How to Delight – Not Confuse – Your Customers

Posted by Jane Heifetz on May 14, 2008 10:58 AM

I just spent 3 infuriating hours on the phone with a slew of customer service representatives, trying in vain to fix my son’s laptop. Slamming down the phone, I wondered about all the other companies that inadvertently anger customers with products that are too confusing to use.

According to a recent study by technology consultant Accenture LTD, the U.S. electronics industry spent about $13.8 billion last year to re-box, restock, and resell returned products. 68% were returned because consumers “didn’t understand the product;” only 5% because they were defective.

James Womack and Daniel Jones, authors of Lean Consumption and Lean Thinking, argue that many companies wrongly assume they’ll save time and money by offloading tasks to consumers. They force customers to waste valuable time tracking their own orders, struggling with complicated technology. The result? Consumers are angry and companies spend more resources -- not less -- handling complaints, reworking botched repairs, and replacing customers lost to competitors.

The solution? Lean consumption: streamlining the way you provide goods and services, so customers can use them more easily. How? View consumption as a process, not an event. Identify steps in your customers’ consumption process where they expend time but get no value. Then revamp your processes so that you provide exactly what customers want, where and when they want it.

Here's a great example of lean consumption: Some office equipment -- copiers, printers, etc – now have built-in diagnostic software that tells when a part will wear out and remote sensors that convey this information to the manufacturer, enabling its repair person to replace the part before it malfunctions, and before the customer thinks it’s broken and needs to be returned.

Have you experienced lean consumption as a consumer? Does your company practice lean consumption?

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Comments

Here is the leanest consumption I have experienced. I would like to repeat the experience many times. It was very satisfying.

My daughter's iPod malfunctioned. I set an appointment online at the nearest Apple Genius Bar. I went in and they reset my daughter's iPod. I took it home. It continued to malfunction. By 8:30 that evening I had decided I had wasted enough time with this iPod problem (as you stated above). So I dug in my heels and was going to go back down to that Genius Bar at the Apple Store and give them a piece of my mind. I went back on line and saw that they had one appointment left open at 8:55PM - 5 minutes before closing. I went in and was met by a different genius. I had not seen this younger man before, but he was prepared. He said, "You were here earlier today, weren't you?!" I said yes. "And we didn't fix your problem?" No I said. "Here,let me take a look." I handed the man my daughter's iPod. He noticed that it was no longer under warranty, but he said, "You know what? I'm going to give you another iPod for free." I was shocked, and asked why. He said, "Let me explain our philosophy to you. We know that our products are expensive. And we know that the people who can afford to buy our products probably know how to take care of the things that they buy. So when things go wrong, we figure it's probably something we did rather than something you did." And with that, he went into the back room and returned - handing me a brand new iPod. Not only did this person make me feel good about myself, I became an Apple convert for life.

- Posted by Calle & Company
May 14, 2008 6:12 PM

Here's another lean experience moment. In the early days of the internet and emailing Procter & Gamble and I, as a new product consultant, decided to try our hands for the first time at emailing reports and recommendations back and forth. The reports were memory intensive given there were lots of images. On the first attempt the reports would not email. P&G had no webmaster per say, so it was my job to contact Microsoft for technical support. This was an urgent matter for one P&G President had called to ask me to stop emailing because the report (apparently broken down into bits) had filled his email box with 1,800 messages over the weekend.

The lean, or lack of lean moment came as I spent 14 hours in on again off again technical support phone calls with Microsoft's Indian support personnel. After 14 hours of reading through scripts and restarting all over again several times with different CSR agents, we threw in the towel. No one at Microsoft technical support could solve the problem. The problem was they could read through diagnosic customer service scripts just fine, but none of the support personnel were experienced graphic artists. They'd been trained, but never used the product. The following week, after we FedExed hard copies to P&G a graphic artist friend deftly showed me how to reduce image resolutions. In less than an hour the entire report had been combed, image resolutions reduced and the reports emailed problem free.

Oh, what a little practical experience can bring to lean consumption!

- Posted by Calle & Company
May 14, 2008 7:29 PM

You can call it "lean consumption" or you can just call it viewing your product or service through the lens of the consumer.

There is a reference to a 1 to 1 Media article here; http://elliotross.wordpress.com/2008/02/26/sales-service-and-education/

"Forrester Research is quoted as saying that 20 percent of High Definition Television (HDTV) sets sold at retail are returned - not because they are defective - but because the consumer had no idea that the set was not going to give the expected HD user experience unless both your cable provider has HDTV services, and that you are paying for those extra services."

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- Posted by Elliot Ross
May 15, 2008 11:04 AM