How hard is it to become your customer?

Think about somebody who has never dealt with you before and wants to buy something today.

He has to find you. Then work out whether you do the thing he needs. Then find a way to ask. Then wait. Then understand your quotation, which was written by somebody who has written four hundred of them and forgets that he has read none. Then work out how to confirm, how to pay, and what happens next.

At every one of those steps he can stop, and some of them he will.

Why you cannot see this

Because you have never been your own customer, and neither has anybody who works for you.

From inside, the path is obvious. Everybody knows what you make, who to call, what the rates are, how it works. None of that knowledge is available to the man outside, and the gap between the two is invisible precisely because you are standing on the wrong side of it.

This is why owners are genuinely surprised when a customer says it was difficult. It was not difficult for anybody in the building.

How to see it properly

Ask three people who have recently become customers one question. What was the most annoying part of dealing with us at the beginning?

Not are you satisfied, which gets you a polite yes. Ask about the annoying part and give them permission to answer. People tell you, if the question makes it easy.

You will hear the same two or three things. The quotation was hard to understand. Nobody told us what would happen next. We had to ask twice.

None of those are expensive to fix, and all of them are costing you people you never heard from.

Call three recent customers this week and ask what was most annoying at the start. What do they all say?

Walking that path as a stranger and marking every place somebody stops is how we usually begin. Tell us what your three customers said and we will tell you what to fix first.