Steve Ballmer, the former CEO of Microsoft and one of the world's richest people, recently opened his $2 billion Intuit Dome, which will be the home of his Los Angeles Clippers NBA team. The arena is drawing rave reviews.
The app that goes with it? Not so much.
Ballmer appears to have fallen in love with his new arena so completely that he assumed customers would treasure it, too. He also seems to have let the coders run the show when it came to building the app, so "customer-centric" became "coder-centric."
So let's have a chuckle at the expense of a man who's worth, oh, $125 billion more than we are-- then make sure we don't make the same, all-too-common mistakes that he did.
How far off the mark is the Intuit Dome app? Here is how a guest columnist for the Washington Post described the experience of taking his son to a Billy Joel concert there:
"There was no way I would have downloaded the Intuit Dome app if I hadn’t received a bunch of scary emails with subject lines that started with a red exclamation point and said that no one would be allowed into the arena without it. And although I had purchased two tickets, one would have to be transferred to my 15-year-old son’s own Intuit Dome app. We had to show these tickets on the app to get in. I could not move these tickets to my Apple Wallet, use a screenshot or print them out.
"To use the Intuit Dome app, I had to surrender my address, email and phone number (none of which, unlike every other app I have used, it was able to autofill). If I wanted to buy anything at the Intuit Dome, I had to give the app my credit card information because neither cash nor Apple Pay would be accepted. The app strongly encouraged me to take a selfie for my “Game Face ID,” so it could use facial recognition. It wanted my license plate number for parking....
"It was a time investment that might make sense for someone who is going to the Intuit Dome very often. For instance, an L.A. Clippers player....
"The app brags about how its 'Zoom Thru' tech allows me to 'navigate Intuit Dome like a pro.' This is not my goal. My goal is not even to be an amateur. My goal was to eat popcorn and listen to Billy Joel."
You can see where Ballmer is coming from. He wants to design an entire experience befitting his team's expensive new home, and he's assuming he'll have lots of repeat customers who will happily adapt to the arena's rules, which ought to produce efficiencies in the long run.
But that's not how customers think. As the columnist wrote, he and his son weren't looking for an Intuit Dome experience. The columnist wanted to buy tickets, get into the arena, and watch a concert. That's all.
The classic line about marketing is that "the consumer doesn't want a quarter-inch drill; the consumer wants a quarter-inch hole." But the Intuit Dome app focused on delivering a branded, quarter-inch drill--and, in the process, let the technology get decidedly unfriendly.
The columnist wrote:
"In the week before the concert, the Intuit Dome app asked me to update it three times, which is weird because most apps do that automatically. Then, as I was finally entering the stadium, my app logged me out. An attendant came over and used an iPad to look me up, though she could not find our tickets....
"After five minutes of recovering passwords, the nice woman said I was close enough to solving the Intuit Dome app’s three riddles to be allowed inside."
I've known Ballmer for going on 40 years, since I covered IBM for the Wall Street Journal back in the days when the IBM-Microsoft relationship was core to the nascent personal computer industry. He's a seriously smart and disciplined fellow who will surely address all the problems with the Intuit Dome app. And quickly. A year from now, we'll all have forgotten we had this conversation.
But I hope these early problems will stick with you, because remembering them could head off problems. The temptation is so very strong in business to view the world from an internal perspective, not from the customer's, as hard as we may try. And I see insurance companies at least tempted to make that mistake when it comes to apps.
Just about all the major insurance companies have apps that they expect customers to use to make a payment, ask a question, or file a claim. I also see insurers talking about wanting to interact more often with customers.
But a lot of customers don't want the XYZ experience any more than they want an Intuit Dome experience. They just want to do their business with you and move on. They likely don't want to interact with you more often, unless you have something useful to tell them or to do for them.
They want you to fit into their lives. They don't want to have to fit into yours.
Cheers,
Paul
P.S. A couple of Ballmer stories:
The first time I met him was in April 1987, for breakfast at the Plaza Hotel in New York. IBM was making an announcement that day that was designed to retake control of the PC operating system, and Microsoft wanted to get ahead of the announcement by briefing the major media. But Ballmer wasn't there. Not 10 minutes after the appointed time. Not 15. Not 20. I went ahead and ordered breakfast. Finally, 45 minutes late, a large man plops himself down in the seat opposite me, wearing a T-shirt and running shorts, covered in sweat, and with dirt and pebbles on the back of his shirt and underside of his forearms. He had gone out for a run in Central Park, and his back had gone out. He had spent the last hour and a half, mostly lying by the side of the road, eventually managing to get upright and hobble over to the fancy restaurant at the Plaza.
Talk about a dramatic entrance.
I got a bit of an inside look at how he operates when Bill Gates offered to open Microsoft's archives to me for a book I was doing on IBM's problems, "Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM," published in 1993. I spent a week at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, WA, where Ballmer set me up in a small conference room next to his office. Every morning at maybe 8, he'd come in with boxes of material and brief me both on what was in them and on the people he'd arranged for me to interview that day, to give me the Microsoft side of the early days of working with IBM. Every night at 7 or so, he'd come back and spend maybe an hour with me answering any questions that had come up.
That was all extraordinarily helpful. Once I had so much detail from Microsoft, the IBM folks could either let that version stand unanswered or find a way to respond -- and soon enough almost every IBM executive who had turned down my request for an interview for the book found a way to talk to me at length.
The revealing part came because my base of operations abutted Ballmer's office. He had insisted on having the smallest size of office available at Microsoft, even though he was the No. 2 executive, and he was like a caged animal in there. He sounded at times like he was literally bouncing off the walls. He bellowed so much, at least in those days, that he had to take voice lessons to learn how to be himself while not damaging his vocal cords. He was mostly enthusiastic but could also be extraordinarily loud when upset. I've never seen such range of emotion in an executive.