Extract from my new book 'Customers are the Agenda'

Tip 5: Make it easy for your customers to deal with you!

The secret of helping your customers deal with you so that the entire process becomes a doddle – is always the same: look at things through their eyes.

If you follow this rule, you can’t go wrong, because after all, the whole essence of Customer Centricity is to listen to customers and to give them what they want.

Never assume that just because your organisation has been dealing with customers in a certain way for a long time, your customers will want to continue with you in that way for the rest of eternity. They won’t. What they want is to be able to deal with your organisation as effortlessly as possible and to get the products and services they really need from you.

Too much is spoken about multi-channel, as if it were some Open Sesame to the perfect customer relationship. But the truth is that what customers want isn’t actually multi-channel, but the biggest choice of channels relevant to their particular needs.

For some customers, this means just one channel: they want to visit a retail outlet and pay cash for something they want to buy. If you install an internet-driven automated sales machine in the store which requires them to use their debit card, and they don’t want to use their debit card, you’re not helping them. I know that such internet-drive devices are important because they allow your customers to access your entire range of products and services when you aren’t able to keep everything in stock. But give customers what they want: why force them to pay by card when they don’t want to? It’s irrelevant that debit cards are easier for you: you’re not in business to make things easier for you; you’re in business to make things easier for your customers!

Give customers the ease of access they want; find out what they really want and how they want to buy from you.

Gear yourself up to what your customers want. Conversely, there’s no need to over-service your customers, if it’s not what they want. For instance, many organisations can order in a product for the following day for a customer who wanted it but it was not in stock. However, maybe your customer does not want the product the following day; next week will do just as well. If you order it in for them the following day and they don’t want that, all you’re doing is devoting resources to doing something that could be used better elsewhere.

Too many organisations set an initial Key Performance Indicator (KPI) which matters to them rather than their customers. The classic example is call centres, which effectively give their operatives a time limit on how long a call should take, and if the goal of the call (from the organisation’s point of view) is not met in that time, they will want the call ended. However, a KPI should be based on what customers want, rather than what the organisation wants.