salesforce Connections, Greenberg and Kolsky made a useful distinction: the customer is in control of the social conversation. Not necessarily in control of the company itself (see my write-up for the Kolksy side of this: Why customer experience is so elusive, and AI is even trickier - a chat with the implausible Esteban Kolsky).
I'll buy that. United Airlines certainly isn't in control of their brand's Twitter conversation. Ergo: as long as we accept that our social feedback on brands has no power or impact, we're good. We control something! Too bad the thing we control is of very little consequence, but hey, congrats fellow customer - we're in charge of brand conversations. (To be fair to Kolksy and Greenberg, their thinking on CX goes way beyond the scope of this article, into concerns enterprises should reckon with. Check their blogs).
Customer power is an algorithm of its own - here are the variables
But it's not that simple of course. Customer power is a matter of degrees. It's real in some situations, a fantasy in others. My stump speech on the power of consumers:
- Depends on the industry. The more monopolistic the industry, the less power the customer has. If you can vote with your wallet, you tend to have more power. I can easily stop eating at Chipotle, but I can't get out of bed with Comcast. Not without pathetic satellite-type Internet. Therefore, Chipotle is under a tad more pressure to care about what I think.
- Depends on whether you are Kim Kardashian or not. Celebrities with massive online bullhorns have a totally different customer experience than you or me.
- Depends on how addicted you are to a platform. We brag about customer choice, but once you buy five Alexa devices, integrate everything from Spotify to Nest appliances onto Alexa, how quick will you be to abandon Amazon Prime, Music, etc? For enterprise buyers, we could rephrase this into "depends on how locked in you are to a vendor/platform." But the B2B customer is a different story anyhow - not my focus today.
- Depends on how much you spend with a company, and if they have organized their services to cater to high value/profitable customers. Some companies have the equivalent of Klout (bye!) and treat you a little better if they think you are an influencer.
- If the service you are using is free (Twitter, Instagram), you have less customer power, despite their reliance on your eyeballs and data. Doesn't mean the reverse is true, however. Paying for services doesn't guarantee your influence.
- Depends whether you are talking about Amazon, Google, Facebook, or Apple, aka FANG (or, more accurately, FAANG and that includes Netflix, which isn't too big to care but thinks they are). You have no power with any of those four. They are officially "too big to care."
Unfortunately, how much passion you have for a particular brand doesn't factor in. So the potential for disillusion and sour taste always looms. In the case of FANG, most of us are stuck in flawed commercial marriages of convenience.
One thing I find fascinating: even though Amazon and Google have the resources and algorithmic sophistication to serve a range of users with different preferences, they typically choose not to. Their reams of data on our preferences would allow them to automate - and even monetize - services for individuals and subgroups. But they always offer up a wet noodle "majority rules" excuse when cancelling beloved services.
Super-users get the algorithmic shaft - the fall of Google Reader
Those of us who fit into the nerdy super-user category are often shafted, despite our naive pretensions that our super-user status gives us influence. And: despite the ability of Google and Amazon to serve super-users effectively, if they feel like it.
The classic example was the fall of Google Reader. When Google killed their much-loved newsreader, they killed a product they knew was only used by a minority. Would it have been easy to keep it running? Sure. We know that the Google Reader super-user was influential, due to the amount of journalists who are die-hard RSS addicts. Didn't matter. That's why we are all powerless in the wake of FANG.
The silver lining for Google Reader buffs: providing an online reader is a specialized service that seems to be a good niche for smaller players. This is the type of Internet Seth Godin idealized evangelized in We Are All Weird: connecting globally with segments - or super-users if you will - to support a unique business. That works in the newsreader game for the likes of Feedly, or, in my case, the fantastic Newsblur. If that worked universally, we could be indifferent to the machinations of FANG.
Google kiboshes their YouTube Video Editor - because they can
Google took their anti-super-user algorithmic arrogance even further when they got rid of YouTube Video Editor. YouTube Video Editor was brilliant for editing videos quickly on the road. I got into the habit of shooting a video via YouTube Live on my phone, and editing it online. I could put out a decently edited video in 15-30 minutes - without having to download and upload a gig-sized file via a barely-functioning hotel Internet connection.
But YouTube pulled the plug on Video Editor because only a minority of YouTubers used it (which they explained matter of factly on the obituary - as if they have no ability to support services for user niches). Since there are so many FANG fanboys and girlz in the tech press, they tend to function as half-hearted apologists for these closures, blindly supporting these "majority didn't use this service" explanations. Engadget shrugs their shoulders at the plight of YouTube "power users," but the comment thread is the real deal.
Google can crunch data on any one of us, ask us to review the restaurant we just freaking walked out of, send us our own photos in a collage from the same day two years ago, but when it comes to cloud services they don't feel like supporting, nope - it's brute force majority rules.
When Google sent out its condescending notice that YouTube Editor was shutting down, Google noted a number of free video editing alternatives - but failed to mention none of them are online editors, and none of them are fully integrated into YouTube.
Hmmm - can you think of a group of computer users who are unable to download video editing software? Yep - Google Chromebook users, which includes thousands of schools that provide Chromebooks for their students.
After Google canned Video Editor, angry schoolteachers posted in forums about losing the ability for their students to edit videos on Chromebooks. Just one of many from Engadget:
I've edited hundreds of videos using YouTube Editor over the past years and THERE ARE NO ALTERNATIVES anywhere on the web or on Android. This was the ONLY way to edit videos for YouTube on a Chromebook... This means it will now be a real pain to edit videos on a Chromebook. Thanks a lot for this nightmare.
Google didn't care - despite having an ample stake in making Chromebooks the schoolroom standard. If Google can spare a few team members and servers to keep the abandoned embarrassment known as Google Plus up and running, they can certainly keep YouTube Editor going, and retain the loyalty of educators and video producers. But - no need. They're Google, and we're not. (Though as Den Howlett noted in Book review: Life After Google - The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy, there are a few cracks in the silicon castle).
In this case, my recourse wasn't a happy one. YouTube has enough of a monopoly on video attention that Google sees no reason to outsource video editing services to a partner. For light video editing on the go, I settled on a paid version of VideoPad, but I had to download the software on each machine. Now I contend with video uploads and downloads on my hotel Internet once again - along with a heightened level of resentment towards Google for the effort I took mastering the nuances of a service they discarded with impunity. A service I would have happily paid for.
Amazon Music pulls a power play on another group of super-users - music collectors
Which brings me to Amazon. Now, I don't know if music aficionados are an influential demographic or not. But a few years ago, I paid for Amazon Music Unlimited, including the ability to upload your own mp3 music files. Streaming music might work great for the masses, but for music buffs like yours truly, we want to upload our own rare tracks and outtakes that are not available for streaming.
So I did. Then I built playlists on Amazon that used those tracks. When I chose Amazon Echo over Google Home devices, it was primarily due to the superiority of the music options I had customized. Yep, Amazon canceled the ability to upload music files. I found out one day when I logged on and saw a cute alert saying "Deleting 12,000 songs.."
An Amazon tech support person berated me for (supposedly) not following instructions which would have preserved my online files till the end of 2018, when all your remaining private music will be deleted from Amazon Music (most are already gone unless you changed an obscure setting to postpone your reckoning). This tech support jobsworth also patronizingly told me that since only a smaller percentage of Amazon Prime/Music users uploaded their own files, it didn't make sense to continue. The Internet mob rules.
Cue the requisite insensitive apologia from the tech press, this one from Art Technica: "With more of the music industry moving to paid streaming, it makes more sense for Amazon to focus on its Music and Music Unlimited services." Yeah, because Amazon can't possibly serve several types of customers at the same time; they aren't technically sophisticated enough, and AWS doesn't have enough storage for mp3 files. Thankfully Ars Technica readers aren't so Amazon-washed:
With SaaS you will get what they give you, like it or not, take it or leave it - especially with Amazon. Amazon could give a shit about what customers think of their software. I'm glad I have the skills to not need a streaming service for the music I own.
And:
Not the 1st cloud service to shut down, won't be the last. It's a risk you take when you let others control your data.
A glaring absence of "the customer is in control" nonsense in these comments. And Amazon shut this down even though it connects to potential Echo sales.
Since Amazon cares a lot more about the future of Alexa devices than my playlists, I played the Alexa card. I explained I'd have to strongly consider moving to Google Home devices (Google Music currently allows free uploading of 50,000 mp3s). It took me a while to do something about it - I'm pretty stuck on the Alexa platform. Amazon wasn't at all concerned about me kicking tires on Google Music.
But I made it happen, and moved all my music to Google. No Google Home devices yet, but I'm weighing it out. I'm under no illusions: the same thing might happen again on Google. But I figure with Google way behind the likes of Apple and Spotify in music streaming, Google will probably put up with me for a while.
Final thoughts - I guess I'll settle for hyperconvenience
This music example is the most disheartening because there are no paid services that can operate at Amazon/Google scale and flow to smart devices. There are no "weird" upstarts that can compete with Google or Amazon's online music libraries and let you supplement that with mp3s. Google is now the only game in town for this type of music buff.
Obviously social means something, otherwise brands wouldn't even bother with social channels. Southwest responds to almost all my tweets. It has a strange way of making me more loyal, even though they haven't changed policies or flight routes on my behalf. If social media had no power, I'm not sure we'd have the president we have today in the U.S. Perhaps that goes for Obama also.
So the matter of social media power is complicated. I do believe socially-organized brand boycotts can have impact, especially as advertisers begin to pull out. But it's revealing that companies which have the algorithmic ability to serve a wide variety of niche constituents choose not to - even when those niches are influential. Google and Amazon make decisions based on what's good for Google and Amazon.
Sometimes that works for you, sometimes not. I'm happy to talk about customer experience, because it does matter. But when you play the customer-has-the-power card with me, you might get a Chipotle burrito in the mail.
Notice I didn't threaten to move off Amazon Prime. They've got me where they want me. I guess instead of power, I'll have to settle for hyper-convenience.
Updated, 6am UK time Saturday, with additional links and consumer feedback quotes.