Business Tip

"Be ETDBW: Easy to Do Business With "

By: Ann Thomas and Jill Applegate, WomenEntrepreneur

Although we all love to be treated like snowflakes--as one of a kind, never to walk the earth again--the reality is that we share many of the same service needs. And one of those is a desire to transact business with organizations in the most convenient and hassle-free ways possible.

The more times we have to call a company back to resolve a frustrating problem, the more times we walk the aisles of a store without receiving a sniff of assistance, or the more times we endlessly search a poorly designed website for information, the greater the odds we'll start looking for someplace else to spend our money. More than ever, today's busy customers value and fastidiously protect their time. The easier and more convenient you can make it to do business with you--given that you're also providing quality products at competitive prices--the better the chance you'll turn people into loyal, longtime customers.

Although this might seem an obvious point, it's one that's apparently overlooked or downplayed by many organizations. A few years ago, we developed an inventory of characteristics and practices that distinguish between organizations that delight and retain their customers and those that marginally satisfy and frequently lose customers. The survey differentiated companies that focused on transactions from those that created value for and long-term relationships with their customers. One statistically significant factor is the ETDBW aptitude: being "easy to do business with."

Paying Attention to the customer experience means that you are focused on making it so easy for customers to do business with you that they'll have little reason to look for greener pastures and will enthusiastically recommend you to others.

ETDBW organizations make it easy for customers to obtain their products, information, or services--on their own terms--just as they make it easy for customers to reach the right individual, area, or resolution system when they have a problem or question.

Consider for a moment how frustrating it is when you dial a company's 800 number--particularly if you've just searched exhaustively for it on a website, only to find it tucked away in microscopic print under a nonintuitive category--only to be greeted with an automated phone menu. Although the recorded voice might be friendly and constantly remind you that "you're a valued customer," you wait patiently without hearing the option you believe best meets your needs. Because you're limited to only the options offered, in frustration you select one that you think is close enough.

When you're asked to enter your account number to best direct your call, you do so. Once you're transferred, if you're lucky enough to reach a human being, you're asked to provide the 16-digit account number yet again. By this point you'd be forgiven for pounding the phone against a wall. Such systems are the antithesis of being easy to do business with. They are designed from the inside looking out rather than the outside looking in. In other words, they're built primarily to reduce operating costs, with little consideration for the customer experience.

What does an ETDBW service delivery system look like in action? From the customer's point of view, the "customer-friendliest" delivery systems are as follows:

* Accessible. You can reach the company easily and in multiple ways. Where are your customers likely to look for you? Your website? Twitter or other social media? E-mail? Employ as many options as you can manage.

* Accurate. Regardless of the topic, all the information that's accessible to customers must be accurate. If it's not, customers will see right through the inaccuracies and not return for more abuse.

* Integrated. Customers can get all the information they need from one source. And your sources--web site, 800 number, tweets, blogs, bricks-and-mortar, customer service representatives, online chat options--need to be perceived as seamless to the customer. Regardless of the way a customer chooses to engage your organization, the channels must be open, easy, consistent, and knowledgeable.

* Customer-driven. The customer can understand and use the information, systems, and options without hoops to jump through. In addition, all forms of engagement should offer the customer what he wants, when he wants it.

* Fast. In this time of instant communication, customers are less willing to wait than ever before for answers to questions or resolutions to problems. The speed at which information travels is critical to your success. Immediacy is what's made channels like Twitter such a valuable way to address customer concerns. Customers can alert companies to problems via tweets, and service staff can follow up through other channels such as phone or e-mail if needed.

* Totally transparent. If there are details that need to be handled, they should be outside the customer's field of vision or so well integrated that the customer doesn't even know they happen. Think of a duck swimming upstream. What you see above the water line is a calm quacker. Below the water, the poor duck is paddling like crazy!

EDTBW considerations are different between bricks-and-mortar companies and those that do business online. Consider the new restaurant that opens in the heart of a major business district. Regardless of the quality of the food, the attitude of the wait staff, or the price, the restaurant is likely to do decent business simply because of the proximity to the market. But in the world of e-commerce, customers don't notice you as they walk down the street; they have to seek you out. They won't return out of convenience or because you're located just around the block from their home, since they can just as easily go to a hundred other sites with the same ease as visiting yours. With the increase in online shopping, it's more important than ever that you be easy to do business with.

Consider the changes that the Artful Home, a retailer that sells artists' original works, made to its website in the name of being ETDBW. Research found that visitors to the site often had difficulty locating what they were after; some 30 percent of searches to the site produced no results. One problem was the way customers spelled words in searches. For example, because some people have a hard time spelling jewelry, their searches on the site would produce the result, "Sorry, we don't have any misspelled word," which in regards to jewelry was far from the case. So, as part of its web site redesign, the Artful Home employed a new search tool that provides results for commonly misspelled words.

Other site design changes streamlined content and made navigation easier for customers. In the previous design, for example, there were 20-plus categories listed on the left-hand navigation column; the redesign now features the five best-selling categories run across the top of the page. Product images also were made about 200 percent larger, for easier viewing by customers.

The company quickly saw positive results from the design changes. After the redesign went live in 2007, sales from online marketing efforts increased 153 percent, and customer searches producing no results dropped from 30 percent to 8 percent.