The great importance of making it easy for your customers to buy from you

On the face of it, we might imagine that all organisations will strive to make it easy for their customers to buy from them, but in practice this isn’t necessarily the case.

You shouldn’t assume that just because your organisation has been selling to your customers in a particular way for a long time, this means that your customers will want to keep buying from you in that same way for ever.

In practice, the way you sell to your customers ought to be in a constant state of review. What you need to ask yourself is this: what can we do to make it easier for our customers to buy from us and to give them a better customer experience?

The secret of answering this question acutely and effectively is this: always strive to look at things through your customers’ point of view and through their eyes.

If you do this, you’ll quickly realise that what your customers really want is to be able to deal with your organisation as simply, clearly and easily as possible and to get from you the products and services they really want, with these products and services delivered with a maximum quality of customer service.
Organisations often make too much of multi-channel, as if it were some magical route, some Open Sesame, to the perfect customer relationship. The truth, though, is that what customers want isn’t actually multi-channel for its own sake, but instead the biggest choice of channels relevant to their own particular needs.

For some customers, this will mean just one channel. For example, they might 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 one of your retail outlets but they don’t want to use their debit card, you’re not, in fact, helping your customers.

Yes, I know that internet-driven automated sales machines are, clearly, important because they allow your customers to access your full range of products (or products and services) when you aren’t realistically able to keep everything you sell in stock. But in fact it’s irrelevant that debit cards make things easier for you: you’re in business to make things easier for, and more acceptable to, your customers!
Another example is how too many organisations set up key performance indicators (KPIs) which are focused around the needs of the organisation rather than its customers. The classic example of inappropriate, or even plain silly, KPIs, often arises in call centres. KPIs imposed in call centres on customer service staff often require these staff to limit an incoming phone call to a particular length, and if the issue around which the call is centred is not resolved during that time, the organisation will want the call ended.

Instead, base your KPIs – and indeed all your metrics relating to aspects of your customer relationship process, on what you have ascertained your customers want, rather than on what you want!