Take a Walk in Your Customer’s Shoes to Learn How Your Company Looks From the Outside

Take a Walk in Your Customer’s Shoes to Learn How Your Company Looks From the Outside

Every business has a lot of moving parts and as diligent as an owner is about making sure everything is up to their standards, certain areas can quickly run amok and unnoticed, to the point where they can negatively impact customers impressions of your brand and its offerings.

If this has happened to your business, you’re certainly not alone. There’s even a cautionary tale about how Bill Gates had a disappointing interaction as a user with his own company, Microsoft. In his attempt to simply install a Microsoft program on his computer, Mr. Gates ran into a seemingly endless barrage of problems, mis directions, complications, dead ends, and irritating delays that ultimately prohibited him from downloading the program, and further led to him write a scathing email to his user experience team outlining the ordeal step-by-step. Read the email in its entirety here and prepare to cringe!

When disparate teams are working to make your business happen, it’s all too easy to become overwhelmed and for processes to become muddled and disjointed. Communication and follow through can break down when workers are busy actually performing the work and before you know it, you can end up in a situation like Microsoft that led to their user experience being absolutely abysmal.

A proactive solution to such embarrassing and disruptive customer interactions occurring is to make it a regular practice to play the role of a customer so you can experience firsthand what they experience from the outside. Personally "take a walk in your customer’s shoes" - even in just a couple areas like phone support and technology - two particularly customer-facing destinations. You’ll be able to spot inconsistencies, redundancies, annoyances and other factors that could well cause someone to abandon your company for another more efficient and attractive alternative.

Phone support

Garbled or too loud on-hold music, or a musical loop that’s too short, leading to an annoying, repetitive auditory experience will surely repel customers and make them unwilling to communicate with your company via phone.

Confusing or overly complicated telephone menus that leave a customer unsure of which selection to choose - or thinking they chose the wrong one while they wait is particularly unnerving and unprofessional.

Unclear - or redundant - communication with the customer support agents are a source of frustration. Sometimes when transferred to a new agent, you have to state your entire issue again, which is annoying and inefficient. Other times they take long silent pauses and don’t tell you what they’re doing so you’re left wondering if you are still being served or if they are, in fact, awaiting more information from you.

Confusing, vague, generic or downright wrong information from telephone agents leave you feeling disappointed in the level of support you’re receiving. Many times, you feel like they are not listening to the details of your issue and are instead responding with canned replies that only vaguely touch upon the issue you’re calling about. When providing a timeline for next actions, estimated follow up timelines are often wildly inaccurate, causing unnecessary delays in resolving issues.

Technology

A poor quality image on a website is worse than providing no photo at all. A poor photo instills a negative impression of your offerings upon the potential customer who will ultimately shop elsewhere where images are attractive, descriptive and representative of the quality of the item.

Antiquated technology irritates customers. While you need not have all the latest bells and whistles on your website, take steps to make customers’ experience simple, straightforward and seamless. Bonus points for pleasant.

An old, outdated website makes a bad impression; one that’s merely an electronic business card screams "basic." Customers make judgments about the relevance of your business from your website. If it has a tired, dated appearance, has a clunky interface or doesn’t function as expected, they will be inconvenienced and possibly irritated by how difficult it is to do business with you.

Making it a priority to interact with your company as a customer can give you an accurate - and valuable - picture of how your business is perceived from the viewpoint of a customer. Once you’re aware of the areas that cause friction, they can be addressed and rectified.

Have you "taken a walk in your customer’s shoes?" If so, what did you learn?