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Make It Easy: Be the Business You’d
Want to Work With
By Marsha Lindquist
Habit, price, and convenience. These three factors determine everything from where you buy groceries to which vendors you choose for office supplies and Internet service. Especially when you’re in a hurry, you may go where you’ve always gone—just because you’ve always gone there—or you may go where you think you’ll get the best bargain. But in all sales-oriented businesses these days, convenience has become of paramount importance to consumers.
More than ever, when you are a business’ client or customer, you don’t want any additional hassles in your days. You don’t have a lot of extra time, and you don’t want to be any more stressed out than you already are. No one wants unnecessary complications; we all want everything we do to be as easy as possible, especially in a business transaction.
Successful businesses are finding that the way to win customers is to have the talent and the resources to give their customers simple solutions to their problems, and an easy method to deliver products or services that meet their customers’ needs.
Those businesses that flourish and grow are the ones that make it easy to do business with them. So you want to model your business after those that you, as a customer, find easiest to do work with. Consider these tips that could help make your customers thrilled and your business thriving.
Easy communication. Clear and uncomplicated communication with your clients is a must in any business. Some businesses’ communication is not customer-oriented, making it difficult for customers to understand procedures or creating a situation in which customers become responsible for the company’s ease of operation instead of the company being responsible for the clients’ ease of use.
For example, have you ever gone to a doctor's office, feeling really crummy, and read a half-dozen or more “loud” signs in the waiting room telling you the office’s rules and regulations? While you’re sitting there feeling like you’ve been hit by a truck, you really don’t care about making life easier for the office manager, much less being shouted at about it in capital letters! You don’t even want to be there in the first place, but since you are, you need to be taken care of, not to worry about the rules and regulations this office has set out for its patients.
It’s essential for any business to communicate that you are there to serve the customer, not the other way around. If essential procedures must be followed, for the customers’ sake as well as your own record-keeping, communicate that in the most customer-friendly, non-aggressive way possible.
Easy logistics. Put yourself in your clients’ shoes: how do you feel when you need to make an appointment with a dentist and booking becomes a more painful procedure than having your tooth pulled? Maybe you can’t get in for a month when you need an appointment immediately. Or you call for an appointment, and the office hours are so bizarre you can’t ever seem to talk to a live person. How do you feel when you need to change an appointment for some reason, and you’re given the third degree, then your appointment’s put off still farther into the future?
We’ve all experienced these irritations outside of our businesses, and we must be extra-diligent to ensure that our clients don’t experience those same frustrations with us. Because, quite simply, you won’t get a second chance with most people; if it’s not easy to do business with you, they’ll take their business elsewhere. You may have the greatest product or service, the best value at the lowest prices, but that ultimately will not matter if it’s not easy for your customers to deal with you.
Easy come... Find a way to simplify the delivery of your product or service and you’ll develop instant customer loyalty. One of the reasons eBay is so popular is because they offer their sellers instructions to make the process of delivering the seller’s product easy. You can simply go online to UPS, arrange for shipment, package what you’re selling, and leave the package at your front door for pickup. eBay wants its customers to keep coming back—as buyers and sellers—so they’ve made it as easy as possible to do so. Seek creative, easy ways for your customers to obtain what your business offers and you’ll build a devoted customer base.
Easy go. Have you ever been stuck with something you ordered online that you didn’t like, but didn’t want to pay an arm and a leg to send it back? Or purchased something at a store and fumed that you couldn’t return it because you couldn’t find the receipt? Or found the receipt only to discover that you had a limited time in which to return it, and that time has passed? Or spent precious time convincing a customer service person that your reasons for returning something were valid?
Mail order giants Lands End and L.L. Bean have remarkable return policies; if you need to send something back, not only do they take it, no questions asked, but they pay for the postage so you can send it back to them. They figure, whatever it costs them to ship a return back is nothing compared to keeping a lifetime customer. Their policies make it easy for customers to come back to them again and again.
In your own business, you might need a return policy to prevent shoplifted “returns,” for example, but carefully review your current procedures for accepting returned products or terminated services to ensure that you make it as easy as you possibly can for your customer. Stay flexible and in tune with your customers’ needs. As with communication, are your policies oriented more toward making things easy for your staff? Or toward making it easy for your customer to do business with you, thereby ensuring their devotion and future business?
Easy payments. Don’t make your customers work to give you their money. You have probably recently encountered at least one business still operating in the Dark Ages and not accepting credit or debit cards. If a business accepts cash–only and you have no cash, you know that you will take your credit card or check elsewhere and probably never go back. Maybe you’ve searched for a product online and finally found it, only to read “Available at a retailer near you.”
Evaluate your own business’ policies and procedures for accepting payment for goods and services. Could you simplify the process in any way? Consider creative billing options as well as daily in-house transaction methods.
Five Easy Pieces
When companies make it quick and easy for people to get what they want, customers come back time and time again. In fact, happy customers will come to you first for whatever they’re looking for. Even if you’re not offering what they wanted at first, they might find something you’re offering that they do want.
Look at your business’ communication, logistics, delivery, return, and payment policies. It may be difficult at first to think of how you might structure your own business to run as conveniently for you as those businesses that YOU like to deal with, but simply reevaluating and reworking your own customer services policies to make dealing with your business as easy as possible could mean many more future sales.
About the Author
.Marsha Lindquist, CEO of The Management Link, Inc., has over 30 years experience as a business expert in Government contracting She has enhanced her clients’ cost competitiveness, improved their contractual positioning, and solidified overall strategies with companies including BP Amoco, DynCorp, and Northrop Grumman. Marsha adds value by telling you what you need to hear. For more information on her, please visit: www.TheManagementLink.com or email her: Marsha@TheManagementLink.com
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