Certified Usability Analyst of the Month

An Award-Winning Strategy: HFI Training Helps Verizon.com's E-Commerce Team Win Multiple Industry Awards

by Douglas Gorney

As Director of E-Commerce at Verizon.com, the first question Mark Studness asked himself was, "What's the best way to serve our customers online? Obviously, you have to build a great website, one that really serves customers' needs."

Mark and his E-Commerce team did that – and then some. Verizon.com was awarded "Best in Class" in The Customer Respect Group's 2009 Online Customer Service Study of Telecommunications Industry Websites for the second straight year – the only communications provider to achieve an "Excellent" rating in two subsequent years. Additionally, the Association of Support Professionals (ASP) chose Verizon.com's consumer support website, www.verizon.com/residentialhelp, as one of the "Ten Best Web Support Sites of 2009." Along with a healthy increase in self-service transactions, the awards validate Verizon's commitment to customer service innovation.

Mark is very clear about the source of that innovation. "At the end of the day, it's your staff that is going to make your site better. So when it came to making significant improvement to our websites, I decided to invest in our people's skill sets."

Mark and his Verizon.com E-Commerce team started to look around for user experience training. After sending team members through several courses, with positive but not entirely satisfactory results, Mark discovered HFI's Certified Usability Analyst (CUA) training program. The 10-day, instructor-led training proved popular with team members, who felt the course was thorough, research-based and grounded in practice. To date, more than 28 members the E-Commerce team have taken HFI CUA training, with another 3 signed up to take the training this year.

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For Mark, one of the program's most significant features was the rigorous, 2-hour online exam that course participants have to pass to become a Certified Usability Analyst. "The fact that you have to get certified," Mark noted, "made it very real."

So did the results.

"The ROI has exceeded our expectations," Mark says. "We began to see positive feedback immediately after the training. Everybody on the team was able to take what they learned in class and apply it immediately. There was good, positive feedback, and almost with every release we saw an improved level of performance.

"We began HFI training at a critical time," says My Verizon Application Manager Tom Malone. "One of our challenges was to reduce silos of services within Verizon, all created and managed separately. So we were in the process of merging four product-line "buckets" – Internet, TV, phone and wireless – into a single, strategic application for the customer. HFI training was really fundamental to our success in accomplishing that initiative."

In naming Verizon.com's support site one of the "Ten Best," the ASP singled out the integration project. "The Verizon site developers faced a challenge that they solved quite effectively – how to provide a single customer experience that works across a very wide range of products and customers," said ASP executive director Jeffrey Tarter. "This kind of integration is extraordinarily difficult to deliver, but Verizon shows that it can be done."

With responsibility for the entire, end-to-end online customer experience at Verizon.com, Mark and the E-Commerce team use their HFI training to help them deliver on challenging projects every day. Yet they are not usability specialists or designers themselves. Instead the E-Commerce team manages the end-to-end online customer experience and is accountable for the results. Their role involves working with usability resources and designers to develop best-in-class customer experiences like "shepherds leading a flock," Tom says.

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Judy Ferrell, Group Manager with Verizon.com eSupport, says other HFI course participants "were intrigued when they found out that we were business owners, not usability practitioners. 'Why are you going through this?' they would ask. Well, CUA certification has given us a clear advantage. Before we took the training, we hadn't necessarily made time in the schedule to test the user experience for all projects. Now we engineer time and resources to create effective customer interactions – and include validation steps with users to ensure a positive customer experience."

Says Mark, "The training taught us not to rush through the design process. Whenever anybody says, 'I think it should be this or that,' rather than committing ourselves, we step back and ask, 'Well, what does the customer think?' and we make time to obtain customer input."

Asked about the lasting value of HFI training, Mark is quick to reply. "At the end of the day, your own people are the ones who are going to make your site better. You can engage an outside firm to redesign a part of your site for you, but at the end of the day, it's your employees who ensure that the new design will work for your customers. So making the investment of HFI training for our employees was our ticket to A) substantial improvements, and B) long-term improvements."

Mark was too modest to mention C) two coveted, industry awards for customer service excellence.

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