Your Customers Are Way More Efficient Than You Are

I just love sitting in the quiet zone on the train. No marimba ringtones, screaming babies are but a distant menace and nobody feels the need to talk to me about hockey.  Imagine my disappointment last week when I jumped on a crowded train and had to sit in the noisy bit. The sole comfort was the very interesting argument the couple behind me were having.

Now, it’s difficult to argue in public at the best of times. Add to that the general social intimidation that comes from being Canadian and the confined space on a commuter train, and you have a very interesting set of imperative whispers punctuated by the occasional “are you serious?”. 

As we rumbled along, the discussion escalated and ipods were discretely muted as the rest of the car leaned in for a bit of a listen.  I’m quite sure the folks two rows down were actually taking bets on the subject of the argument, with dysfunctional family dynamics followed by money landing as odds-on favourites.  But it wasn’t either of those things. It wasn’t sex, religion, toilet paper positioning, parallel parking or even politics. Nope. The argument turned out to be about who had to call a certain telecommunications conglomerate to fix some technical issue.

I think calling the cell phone company or the cable provider lands someplace between chewing tin foil and watching six continuous hours of Pingu on most people’s preference list. In fact, I think there is an excellent business to be built around outsourcing conversations with terrible customer service organizations. The delicious goal of which would be to outsource your side of it to the same call centre your supplier is using. All of which leads me to the idea of efficiency, and the widening gap between how companies view it and how customers view it.

For most businesses, efficiency looks a lot like repeatable, measurable processes that deliver value to the organization. For consumers, it’s about getting stuff done.

Marketers spend a lot of time working on shorter sales cycles, end-to-end lead tracking, automated nurture programs and anything that reduces the cost of acquisition.

In our Customer Abuse departments, efficiency is measured in handle time, first call resolution, staffing optimization, escalation percentages and other stuff.

But customers are viewing efficiency in a much different light. For them, efficiency looks like Whatsapp, Instagram, Skype, Twitter and text messages. Even in the B2B world, an efficient transaction for the customer is often a very different animal for the supplier. Let’s take a simple technical issue. 

As an efficient and customer-centric organization, you’ve spent ages thinking about how to get the right information to your customers just when they need it and, preferably, at little or no cost or bother to you. That’s why your customer is first sent to your dreadful website to login to their account. Which of course takes half an hour because they forgot their user name. And, having recovered that, don’t know their password, account number or product model.

Now, before you are willing to open a ticket and start helping, they need to spend a month or so wandering around in your Helpful Knowledge Base where they will surely find the answer. If they are just too lazy to read your hundreds and hundreds of technical updates and product notices, they will spend another good, long time, searching for access to a real human. Of course, they will fail, because humans, are a terribly inefficient way to deliver service, and the one thing you have done right on your site is make it more or less impossible to contact anyone. Much better to have your customer fill in a form, wait for a ticket number, and then spend a chunk of their day in your call queue, explaining their issue over and over.

On the customer’s side, they are used to ordering an Uber ride and having it turn up in 5 minutes, helpfully notifying them when it’s there. They order stuff online and it’s in their hands the next day. They wave their phone at a blinky thing to pay for coffee, buy a movie ticket, board a plane and check their blood sugar. They check in with the kids, the spouse, the babysitter and the thermostat in the time it takes to walk to the car.  Like it or not, our customers are much more efficient than we will ever be.

These are people who measure efficiency in terms of getting stuff done, crossing it off the list, moving on. Can you see why they just aren’t impressed with your wiki? Do you understand why they are a little touchy when you finally get around to picking up the phone and actually selling something? Can you appreciate why couples are fighting on trains about who has to call you?

Perhaps it’s time we worked on a mutual definition of efficiency when it comes to selling and serving customers. Perhaps the metrics need to be around the number of minutes your customers invest in buying or getting service and not the number of minutes your staff spends helping it happen. And in case you are wondering, keeping up with them is table stakes; the winners here are the companies that make their customers more efficient.

Related Posts:

The End of Valued Customers
Border Collies are Loyal, Customers are Satisfied

Interesting Things I Found This Week

Speaking of efficient, check out this fun campaign by Oreo that lets you decorate the package and ship the cookies directly to those hard-to-buy-for friends. Brilliant, and not a retailer in sight.

If you think you’re having troubles with Productivity Prevention Department not getting your little VPN issue dealt with, you’ll want to read this terrific piece in Slate on what it’s like to go to work when your entire company has been hacked so severely, your office looks like a zombie apocalypse movie only with Kim Jong-un playing all the zombie parts. 

BizMarketer is Elizabeth Williams
You can reach me at escwilliams@gmail.com
or follow me on Twitter @bizmkter