Your customer doesn't know what you know

I was on a website recently trying to find out how much something cost.

Nothing particularly complicated. I wasn't trying to establish the company's annual turnover or track down the maiden name of the Finance Director's mother. I had seen something I was interested in, I wanted to know roughly what it would cost me, and I was potentially prepared to buy it.

So I looked at the page I'd landed on.

No price.

Fair enough. Perhaps there was more information elsewhere. I clicked through to the service page, read a little more about how passionate everybody was, discovered that the company offered a “tailored approach” and was invited several times to “start my journey”.

Still no idea what the journey cost.

By this point I'd become slightly more invested than any normal customer reasonably should be, largely because this is what I do for a living and I wanted to know whether the price actually existed somewhere. So I checked the menu. I found another page. That sent me somewhere else. Eventually I discovered an FAQ containing a sentence that suggested I should get in touch to discuss my requirements.

And there it was.

The point where an ordinary customer has to decide whether they want the thing badly enough to start a conversation just to obtain a fairly basic piece of information.

Now, there may have been a perfectly good reason the price wasn't published. Perhaps every job genuinely was different. Perhaps they needed more information before they could quote. Perhaps there was even a page somewhere explaining exactly that and I simply hadn't found it.

But here's the interesting bit.

I didn't know any of that.

I only knew what the business had given me.

And because I am professionally incapable of leaving these things alone, I started wondering what the experience looked like from the other side.

I could almost imagine somebody inside that business saying, “Oh, that's easy. They just need to fill in the form.”

Of course it's easy.

You know there's a form.

And I think this is one of the strangest things that happens when you run a business for any length of time. You become incredibly knowledgeable about the very thing you're trying to explain to somebody who knows absolutely nothing about it.

You know that the service mentioned on Instagram is the same one that has a slightly different name on the website because you renamed it six months ago and never got around to changing every reference. You know that clicking “Contact” takes people to the form they need. You know that Dave answers those enquiries and usually replies within a day. You know that the package includes X even though the website doesn't actually mention X because everybody always asks for X.

None of this feels confusing to you.

Your brain simply fills in the gaps.

And the really annoying thing is that most of those gaps didn't appear because anybody was bad at their job.

They accumulated.

The website was built three years ago when the business looked slightly different. Then you introduced a new service. Somebody added a page. You stopped offering something else. Instagram became more important. The booking system changed. A member of staff left. You changed a process because the old one was a pain in the arse. Somebody updated the prices but forgot the PDF that's still floating around somewhere.

Every decision made sense at the time.

And then one Tuesday afternoon a perfectly sensible potential customer is six clicks deep in your website thinking:

I JUST WANT TO KNOW HOW MUCH THE BLOODY THING COSTS.

Meanwhile you're sitting inside the business thinking the customer journey is obvious.

I've seen versions of this so many times that I've become slightly obsessed with it. Not just websites, either. It happens across social media, emails, enquiry processes, booking systems and the language businesses use to describe themselves. Each individual bit can be perfectly reasonable while the experience created by all of them together is… less so.

It's also why I don't think you can completely audit your own customer experience.

You can certainly check it. You absolutely should. But the moment you arrive at your own website, you're carrying information your customer doesn't have.

You already know where you're going.

It's a bit like trying to test whether the directions to your house are any good by driving home yourself.

Of course you found it.

You live there.

And this, really, is how OLI came about.

Not because I thought businesses needed another enormous strategic exercise, another 47-page report or somebody turning up and saying “Have you considered optimising your conversion funnel?” while everybody quietly loses the will to live.

I wanted to know what happens when somebody simply approaches a business from the outside.

What do I think you sell before you've explained it to me? What can I work out for myself? Where do I hesitate? Where does the language change? What do I have to go hunting for? What am I being asked to know that nobody has actually told me?

And, crucially, at what point might I quietly bugger off?

Because that's the bit businesses don't necessarily get to see.

Most customers don't email to say:

Hello. I was considering giving you some money at 2.37pm today, but after seven minutes on your website I became mildly irritated and went somewhere else. Thought you'd appreciate the feedback.

They just leave.

Which means you can have a perfectly good product, people genuinely interested in it and marketing successfully bringing those people towards you...

...while losing some of them in the last few feet because you know how to get through the door and they don't.

And perhaps that's the useful question to ask occasionally.

Not “Does my website look good?”

Not even “Does everything work?”

But:

If I didn't already know any of this, would I know what to do next?

Because your customer doesn't know what you know.

They shouldn't have to.