Establishing a business is difficult at the best of times. You want to get up and running, start making sales and generating income as quickly as possible. Whatever it is you’re selling, there will be a degree of complexity involved before your customers get exactly what they want. Factors such as ease of use, availability, delivery times and technical support all affect the customer experience. Reading complicated instruction manuals, waiting for deliveries that arrive late, poor technical back-up all result in one thing, frustration. Do you want your customers to be frustrated before they’re even able to start using your product? It’s up to you if and how you decide to approach making life easy for them.
It’s understandably tempting to take the easy route and expect that your customers can deal with problems themselves. Many businesses operate in this way but, if you want to set your business apart from your competitors and become the go-to company for your product or service, there is another way.
Follow the Giants
Many of the most successful businesses operating today have achieved their success because they have gone out of their way to remove complexity for their customers. They have made things more difficult for themselves in order to make life easier for others but in the long run, it has paid off.
Companies like Amazon and Apple have become dominant in their sectors precisely because they make life easy for their customers. Apple not only led the way in smartphone technology, but they also did everything possible to make the consumer experience a good one by making their phones easy to use. Amazon revolutionized the retail industry by providing a level of service that was previously unheard of on such a scale.
Guiding Principles
The principles followed by these giants can equally be applied to businesses of any size. It requires digging deep into the detail to find what will make your product as user-friendly as it can possibly be.
The key to standing out in your sector is to ask yourself these four questions:
- Who are my customers?
- What do they want to achieve?
- What are the obstacles preventing this?
- What can my business do to remove those obstacles?
If you can develop a strategy that enables you to give your customers what they want, delivered in the way they want, at the time they want, you will have added value to your product. This will give you an edge over your competition because what customers really want is less frustration and an easier life.
Effectively, what you’re selling is not just your product, it’s your product with the added bonus of an easier life thrown in. It won’t be easy for you, just like it wasn’t easy for Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs. The point is that you take on the frustration and pain so that your customers don’t have to. It’s about managing the experience of buying from you and making that experience the best it can possibly be.