Your Customer Doesn't Care How Hard This Was

This may sound slightly harsh, but your customer doesn’t care how difficult your business is to run.

They don’t care that the form they’ve just completed used to be three forms, that you spent two months getting your booking system to talk to your CRM, or that what looks like one very simple button is being held together behind the scenes by four bits of software, seventeen automations and Steve from IT quietly performing witchcraft.

They care whether the button works.

That’s not because customers are ungrateful bastards. It’s because none of the rest of it is their job.

We naturally experience our businesses from the inside, where we can see all the work that goes into making something happen. We remember the old system, the terrible form, the manual process and that period nobody talks about anymore when every order generated approximately 46 emails and somebody had to update a spreadsheet by hand. So when we improve it, we can see exactly how much better it is.

The customer can’t.

If something used to take nine steps and now takes six, everybody inside the business is understandably delighted. You’ve removed a third of the process. There may have been meetings. Possibly a flowchart. Someone may even have said “streamlining the customer journey” without being immediately asked to leave the building.

But your customer never saw the nine-step version.

They’ve just been given six things to do.

It’s a bit like proudly announcing that a journey now only takes six hours because it used to take nine. That’s genuinely excellent work, but if I never had to make the nine-hour journey, I’m not emotionally invested in your achievement. I’m mostly wondering whether there’s a service station halfway because I’m going to need a wee.

And I think this is where businesses can accidentally measure customer experience against the wrong thing. We compare it with what came before because that’s the thing we know. The customer compares it with the amount of effort they expected to make.

Those are not always the same benchmark.

You see the same thing when businesses try to be helpful by explaining absolutely everything. We know why there are three service options. We understand the subtle but terribly important distinction between Package One and Package Two. We know why you need to complete that form before you can speak to somebody and why the information on page four genuinely does matter eventually.

So we explain it all.

And then we explain the explanation.

Before long, what began as an attempt to help somebody choose the right service has become the commercial equivalent of being cornered at a wedding by someone who wants to explain cryptocurrency.

Meanwhile, the customer came in with a much smaller question.

Can you do the thing I need, is it right for me, how much does it cost and what do I do next?

That doesn’t mean customers are stupid, impatient or incapable of processing information. It means they have their own lives, businesses, children, dinners, deadlines and inexplicable household admin to deal with. Nobody woke up this morning hoping to dedicate 45 minutes to understanding your internal service structure.

Every extra thing they have to work out is a little bit more effort.

And usually it isn’t one enormous, glaringly stupid obstacle that loses somebody. It’s the accumulation of tiny ones. They read something twice because they’re not quite sure what it means, open another page looking for the price, come back, compare two services, start filling in a form, realise they need something they haven’t got with them and think, I’ll do this later.

We all know what “I’ll do this later” means.

There is every possibility that person is now reorganising a kitchen cupboard and has completely forgotten you exist.

From inside the business, though, nothing went wrong. The website worked. The form loaded. The information was technically available. Nobody received an error notification and nothing caught fire.

The customer just disappeared.

And they probably won’t tell you why, because people very rarely send an email saying, “Hello. I was quite interested in giving you some money at approximately 11.07 this morning, but by 11.14 I had seven tabs open, no longer knew which package I needed and decided to make toast instead.”

They just go and make the toast.

That’s why I think there’s a more useful question than simply asking whether your customer journey works.

How much work are you asking the customer to do?

Not everything can - or should - be frictionless. Sometimes you genuinely need information from people. Sometimes there are several options because one size really doesn’t fit all. Sometimes the customer needs to understand something before they buy it, and reducing everything to three words and a massive orange button marked BUY NOW would be bloody irresponsible.

The point isn’t to make everything ridiculously simple.

It’s to make sure the effort you’re asking for is actually necessary.

Because the customer doesn’t know that you’ve already removed three steps. They don’t know what the old website looked like. They don’t know that your systems are complicated, that your industry requires certain information or that Sharon used to spend every Thursday afternoon manually transferring data from one place to another and is now finally free.

They experience the version in front of them.

And that’s the only version they can judge.