Recently I was booking sightseeing tickets online for an upcoming trip. On the left side of the page were the features and highlights. On the right side of the page were the terms, conditions and restrictions. The text on the right was more dense and much, much longer.
It made an immediate and strong impression regarding the company’s attitude toward customers. Once you’re booked, that’s it. Zero way to cancel, fix errors, make changes, etc. Now, this is all done online, so it’s handled by software. There’s not a big cost to the company to enable these functions. And humans will make mistakes, so dealing with that should be built in.
The company also seemed to require an awful lot of personal information to book sightseeing tickets. Apparently our money isn’t enough so they need to sell our data, too. The experience was not great.
There are plenty of less rigid ways to enable a company to maintain viable operations while protecting itself from those acting in bad faith, too many last-minute cancellations, etc. That company chose none of them. I have a feeling they get hit with a higher than average number of credit card chargebacks…
More and more, we live, work, play and shop online. As a result, more companies need to understand the nuances of selling online, and building relationships with customers they can’t see.
Now, most people or companies selling stuff use third-party platforms. They don’t build their own. The companies using them need to insist they include customer-centric features, and the companies building the platforms need to design and build from a customer-centric perspective.
We shouldn’t just accept that we can’t offer our customers a great experience because the vendors we deal with couldn’t be bothered to build it.
In addition to getting things like pricing, inventory and checkout right, we need to remember that we’re taking people’s money. Becoming a customer makes people more particular, demanding, and less trusting. And, frankly, they’ve usually earned that attitude.
Which means we need to develop and evolve policies for our businesses and customer experiences that are as thoughtfully and thoroughly designed as our ecomm platforms hopefully are.
As I hinted at above, we either approach policies from a self/business-centric angle, or from a customer-centric angle. What’s best for one often isn’t best for the other, trying to balance the two is hard, and compromise often leaves no one happy.
Fundamentally, our businesses have to bring in more money than we spend on expenses. So we need to determine what’s possible for cancellations and returns, for example, since they cost money.
“No questions asked” return policies are awesome from the customer’s side, but from the business side they are a luxury that most small businesses simply can’t afford. So we need to ensure the buying experience is as clear and informative as possible to limit mistakes or buyer’s remorse.
Yes, some people will be unreasonable, and some people are crooks. Be aware of that, take a deep breath, swear as needed. We need to handle these situations, but not let that minority dictate how we view all potential customers or how we run our businesses.
Make sure people get what they bought. On another ticket-buying adventure for our trip, we had to specify a date and time slot, so were surprised when we requested 9 a.m. and received tickets for 3:45 p.m. Upon inquiry we were told that 3:45 p.m. was the “closest available,” despite 9 a.m. being clearly available on the form and there being no indication that assignment would be arbitrary.
Margins are razor thin for so many small businesses. There’s a lot we’d love to do or offer, but especially when bootstrapping and growing modestly initially, the money’s just not there. So it requires creativity.
For mom and pop (or just you) operations whose competition could be a tech giant, how the hell can anyone compete? It is still possible in some ways, and fortunately none of them require paying attention to the competition.
The more we know about the industries we jump into, the more we’ll be able to use regarding what they do right, wrong, or not at all. There’s opportunity there.
The founders of the company I work for knew a lot of ways our industry can be sketchy, intentionally opaque, and not remotely customer-centric. They knew we would be a small fish in a big industry pond, and where we could or couldn’t compete.
They built a company that didn’t make them feel icky about doing business, or make our customers feel icky about doing business with us. We’ve kept the customer satisfaction rating above 95 per cent since before I joined the company five years ago.
Listen to customers. Your own once you get started, and those of other companies before then. We hear all the time how happy people are to get a fast response to a support request. People have become trained to expect to wait a day or longer. So we work hard to reply as quickly as possible.
People who are knowledgeable and can fix things rather than just reading scripts and transferring calls also make a big difference. When customers know that someone is actually working on their problem, it makes them a lot more patient and understanding. Your support staff will likely stick around a lot longer, too.
We tend to have a lot of black and white ideas and opinions when we’re new to an industry and ambitiously launching a business. This includes wanting to do the opposite of every crappy thing we’ve ever experienced as a customer. If only...
Then we develop some experience, deal with real customers, have some rough days, and start to understand how crappy policies, experiences, and systems develop. Business people can get jaded by bad customer experiences, too.
Building and maintaining a customer-centric business focus is hard. It’s a choice we have to make on the first day and every one after that, while still protecting ourselves.
We’re in trouble if we start to think that customers are all idiots or adversaries (or just wallets). We can also spread the taint of bad customer experience and become a liability to our whole industry.
As noted, wherever there’s dissatisfaction, there’s opportunity. That can benefit or bite you. As soon as competition offers experiences that start being even a little better, where do you think customers are going to go?
M-Theory is an opinion column by Melanie Baker. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Communitech. Melle can be reached on Twitter at @melle or by email at me@melle.ca.
