Are you really making the customer experience easy?

My wife recently had a great experience on the U-Haul Web site, and she never went near renting a truck. You might be surprised to know that U-Haul sells packing boxes to all comers, whether they rent a truck or not. I know I was. But what surprised me even more was the way they sell boxes. As I think about what would concern me the most about buying boxes, they seem to have thought of just about everything.

Image via Wikipedia

Think about the average person who is moving. First off, they probably don’t do it very often, so they don’t really ever get good at moving. They just kind of stumble through it and don’t think about it until the next time.

So, what would it take for you to be able to order your moving boxes from U-Haul? You need help to select the right stuff, and reassurance that it’s not a final decision. U-Haul excels beautifully in both areas.

Of course, if you know that you need three poster tubes, five medium boxes, four small boxes, and one box for packing dishes and glasses, you can just pick them out and you’re done, but where’s the sport in that? That’s for the professional packer, which most people are not.

No, for the rest of us, we have no idea how many friggin’ small boxes we need, much less what to use for our flat panel TV. What intrigued me is that U-Haul offers sets of boxes designed to move in specific situations. I might not know what boxes I need, but I definitely know if I am moving a dorm room vs. a two-bedroom house.

Ok, so this I can do. But wait, it gets better. You aren’t even stuck with these pre-fab packages. If the package contains five medium boxes, but you think you might need more, just change the number to seven. So, it’s the best of both worlds–it gives you a starting guess and lets you fine-tune.

But it gets better yet. If you buy too many boxes, U-Haul will “buy your boxes back.” (How come that sounds better than just saying you can return them for a full refund?) And you don’t have to pack them up and ship them back–you can return them to any local U-Haul location. So even after you decide what you need, you can still fix a bad decision.

The only thing I think they could do better would be to make it abundantly clear on that opening screen I showed earlier that you can change the amounts of boxes. Yeah, it says that it’s customizable, but I didn’t pick up on that. I think if they had a nice graphical set of instructions that said something like: “Know what you want? Tell us!” for the section that lets you buy exactly what you want, and “Want a suggestion? Tell us what you’re moving and we’ll help you!” and then in small print say (“You can modify our suggestions in the next step.”), then I think they’d have it nailed.

But who knows? Perhaps they tested it and what they do now works better. Regardless, U-Haul has put a great deal of thought into their customer experience and it shows. What about your site? Do you sell only to customers that know exactly what they want? Or do you find ways to help people who need it?