Is making it easier for you, making it harder for your customers?
Have you ever been a customer where you encountered a store or business’ policy that just made you scratch your head? Too often companies do things that make things easier for them and their employees, without realizing that they’re making it harder for the most important people… their customers. Are you doing that?
Listen to this new, 8-minute episode to see if you have rules or policies that need to be reevaluated, so you can reduce the friction for your couples and clients.
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Below is a full transcript. If you have any questions about anything in this, or any of my podcasts, or have a suggestion for a topic or guest, please reach out directly to me at [email protected] or contact me via text, use the short form on this page, or call 732.422.6362
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– Is making it easier for you making it harder for your customers? Listen to this episode, find out what I’m talking about. Hi, it’s Alan Berg, welcome back to another episode of the Wedding Business Solutions Podcast. I was listening to a book by my friend David Avrin, “Why Customers Leave and How to Win Them Back.” And there were many, many interesting things in there. I think it’s a great book. I think you should definitely read it. Listen to it. I do audio, so listen to it. It’s in his voice. I love doing that when the author has a great speaking voice as well. And what he’s talking about is the things that businesses do that make it easier for you, but make it harder for the customer. A simple thing would be, I go to websites and there’s big buttons that say, “Call us now”. Call us now? Yeah, that’s easier for you. It’s not easier for your customer because they don’t necessarily want to call you now, right? Or things in the, go to retail stores and they make it harder for us because whether it’s the checking out or the type of payments.
Like, I go to Home Depot a lot, as you might know from DIY stuff I’ve posted online and they don’t accept Apple Pay. Not a big deal, not a big deal, but I remember running out of the house one time and forgetting my wallet and going to Home Depot and get everything I want, get to the register and I can’t pay. Had my Apple Watch. Had my phone. Could have paid, but I can’t. Seems odd that a big store like that wouldn’t have that when so many other places do. I mean, gosh, I can buy a donut at Dunkin’ Donuts with it. I can buy a Diet Coke at McDonald’s with my, with Apple Pay and it just seems more ubiquitous now and they’re making it harder, but it also comes down to policies. You know, we have policies and a lot of times we have the policy because it makes it easier for us, but the customer’s like, well, why? Right, why? And if you know a speaker and a humorist, Tim Gard, G-A-R-D. Also a friend of mine, speaker, I just got to hear him speak at another conference and he’s hysterical. And he actually has his own little Personal Policy Manual. He’s got his own little book that when somebody says, well, our policy is this and he pulls out his own and he says, well, my policy is this. And they generally don’t know what to do with him with that, but a lot of the policies that companies create are to making it easier for them, but not for you. And David tells a story in his book where he goes with probably about 15-16 people to go out to eat and they go to a restaurant and they didn’t have a big table like that, so they want to sit them at separate tables, but there’s nobody else in that area, and these tables are next to one another, so they go to push them together and the wait staff lost their minds. You can’t do that. And it’s like, well, why? We’re here, we’re here. What’s the big deal? We’ll move them back when we’re done. And they were freaking out because you couldn’t move the tables together.
There was no good reason for it. There was no good reason for it. And you know, if we all know that, yeah, the customer is always right, there are times when there are hard Nos, right? There are things like that. I have clients that you can’t do fireworks because the fire code in the area says you can’t do fireworks outside. You can start a fire and brush fire turn into a forest fire. You can’t do that, there are hard nos, but when you look at the policies that you have you have to ask yourself, why, why are we doing that? And is that just to make it easier for us? And is making it easier for us making it hard for the customer?
And I think the easiest thing to do in situations like this is just to ask yourself if I was the customer and I was being told this, would I be okay with that when I was the customer? Would I think that was reasonable if I was the customer? It’s a hard thing to do because you know why you have your policies or maybe you don’t. Maybe if you’re an employee and you came in and the policies were already there, you don’t know why. You just know that they’re there. And there’s a lot of legacy stuff that maybe with our businesses we need to get rid of and say, are we really making this harder? I am a fan of chatting with businesses when I’m a customer. I like chatting.
But I think for me, if I’m chatting with your artificial intelligence and it’s not answering my question because I’ve probably gone to your FAQs or have probably gone to your knowledge base or whatever before I go to chat with you, and are you really making it easier for me because I can chat with your artificial intelligence? Just had one the other day had to report it to them, but Yelp, client of mine was trying to get help with their paid account on Yelp. And when they called the phone number that Yelp keeps giving them, it picks up and it says, do you want English or Spanish? They choose English and it hangs up. And then, they go to the chat, and the chat was an artificial intelligence. It says it right there. I’m Charlie, your auto, whatever, however it said it. And it got to the point where, okay, you need to speak to someone and then nobody ever comes on.
So, are you really making it easier for your customer? No, you’re making it harder by having that. I had somebody who left me a message today, I had to call my utility about something and the guy left me a message back because I was on another call and he said, call my, you know, here’s my number, here’s my extension. Except when you call, it never says, if you want to enter an extension, go here. It just gives you all the voice prompts there. So, I didn’t know where to enter the number. So, I started entering the number and of course it took me to prompt number two because I was trying to put in extension 2376. It heard the two, took me over to thing, I’m like, no, that’s not what I want. So, he thought he was being helpful by saying, here’s my extension, but he wasn’t.
So, think about the policies that you have. Think about the things that you do and whether they’re physical things with your business or whether they’re virtual things with your website or things like that, long contact forms makes it easier for you because you get more information. Does not make it easier for the customer. Is it, can I fill out that form easily on mobile? I mean, how many times have you had that where you go and you can’t do it? I reported to somebody the other day that I got an email and when I looked at it on my desktop, looked fine. When I looked it on my phone, the print was so tiny it was really hard to read. And I reported it and I got a little friction first because the person was like, looks fine to me. And I’m thinking, okay, well maybe you don’t wear glasses like I do, or maybe you have the print bigger on your phone than I do. But I looked at it on my phone, my wife’s phone, and it’s just tiny. And I sent a screenshot to show that and eventually I got a thank you, but I was trying to say, you’re not making it easier for us, right? That you haven’t looked at it that way the way your customers are and that you’re fine with it the way it is, doesn’t mean we are.
And that’s a lot of the same things with the policies that we have. Are we really making it easier for the customer or are we making it easier for ourselves? So, look at some of those things. You know, when customers start complaining about something that you do or didn’t do or can’t do or whatever, take a step back and think, really, is this the hill that we want to die on? Because you could be losing customers that way because of things that make it easier for you, make it harder for them. And I’d be curious to some of the things that you guys come up with. So, please report them back to me, [email protected] and thanks for listening.
I’m Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you’d like to suggest other topics for “The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast” please let me know. My email is [email protected]. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.
Listen to this and all episodes on Apple Podcast, YouTube or your favorite app/site:
- Apple Podcast:
- YouTube: www.WeddingBusinessSolutionsPodcast.tv
- Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3sGsuB8
- Stitcher:
- Google Podcast:
- iHeart Radio: https://ihr.fm/31C9Mic
- Pandora:
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