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Welcome to CX Weekly, where Dan Gingiss shares customer experience tips! Watch the video by clicking above, or read the transcript below to learn how you can improve your website’s forgotten password process to pave the way toward a better customer experience.

Hey, everyone. I’m Dan Gingiss and today I want to talk to you about one of the key experiences in your digital customer journey: the dreaded forgotten password.

I’m sure this has happened to you. I mean, who in the world can keep track of all of the passwords that we have across so many sites? So we try. We fail. We try. We fail. We try one more time, and before they lock us out, we click on “Forgotten Password.”

Let me ask you something: Do you know what happens next on your company’s website? Have you gone through this process recently? My guess is not and I think you should.

Here’s why: When people forget their password, they’re already frustrated. Now, they may or may not be frustrated at you. They may be frustrated at themselves for forgetting, but generally they’re going to be frustrated at the whole process. “Why do I have to remember so many passwords? I don’t remember what the rules are. This is so frustrating.”

Go through your forgotten password process and look for areas where you can make it more friendly, more helpful, faster, easier and overall a better experience.

For example, and I know there’s some security reasons behind this, but to be honest with you, I think they’re excuses. When we ask customers to create passwords, we tell them all the rules. We say, “well, it has to be 15 characters or more. It has to have this many capital letters and numbers and symbols. And it can’t have this and it must have this.” But when they forget their password, we don’t bother to remind them of any of those rules. We just ask them to come up with their password.

I don’t know about you, but sometimes when you get to a website, I’ll see a specific rule that I’ll use on one website that I may not use on another. So that reminder might be just what I need to remember my password. Again, that makes the process more seamless and faster.

You also probably made customers jump through several hoops in order to recoup their password and again, this is understandable. This is a safety and security measure, so I’m not saying that we should just hand the password to anybody, but I do want you to go through the process and try it and see, if we need two-factor authentication and you’re supposed to get a code sent to you on your phone, does it work? How long does it take to come? Is it a couple of seconds? A couple of minutes?

It’s frustrating when you’re waiting for that code to come when you go to redo your password. Does it tell you any new rules such as you can’t use a previous password?

Man, do I hate it when I go in and put in the password to reset it and it says I can’t use that one anymore. Again, the lesson here is that we don’t want to put unnecessary barriers in front of our customers. We want to make every process as easy and seamless as possible.

So do yourself a favor. Go onto your own website, “forget your password,” and see if you can enhance the experience on what is already a frustrating moment, but could be turned into a remarkable one

If you’d like to learn more, you can order my new book, listen to my podcast, watch my weekly live show, or sign up for my newsletter!