Rent A Dad’s most recent musings were aimed at Assembling IKEA Cabinets. That story was about knowing when to handle things yourself versus bringing in a professional to handle the job. Today, we’re going to focus a bit on IKEA problems.
We’re not big on negative thinking at Rent-A-Dad, so this is actually kind of uncomfortable. But problems do pop up from time to time and we’d like to address something you absolutely haven’t thought about.
This came to mind when we came across a story on User Experience focused on IKEA Problems. It got us thinking; assembling IKEA Furniture is way more about how it feels than what you’re doing. Yep; IKEA is a UX company.
And lately we’re hearing from more and more Rent-A-Dad customers about just how bad the IKEA UX has become.
It’s not a complete surprise. IKEA bought TaskRabbit a bit over a year ago and speaking from the perspective of doing business with the furniture assembly subsidiary we can tell you that IKEA hasn’t yet figured out a good way to integrate its core business with the services part of things they’re trying to add to the mix. But then … it got worse.
IKEA Problems
It seems that as IKEA is spreading its wings to encompass more and more disparate lines of business things are getting ugly at the mothership. Customer Service, never really an IKEA strong point, is going in the toilet, and worse, corporate employees are noticing—and running away.
So let’s make the big Dad-is-talking-at-you point. Customer Service Is Everything. Apply it to IKEA Problems, or really pretty much anything. The thing that will always go further to distinguish you from your competition is how you make customers feel. Anyone can build furniture, but if you want to be a Rent-a-Dad you need to get that the real point is taking care of people.
That’s UX. It’s what we do here. IKEA, are you listening?