Any business that provides a service or product will ultimately require input from both the potential customer and a member of your organization. Once you have contacted a customer, or they have contacted you then there are inevitably “a few simple steps” in order to provide that customer with the product or service that they want. Most organizations recognize the importance of making this process as smooth and simple as possible. If the process for a customer to contact your business is too complicated, you will are discouraging many potential customers. If the process to discuss pricing is extremely complicated and involves too many dependencies, again you will be driving customers elsewhere. If delivering your product or service to those customers is convoluted or requires a lot of manual steps between multiple individuals, you are likely to harbor inefficiency and errors in that process.
For many businesses there is significant emphasis on streamlining processes, improving efficiency and productivity, and eliminating errors. There is great importance in reducing inputs and downtime to maximize profits and each process has generally been analyzed from multiple angles. Six Sigma, Lean, and countless other systems are designed to created the fewest number of steps from start to finish.
But what about the steps your customer must take in the process?
Here is an example of a simple process that I am intimately familiar with. There are “a few simple steps” for having analytical testing performed for a medical device at a testing laboratory:
1 – client: contact the laboratory
2 – customer service: provide pricing based on the request, send the price quote to the client.
3 – client: complete the shipping forms for sending samples, issue a purchase order, etc.
4 – testing laboratory: receive samples, generate protocol and begin testing.
In one role, i helped clients through this exact process hundreds of times each week. 95% of them understood and followed the steps without any issues or delays. In some cases it was not so simple. Some clients did not really know what testing they needed to begin with, or they would change the requested tests mid-process. Others could not remember to fill the form out when sending the samples, or neglected to prepare any kind of payment. Most clients would eventually make it through these steps, but only after multiple follow-up emails or numerous phone calls.
Instead of progressing quickly and easily through the series of 8 easy steps, it sometimes felt more like this:
If you experience many of your clients struggling through these types of simple processes… maybe they aren’t actually as simple as they appear. If you are confident that the steps are as simple as you can make them, then you may just need to take special care with some clients to keep them on track and moving along.
business confab 