I’m a self-confessed lazy person. I like things to be simple, especially when it comes to parting me from my hard-earned cash. Amazingly, some places make it hard for customers to spend money with them and if I have to work to give you my money, you can forget about it.
Of course, I’m not the only one. As customers have more choices, all sorts of questions come into their buying decisions – price, quality, reputation and dozens of other factors. Simplicity is certainly one of those factors.
Customers, like me, tend to make decisions that make their lives easy, and so, if you want to get a leg up on your competitors, you should go out of your way to make sure that doing business with you is as easy as possible.
Let’s take the example of Joe.
Joe works just around the corner from a sandwich shop, but chooses to make his sandwich-related purchases at another one located a few minutes down the road. Why would he get in his car and drive across town when the same product is only a short walk down the road? Joe’s explanation: It’s more convenient.
Here’s why:
It accepts the form of payment he prefers. Joe likes to pay by debit card, which the nearby shop doesn’t take. “It costs them a few extra pence,” he explains. “But it’s far simpler for me.”
It’s faster. At the local shop, there are never more than 2 people behind the counter, which means Joe has to wait 10 minutes during his lunch break to get his turkey and ham baguette. At shop number two, it’s even busier at lunchtime but 4 staff get through the rush faster than 2 – saving Joe time.
They serve later. Sometimes Joe gets stuck in the office and can’t take lunch until 3 or even 4. He doesn’t expect 24-7 service but shop number one stops at 3pm on the nose and usually only has egg salad left anytime after 2:30 anyway. The second shop serves later but even when Joe’s running really late, they’ll still make him up his ‘usual’. In fact, if he phones ahead, they’ll make it up in advance so he can simply collect it and pay.
OK, so you can’t cater to the needs of every single customer individually, but where’s there one Joe, there’s likely to be others. If you can remove the reasons why someone wouldn’t buy from you, you make the reasons to buy from you all the more compelling.
Moreover, in many industries customers are hesitant to make on-the-spot decisions. They would much prefer to ‘think about it’ or are ‘just browsing’. In these cases, the more hoops a customer has to jump through to buy from you, the more likely that those hoops become convenient reasons why not to do it today.
Action Point: Start with a list of all the obstacles that a customer might encounter when buying from your business or getting in touch for a quote.
- Can they get in touch out of hours?
- Is your business easy to find?
- Are your contact details listed in the directories?
- Do you make payments easy?
- Can you go to them instead?
The point: Even small issues can play a make-or-break role in keeping your existing customers happy and continuing to attract new ones. Be easy to do business with.
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