Why your customers may leave before anything has actually gone wrong
Three of my friends are hard as nails. And I don’t mean regular six-inch nails, which I think is already implied by the metaphor.
Take a six-inch nail. Reinforce it with diamonds. Then coat the diamonds in lonsdaleite, a material scientists have predicted could be 58% harder than diamond.
I imagine a regular hammer taking one look at it and going: “Nah. You’ll need my pal Sledge.”
That’s roughly my friends.
Never mind meeting them on a dark night. I wouldn’t want to meet them in Iceland on the summer solstice. At least not without a decent set of floodlights.
And yet, one is terrified of cotton wool.
Another is scared of spiders. Not tarantulas. Not one of those enormous Australian things that looks capable of carrying off a small child.
Money spiders.
Put one in his house and he’s checking Zoopla for somewhere at least five miles away. Someone once told him they follow you.
And the third can’t eat a full Scottish breakfast if even one baked bean is touching the haggis, or gently caressing the minutest corner of his hash brown.
We’re strange creatures, human beings.
Can just looking at something scare us? Apparently so.
Psychologists Hyunjin Song and Norbert Schwarz demonstrated this rather beautifully. They gave people instructions for an exercise routine.
Same exercises. Same amount of work. They changed one thing: how easy the instructions were to read.
People who saw the easy-to-read version estimated the exercises would take about 8 minutes. People who saw the harder-to-read version? 15 minutes.
Almost twice as long.
Nothing about the exercise had changed. Nobody had lifted a weight. Nobody had done a single repetition.
They just looked at the instructions and went: “I could pull something just reading this.”
And crucially, they were less inclined to do the exercise.
Now THAT matters.
Because your customers are making judgements about effort too. And sometimes those judgements determine whether they bother at all.
Research published this year by LexisNexis Risk Solutions looked at people applying for life insurance. Among applicants who abandoned the process, 79% cited the amount of effort required as a leading reason.
Seventy-nine per cent.
Not necessarily because they’d suddenly discovered they didn’t want life insurance. The effort involved in getting it helped drive them away.
And that’s an important distinction.
We spend enormous amounts of money persuading people to want our products. Advertising. Brand. Price. Features. Offers.
Then they arrive.
And apparently there’s an exam: “Please provide sufficient evidence that you meet the requirements to become a customer.”
Which makes the success of Confused.com rather interesting.
Go back to the early 2000s and comparing insurance could be a time-consuming business. Contact an insurer. Give them your details. Get a quote. Contact another insurer. Give them your details. Get another quote.
Repeat until either adequately insured or clinically exhausted.
Then along came Confused.com.
One place. One journey. Lots of quotes.
Price obviously mattered. But something else had changed too.
They removed work.
Today, Confused.com even promotes the fact that customers can save their details rather than waste time filling them in again the following year.
Because customers may come to you for the product. But they can leave because of how hard you make it to be your customer.
And sometimes the difference between what the customer is trying to do and what our organisations require of them becomes almost ridiculous.
One pension complaint considered by the Financial Ombudsman involved a customer who asked for her address to be changed. The provider received the request on 19 January.
Confirmation arrived on 16 February.
Twenty-eight days.
Think about that.
You can sell your house. Buy another one. Pack everything you own. Move the dog. Empty that kitchen drawer nobody has dared open for 15 years. Hire a van. And transfer your entire existence from one side of the country to the other.
Only to discover that updating five lines on a Lenovo desktop could apparently require its own removal company.
And I think there’s something important for leaders in all of this.
We spend a lot of time understanding our processes. How long they take. Where the work goes. What gets stuck. What the SLA says.
All important.
But the best leaders go further. They understand the psychology of the customer.
They get inside their heads. What are they seeing? What are they expecting? What looks difficult? Where are they uncertain? What are they worried might happen next?
Because customers don’t experience your process map. They experience your organisation as a human being.
A form that looks intimidating. A request they don’t understand. A password they’ve forgotten. A document they need to find. A next step nobody has explained.
A nagging suspicion that something which ought to take five minutes is about to consume their lunch break.
And all of that can change behaviour before the process has really got going.
Do I start this now? Do I put it off? Do I call instead? Do I try somebody else? Do I just give up? Is it just too scary to even start?
That’s why reducing customer effort isn’t simply about making a process faster. You need to understand how difficult the process looks from the outside.
In the world of Low Effort, we call it looking outside-in.
But let’s be less grand about it, shall we?
And by less, I mean literally.
Remove the D.
What would your ‘gran’ say if she saw your form?
Would she know what you wanted? Would she understand why you wanted it? Would she know what happens next? Would she feel confident getting started?
Or would she look at it, put it back on the kitchen table and decide there are more pressing matters?
‘Let’s have a cup of tea shall we son.’
Because the best leaders don’t just understand how their organisation works. They understand how it feels to the human being experiencing it.
And once you understand that, you can start anticipating behaviour rather than simply reacting to it. You can see where customers might hesitate. Where they might give up. Where they might call. Where they might leave.
Suddenly you’re not just a leader. You’re something else entirely.
You may even want to change your business card.
MENTALIST
Let’s just hope you don’t need to submit a form to HR for the change.
