Let customers give you money.

Here’s a slightly unreasonable ambition for your digital journeys. Let customers give you money.

Preferably without requiring them to download a form, email it back and then speak to three people.

I appreciate this is radical.

Let me explain.

Apparently buying 5–6 cars a year is unreasonable, my kids tell me.

One drives a Peugeot 106 and the other is an agile coach, so naturally their opinions don’t count. Hi kids.

I’m selling a mini with a little finance left, so I decided to pay it off.

This should be easy.

“I’d like to give you some money.”

They sent me a link.

The link sent me to a form.

The form had to be emailed back.

Etc etc.

Eventually I reached another human being.

Nine or eleven steps after offering them money, I got my answer.

No.

Well done Stuart. Twenty-seven years of low-effort design and you picked the worst performer in a Which? survey.

They’d turned “I owe you money; I’d like to pay you” into an expedition requiring Bear Grylls, three days’ provisions and a flare gun.

But how does this happen?

I doubt anybody sat in a meeting and said:

“Let’s make paying us unnecessarily difficult.”

Surely…

If you were responsible for that transformation, you were probably trying to make things easier.

Digitise the form. Automate the email. Authenticate the customer. Route the request.

Sensible.

So why does it go wrong?

Psychology gives us a possible clue.

There’s a phenomenon called means–end substitution.

We create tools to achieve an outcome. Then, almost unnoticed, improving the means becomes the outcome.

You start with:

How can we make it incredibly easy to settle finance?

But slowly the questions become:

Can we digitise the form?
Automate the email?
Authenticate the customer?
Route the request?

They’re not stupid questions. They’re questions I’d probably ask too.

But notice what’s disappeared.

The customer’s question:

Can I just pay off my damn car?

Perhaps you’ve seen this too. The technology works. The project delivered. Yet customers still call, chase or abandon journeys that were supposed to become easier.

It’s weird, isn’t it?

If that sounds familiar, here’s something I’d try.

Before your next digital meeting, spend £30 on a whiteboard.

Write:

WHAT IS THE CUSTOMER TRYING TO GET DONE?

Forget your existing process for ten minutes.

Just write…Pay off my car finance.

Balance → Pay → Confirmation → Done.

Only then ask:

What technology would help us make that happen?

“How do we digitise our process?” and “How do we make this ridiculously easy for the customer?” can take you to very different places.

One might give you eleven steps.

The other might give you three.

Whiteboard first. Digitise second.

P.S. I decided to keep the Mini. I love it too much. Problem solved! 😂😂

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