Skip to main content
Contact us
Contact us
Customer Experience Horror Stories
Article

3 Customer Experience Horror Stories That Could Have Been Avoided

It may sound dramatic, but when you're trying to purchase something or check your account status, nothing is scarier than a poorly designed customer experience.
Unfortunately, many brands struggle to create a positive, consistent customer experience for their users. According to Kampyle, 87% of customers think brands need to put more effort into providing a consistent experience. Want to make sure you're not scaring customers away? Here are 3 customer experience horror stories and how you can avoid them:

Virgin America Offered a Disjointed Mobile App Experience

A company's mobile app should increase convenience for your customers while also offering a complete experience. Virgin America created a fractured experience with their mobile app by requiring users to switch to their website to book a ticket. By comparison, most other airline apps allow customers to book flights directly from the app. This kind of requirement can make customers feel like they’d be better off visiting the website from their mobile web browser instead.

Apple Surprised Customers with Default iCloud Setting

When speaking about the security of customer experience, it's worth recalling what happened to Apple in 2014. The company was the subject of a major cyber-attack in which hackers were able to gain access to their customer’s iCloud pictures. This resulted in the private pictures of hundreds of celebrities being made public online. Security aside, the affront to customer experience was that most iPhone users had no idea their photos were being backed up to the cloud automatically. Even though Apple’s intent was for this new feature to be a treat for their users, it ended up being a trick. Creating a successful customer experience requires that your customers understand the services you are offering them. By creating hidden or poorly-announced features, you could create a level of distrust between you and your customers.

Dinnr Created a Customer Experience That No One Needed

Dinnr is a failed same-day grocery delivery service from the United Kingdom. The startup offered its clients to pick a recipe on the company’s website and have all the ingredients delivered to their doorstep the same day. After over 18 months of struggling to stay afloat, the startup failed. Later on, Dinnr’s founder Michal Bohanes shared a blog with the lessons learned from his failed product. He wrote that the number one reason for Dinnr’s failure was that they were not solving anyone’s problem. Bohanes shared that he conducted an interview-based research before he launched but failed to have a solid discovery to reflect the real state of the market. So, as it turned out later, there was no real market need for his service.
Businesses tend to invest huge sums of money in products and features that end up being a total failure. How could they have avoided this? The answer is: hiring a UX specialist to validate their business idea and perform a consumer research.

The ELEKS UX team has a vast experience of helping businesses tackle customer experience horrors. Our UX experts say, in most cases, poor customer experience is the consequence of no discovery or insufficient user testing before the development. An in-depth consumer analysis is absolutely essential for a product success. It allows to ensure a product delivers a meaningful customer experience and there is a real need for it on the market.

If you want to make sure your customer experience doesn't turn into another horror story, contact us at ELEKS. With over 26 years' experience, we'll make sure your site or mobile app doesn't leave your customers afraid and in the dark.

Have a question?
Speak to an expert
head-product-designe-min
Explore our product design services
cta Explore our product design services
Contact Us
  • We need your name to know how to address you
  • We need your phone number to reach you with response to your request
  • We need your country of business to know from what office to contact you
  • We need your company name to know your background and how we can use our experience to help you
  • Accepted file types: jpg, gif, png, pdf, doc, docx, xls, xlsx, ppt, pptx, Max. file size: 10 MB.
(jpg, gif, png, pdf, doc, docx, xls, xlsx, ppt, pptx, PNG)

We will add your info to our CRM for contacting you regarding your request. For more info please consult our privacy policy
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

The breadth of knowledge and understanding that ELEKS has within its walls allows us to leverage that expertise to make superior deliverables for our customers. When you work with ELEKS, you are working with the top 1% of the aptitude and engineering excellence of the whole country.

sam fleming
Sam Fleming
President, Fleming-AOD

Right from the start, we really liked ELEKS’ commitment and engagement. They came to us with their best people to try to understand our context, our business idea, and developed the first prototype with us. They were very professional and very customer oriented. I think, without ELEKS it probably would not have been possible to have such a successful product in such a short period of time.

Caroline Aumeran
Caroline Aumeran
Head of Product Development, appygas

ELEKS has been involved in the development of a number of our consumer-facing websites and mobile applications that allow our customers to easily track their shipments, get the information they need as well as stay in touch with us. We’ve appreciated the level of ELEKS’ expertise, responsiveness and attention to details.

samer-min
Samer Awajan
CTO, Aramex