WeWork Customer Experience | Customers, Etc.
A few observations on customer experience at my local WeWork.
As I continue this season away from work, sometimes I feel restless being at home. Even when I was working a regular job, I preferred to be in an office. Sure, I can do the remote thing, but I like the rhythm of heading to the office, putting in a day’s work, and coming home. It’s nice.
To change things up, I started experimenting with working outside of the house. My son goes to a school that is about a thirty-minute drive from our house and on Fridays he only has a half day. One day I thought I would try working from a local coffee shop near the school to fill the time. That mostly worked, except street parking was technically limited to two hours, and it was a really popular coffee shop, so I was lucky to find a seat. Plus it felt weird taking up space for two hours after only ordering an Americano.
Conveniently, there’s a WeWork about five minutes from my son’s school. I’ve worked from WeWork offices a handful of times as part of corporate off-sites, but never on my own. I saw that a day pass was $29 and figured, sure, let’s try it. It was really refreshing to work in an environment where everyone was there to work. It convinced me to sign up for a monthly membership.
While my initial foray into the world of WeWork proved to be a nice change of pace, the journey wasn't without its challenges and surprises. Join me as I delve into the ups and downs of becoming a WeWork member, offering insights and lessons learned from my experience.
The first-timer experience
It’s funny the things that will prevent you from trying out a product or service. There are many potential areas of pain that you will experience exactly once and then never experience again. If you end up getting past that pain and becoming a customer or prospect, you no longer really care. It only really matters if it prevents you from getting to that first stage1.
For me, with this local WeWork, that pain point was parking. I had driven by the building several times, but it was hard to figure out where to park. There was nothing about parking on the website (just “easily accessible via public transit”). I tried calling the customer service number on the website, which connected me to a global support team. They quickly realized they didn’t have the answer and connected me to the local community team, but it was 4:55 PM, and they were dealing with an emergency and asked if I could stay on hold. I hung up at 5 because I had to go. Oh well.
I decided to go ahead and create an account and just book a single day for my “trial”. I could have taken a tour, but I’ve been in a WeWork before and know what it’s like. I was more interested in trying out if this workflow—going to a WeWork after dropping off my son at school—would work for me.
When I dropped off my son the next morning at 8:45 AM, I still wasn’t sure where to park, so I tried calling the support number again, but they weren’t available yet (which was kinda odd—technically the location opened at 8:30 AM but I guess global support wasn’t online yet).
I ended up parking in a public parking deck about a block away. It ended up being fine. In hindsight, it seems obvious that it would be fine—it’s a public parking deck—but when I tried to do research online the only information I could find out about the parking deck is that it cost $6 for the day and you had to pay in cash. Thankfully their parking payment system has been modernized more recently than their website and now they accept credit cards.
Takeaways from this stage of the experience:
Consider the “first timer experience” on your website and in your app. What information would someone find helpful when using your product or service for the very first time?
Is phone support available when customers need it? I know, I know. Tech companies have spent two decades moving away from phone support and it’s hard to imagine lobbying for it. But for location-based businesses, this can be critical because the phone is often a halfway point between the digital research and the physical commitment of actually showing up. WeWork did a pretty okay job with this, having a global support team that answered my call relatively quickly, but ultimately they weren’t able to help and had to transfer me.
Conversion pains
User experience issues that happen at the point of sale are some of the most frustrating for the consumer. Here is someone, literally trying to give you money and some part of your process is broken so they can’t complete it. It should go without saying, but let’s go ahead and say it: if someone has made the mental jump from “no buy” to “buy,” find all barriers to “buy” and remove them.
In my case, I started thinking about becoming a WeWork “All Access” member while on the elevator going up to the location for the very first time. There was a sign on the elevator that said a monthly membership was $149. I quickly did the mental math and figured if I used the location just six times per month, that was a better deal than paying $29 each time2. Even better, after I got settled in and looked up the All Access membership online, I learned they had a special promotion that was $99/month for the first three months, but I had to sign up by March 31st.
By Tuesday of the next week, I decided I wanted to upgrade. I got to my son’s school early and tried to upgrade on their mobile website from my phone. It seemed like it was going to work, but when I went to check out, I got an error saying I was already a member and the promotion was only for “new” members. Only new members? I had only been a member for, like, a day, and didn’t even know that by buying a day pass had made me a “member”. What the heck.
I decided to go to the WeWork anyway and see if they could sort it out with the local community team there. The guy working at the desk was really helpful and suggested a workaround where I sign up with a different email to get the promotion and then they would switch emails on the back end. It was a slight pain, but it worked, and I was happy to save the $50 per month.
Takeaways from this stage of the experience:
People will pay to try your product. Just because someone gives you money once doesn’t mean their trial is over. Sometimes consumers will purchase a product to try it out before making a larger commitment.
Be careful not to discriminate against “paying trialers.” WeWork was trying to be smart in only allowing the promotion for new members, but their systems didn’t have a way to identify people who were new to evaluating a paid membership to WeWork but who hadn’t yet made a full commitment.
Utilize manual intervention to make up for systemic experience failures. Although it was frustrating to not be able to upgrade in the app, the local team was incredibly helpful in suggesting a workaround and getting me on the right path. This is a smart move on WeWork’s part. It could have been easy for the local team to stringently rely on the logic rules of the website and say “sorry, that’s the way the system works,” but they didn’t. They were empowered to step in and smooth out the experience.
Small quality hiccups
My All Access membership comes with “credits” that I can use to book conference rooms, so I thought I would try that for a working “offsite” with my wife to talk about some work we’re doing at home.
Booking the conference room through the WeWork app and on the website was relatively straightforward. The only thing that was a little confusing was that it was unclear what would happen if I used more credits than I had on my account—it wasn’t easy to look up how much a credit costs.
Once in the room, everything was really smooth. The room was clean. It was easy to connect to the TV and there was a whiteboard ready for us to use. The only downside was that two of the Expo markers were completely spent. Which, it was fine—there were other markers—but it’s always frustrating to go write on the whiteboard for the first time and have it not work.
When I was visiting the website (or app?) later that day, I got a little pop-up survey asking about the experience in the conference room. I think I put 3 or 4 stars and made a note about the markers, but I didn’t think too much of it. I wasn’t expecting anyone to read the survey.
Takeaways from this stage of the customer experience:
Can you make pricing information clearer? I know, I know, this doesn’t always apply (especially in the business-to-business world), but for consumers or retail-like businesses, there’s usually more upside than downside to making pricing information as clear as possible.
Invest in systems to keep quality high. Overall, I would say the conference room experience was really good, but seeing spent markers is a sign that it might not be quite as good as you'd hoped. Why? In order to make sure the markers work every single time, you have to invest in systems to make sure the markers are fresh. Those kind of systems aren’t particularly hard, but you do have to establish them and keep them operational.
If you ask for feedback, be clear about how you intend to utilize it. I’ll cover this more in the next section; but it’s worth saying: if you’re going to ask for feedback from customers, tell them how you’re going to use the feedback. Do you read it? Does it influence product decisions? Will someone reply? Be clear and up front about how you plan to use feedback.
A delightfully closed feedback loop
Creating a closed feedback loop with customers can be incredibly difficult. For whatever reason, most businesses fall into the habit of asking for feedback, but never close the loop with the customer regarding how that feedback was used and what impact it had. Businesses that don’t close the feedback loop with customers risk focusing more on the CX score than on the actual relationship with the customer.
To my surprise and delight3, I received the following email a day or so after submitting my survey feedback:
I was really impressed! Sure, the tone feels overly apologetic, but I love how they followed up on the specific feedback about the markers and committed to addressing it right away. Even though I didn’t feel it was necessary to meet about this issue, I thought keeping the lines of communication open was a really nice touch.
Takeaways from this stage of the customer experience:
Create a closed feedback loop with your customers. You can’t always get the experience perfect, but if someone takes the time to share about their experience, follow up with them and share specifically about how their feedback will be used. This is another one of those areas where it might seem really hard to implement, but you just need the right systems in place to get the physics right, after which everything just works.
Hint: if you’re rolling out a customer feedback/survey tool, make sure “create a closed feedback loop with customers” is a clear part of your goal. If the main goal of your rollout is, for example, to “get a [NPS|CSAT|CES] score from customers”, you’ll likely end up with a score, but responding to customers will seem like too much effort.
As I continue my journey as a new WeWork member, I'm reminded of the numerous chances to evaluate and improve the customer experience, not only for WeWork but for all businesses. Every business has a "first-timer experience" to consider, as well as the need to streamline the purchasing process, develop systems for maintaining high quality, and establish effective communication channels with customers through closed feedback loops.
It’s easy for businesses to be blind to these kind of experience failures. Should you fix them if you can find them? Probably. But there’s also a weird mechanism at play that someone who wants your product really badly is willing to put themselves through a certain amount of pain just to talk to you. That’s not entirely a bad thing. But also, don’t not fix experience errors because you want signal that people are willing to do anything to pay for your product.
I also had to factor in parking, but still, it seemed like a pretty good deal. My alternatives were 1) just driving the thirty minutes all the way home and 2) paying $350 for a dedicated desk at a different local co-working space that included parking. If I were going to be there every day and wanted the dedicated desk, I might have chosen the local co-working space.
I say “surprise and delight” because I wasn’t expecting a response. The next level up from what they did would have been to make clear that someone was going to respond to my survey.