What Is Your YouTube Customer Experience?
Tom Guarriello argues that YouTube's customer experience fails both amateur creators and casual viewers. The platform optimizes for professional producers and top-ranked content, neglecting emotional connection and discovery of non-professional work. He maps CX principles from Apple and Starbucks onto YouTube's two user groups, showing where the platform falls short.
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Oh, hi, it's Tom Guarriello. You know, if you hang around businesses anywhere today, any kind of businesses, one of the things you're going to hear an awful lot about is customer experience. Now, customer experience has become an important area for businesses to focus on because the features and characteristics of so many products and services have gotten so similar. You know, the thing that makes any product and most importantly any brand valuable is the kind of connection that customers make with that brand. And over time, what businesses have learned is that the features and benefits, the characteristics of the product or service themselves are really not enough to keep people connected with a brand. So what businesses and brands have learned to do is to connect customers with their products and services by trying to understand what does the customer really want to experience when they're engaged in this transaction. Take a supermarket, for example. Now, it's important to remember that when you go to a supermarket, everybody who goes to a supermarket isn't the same. So to talk about the customer experience at a supermarket, you really have to get a little bit more fine-grained in your understanding of what kind of customer you're talking about. For example, If you're going to the supermarket to shop for your family's groceries for an entire week, that's one kind of a— let's call it one kind of an experience track in going to the supermarket. But if you're going to the supermarket and you're stopping in for a loaf of bread, a dozen eggs, and a half a gallon of milk, then you're on a very different kind of experience track. Supermarkets many years ago learned that these two sets of customers who were coming in with these two sets of requirements to have a great experience in the supermarket, that they had very different needs. The supermarket— the customer who was coming in for a week's worth of groceries wanted a big cart and wanted to be able to take their time walking through the aisles, and they wanted to be able to browse things. The customer coming in for three items wanted one of those little handheld kind of baskets. They wanted to be able to get in and get out quickly, and they wanted a checkout line that was designed especially for them. You can't go into a supermarket today and not find the 10 Item or Less Express line, which was designed in order to make that 3-item customer's experience more pleasant. A pleasant experience is the kind of experience that creates what brands are looking for today, which is an emotional connection with the customer. I guess some of the best brands at creating emotional, uh, connections with their customers by virtue of customer experience are brands like Apple, for example. Now, if you're an Apple customer, Every aspect of interacting with Apple, Apple has been thought about from a customer experience standpoint. If you go into an Apple Store, the experience of being in the store is very brand right. It means that they've thought through what they know their customers want to experience in the store, and they've designed the store in order to meet those requirements of the customer. Google, for example, is another one. Google, if you go to the Google homepage, you take a look at the Google homepage, it is, it's blank, it's nothing. It is the essence of minimalism. Why? Google's determined that their customers coming to their page for search don't want a lot of stuff on that page. What they want is the box to help us find what we want to find, be able to get in and get out quickly. Now Starbucks, another company that has built its brand on customer experience, they wanted to create a place that was what they call a third place, not home, not work, but a place where you could go, feel comfortable, spend time, not be hassled about whether or not you were actually spending money, but could be comfortable in that place. Now, what got me thinking about this today was YouTube. If you take a look at YouTube, you can take YouTube's customers and you can break them up into some pretty big categories. Now, over time, people have taken issue with me saying that video producers, amateurs like me and many of us, are customers of YouTube. I think we are very much customers of YouTube. YouTube is providing us with a service that if we do not ultimately find to be an engaging service, that means one that we have a good experience of, then there are other places to go. And not only are there other places to go today, but there are likely to be other places to go tomorrow that are focused on this kind of customer, the customer like us. The other kind of big bucket of customers that exists here in YouTube are the professional producers of videos. They have requirements that make YouTube a great experience for them. Take yourself as a viewer. When you're viewing videos, you have different kinds of customer requirements, pretty much like if you have different needs to go into the supermarket. Some days you come to YouTube and all you want to see are the top-ranked videos of the day, the professionally produced content and the material that was produced in order to get people's attention. It's funny, it's clever, it's— we know what it is. Now, but other times you might come to YouTube and you might want to engage in a kind of a conversation, if you will, a relationship with the people to whom you're subscribed. You want to, you want to see what's everybody who I'm subscribed to saying today, what kind of videos are they making. Those are very different sets of customer requirements. It seems to me that today many of us, I'm going to start with myself, don't feel like the customer experience that we're getting as either amateur video producers, or as amateur video watchers, is meeting our requirements. Some of those requirements would be as follows: I think that we need a better way to be able to, to have, to discover great content being produced by non-professional users. Yes, there's the people in blogs, and yes, there's the— YouTube might be trying to meet those requirements today, but I don't think that they've met those requirements today. They may be meeting the requirements of the professional, uh, producer of content, and they may be meeting the requirements of the people who are looking to find those, um, professional and entertaining kinds of videos that you see on the feature page. So what I'm asking I want to ask you today is, what's your experience? What's your customer experience of being at YouTube? And by the way, customer experience often gets kind of divided into two big sections: technical experience, in other words, how things work, kind of like, is the Apple website up and working? Does it take orders and so on? And non-technical experience. What does it feel like to be there? What kind of, you know, how does the How does the company make you feel like you're involved in some kind of relationship with them? That's what experience is all about today, trying to get that emotional connection with the customer and establish some kind of a relationship. So I've gone on longer than I wanted to, which is not unusual for me, but I'm really interested in hearing what's your experience of being a producer of videos and a watcher of videos today on YouTube, and what kind of recommendations can we make to them in order to improve our experience so that everybody feels like this is a place that they're really more emotionally connected to rather than just a place to dump videos and watch videos. So take it easy and I'll see you again soon. Bye-bye.
