AB: All-Round Nice Guy

It’s a familiar adage (well, the first part anyhow), used by people all over the world - you hear it from business owners, marketing gurus, as well as from the end user of the phrase, the well-heeled shoppers.

But (and this is a big but) I’d like to put forward when there are certainly times when the customer is not always right - sometimes they can indeed be horribly misled into thinking one thing, when the reality is something else entirely.

Sometimes our customers and our clients earnestly and confidently choose their own path, regardless of our best advice, or our best suggestions of ‘top quality’ products and services. Inevitably, this leads to later dissatisfaction, and distrust in our products and services, and a lack of respect for our business. Even with the best of intentions by both parties, wrong choices can accumulate, and result in bad relationships.

Given that we don’t want this to happen, here’s my list of ways to improve your odds of making sure your customers can make decisions that are both right AND correct.

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Communication

The buck stops here. If we can get this tiny little concept right, then everything else falls into place.

In reality, though, there are not always clear lines of communication between you and your customers - your customers have already had to brave the outside world to reach you - a world filled with marketing hype and advertising slogans - so they’re coming to you a little world-weary at the best of times. From that inauspicious start, they then have to decipher your own unique way of selling your products and services. Even the way you arrange items on your shelves may enhance one persons chances of finding what they want, but it may well work against the next customer as look for an item in a way that you haven’t considered.

Against this backdrop of ‘communication noise’, to have the best impact, your verbal and non-verbal communications with your customers need to be pitched at the ‘right’ level of simplicity/complexity. It varies industry by industry, but in general, over-simplifying your communications results in your customers not getting the full story, and filling in the gaps themselves. At the other end of the scale, over-communicating your message might only result in your customers scratching their heads, and being thoroughly confused from the outset.

Consider current web site trends. Fortunately, the trend is for clear and concise web site, devoid of moving/flashing/things to chase around the screen. But it was not so long ago that web sites forced their users to have to learn a whole new way of navigating each new site - a very impolite thing to have to impose. In the field of Web Site Usability, we’d call those sites, well, unusable. Make sure that your real-world communications are targeted at your target customers, and that they respect your customers’ time and interest levels.

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Education

It’s not a large step up from the previous concept, but ‘education’ builds upon a base of good communication, by adding in extra information that allows your customers to not only clearly be informed about certain features, advantages and benefits, but also to *understand* some of the underlying reasons behind those features, advantages and benefits. It’s a subtle point, and again, the need for education varies from industry to industry, but the importance is also subtle: you’re treating your customers with greater respect by not only giving advice, but also effectively letting them in on your rationale to end up at that advice. The pundits would say that that’s giving up your competitive advantage, giving away your knowledge. But the end result is that you’re educating the market as a whole, letting more and more customers know what is good, and what is merely passable.

Er, the hidden danger of trying to educate your customers is what’s known as ‘the middle ground’. To use computer users as an example, it’s a level of knowledge that someone has that lets them confidently fiddle with settings where beginners would not dare to touch, yet not knowing enough about what they’re doing to be able to undo their fiddlings when they get into trouble. We’ve all been there, haven’t we? …he says knowingly.

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‘Deep research’ on your web site

I really do need to refind my stats on this topic, but trust me on this one: cars and houses are the most highly ‘valued’ things ‘bought’ over the internet. No, I realise that we don’t whip out the credit card and buy a small house online - but we now have the ability to do ‘deep research’ on products in a way that we never have before.

Singlehandedly, the internet has killed off the ‘pushy car salesperson’ stereotype - now we can easily do deep research on multiple cars via the internet: compare exteriors, 3D interiors, tech specs, read reviews, and ultimately, track down the best deal. Sure, we still need to go test drive a car before we buy it, but no longer are we as customers bound by what we are told as truth from shady characters - we can use a library of knowledge on the internet, and even find people who have made the exact same decision before us, that we were contemplating making.

So as businesses, we need to offer that same opportunity for deep research - create a web site that offers summarised information for those who simply want a quick overview, but then offer refined and specific information if and when you can. At worst, you will have an online resource to offer your customers - to educate them and inform them - with minimal upkeep or per-visitor cost.

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Signage & Systems

Gotta love IKEA. It’s a designers paradise. Clean lines, clear branding everywhere, and a system of unambiguous follow-the-steps purchasing options and ‘how-to’ instructions that result in wonderful furniture that you somehow feel good about having put together yourself. It’s sort of like Lego for adults.

The clear signage and systems at IKEA are like a long chain of customer interactions that, yes, you guessed it, are only as good as the weakest link.

In a recent, ah, research trip for this article, my wife and I spent an afternoon at IKEA, and came home with 9 boxes that were exactly what we wanted, and 1 box that was the right product, but entirely the wrong colour. In my defense, nowhere on the box did it say the colour. It clearly said just about every other factoid of information relating to that product, sans the colour. In an effort to reuse the box for multiple coloured products, they assume that the customer will make the right choice of colour based on a long numeric code.

A small 1/3 of a cent sticker with the words ‘beech and black’ would have been all that was needed to make this customer into an informed customer. As it was, we went back there last week, changed over the product, and spend another half a day buying more stuff.

Perhaps there’s a lesson in that for all of us.

AB out