Are You Easy to Do Business With?

It seems like such a simple question: Are you easy to do business with? You know the experiences I’m talking about: Interactions are painless. You smile when you’re finished and think, ‘That was easy!’ You’re so surprised by the superlative treatment that you just have to let your friends know all about it.

Sadly, such interactions are all too rare. More common are these that I’ve experienced in just the last two months:

Your bank insisting that you have to go into a branch to complete a process, despite accurately answering their security questions online or on the telephone.

Your dentist asking you to take 10 minutes to fill out a form that indicates there have been no changes to your medical history. A check box offering “no changes to my history” is conspicuously absent. 

Interacting with retail websites that are difficult to navigate, are not optimized for mobile platforms or do not offer accurate inventory levels or locations. 

The car dealership keeping you waiting when you arrive to pick up your new vehicle as scheduled and lacking the personnel with knowledge to properly explain the car’s features in any detail.

Are you easy to do business with? Have you made that statement a priority for your operations?

EZ STAK, a manufacturing company local to Kingston, ON, built that language into their vision statement. But their executives will tell you the real work started after they made customer enthusiasm a priority. All components of their operations had to line up to support making it easy for their customers — design and engineering, sales quotes and order entry, supply chain, inventory, production processes and scheduling all had to be aligned. Making customer enthusiasm a priority involves a complex dance among all key areas of the firm, not just operations and customer-facing processes.

Picking the right numbers

How do enterprises that prioritize customer-centric simplicity know their strategy is working? Data-driven firms have metrics on their dashboard highlighting success, indicators like sales cycle length (how quickly a customer is processed), time on-site yielding purchase (how long customers spend navigating stores or a website leading to a sale), and first response time (how quickly the firm responds to comments or questions). Hospitality services have their own metrics: repeat purchase frequency, average event spend, lifetime spend. 

Popular surveys such as Net Promotor Score are useful as well, to a point. Data based on surveys is less often a true representation of reality, given that firms usually only hear from their most and least satisfied customers. It would be deceptive to rely on membership numbers associated with a loyalty program as a key metric. How many of us belong to a program for the benefits, yet feel no true enthusiasm towards the brand? 

Beyond the data, consider the characteristics of successful firms with a focus on customer-centricity:

• They listen when customers speak.
• Employees have the power to solve problems.
• Employee morale is high.
• Enterprise productivity is solid, lending more time to engage with employees and customers where appropriate.

This is where an operating strategy is used to deliver on a broader enterprise objective of growth or market share. Ask yourself: How will our organization differentiate itself when everyone has “good people” and our products or service offerings are similar to competitors’? Differentiating on the basis of customer-centricity may be the answer.  

Where to start

For those willing to make customer experience a priority, your business life will get easier. Imagine fewer complaints, happier customers and lower staff turnover — and the impact on your bottom line. Here are several areas to look at:

• Are your product and service menus easy to read, with necessary additional information easy to find?
• Is your website easy to navigate? Is the online experience seamless across different operating systems? Are inventory levels accurate? 
• Is your shop or facility layout logical and designed to support processes or customer flow?
• Are your processes designed to make your lives easier or to help customers get what they want when they want it?

Re-orienting operations in these ways may not be easy at first. Pursuing a goal of clarity and simplicity in order to delight customers may seem burdensome. But this is just a matter of solving process and personnel issues that have likely plagued your operations for some time. 

Our society and business worlds are changing incredibly quickly, and business leaders are looking for an edge in order to navigate these changes. Your operations and how they support customers and employees are things you have control over. Start there and put a smile on someone’s face.