I was on a business trip yesterday and one thing kept bugging me throughout the trip. My rental car keys. As a guy, I keep the keys in my front pocket and the fact that they had put two copies of the car key on the keychain, along with a valet key made it an uncomfortable lump I had to deal with every time I got out of the car.

I know why they made this choice. It was one of convenience. It keeps all the keys together for the time that they might resell the car. It saves them the administration and storage of the additional keys. These are all conveniences for the business. It certainly did me no good having a valet key that I couldn’t even remove from the key chain. I would be curious to know if they even thought about the fact that a bulky key chain is a less optimal customer experience before they made that choice. Businesses far too often side on their own convenience rather than focusing like a laser on what the customer experience will be with their product or service.

I have personally been on the wrong side of some of these decisions. Whether a company should sell an appliance or software. Whether a company should deliver a web based interface. How should customers upgrade and migrate from older versions of software. There are many difficult decisions to be made in technology companies and many of them involve the tradeoff of customer experience with business conveniences.

Try something next time. Focus on the optimal customer experience and find a way to make it work for your business. This is the way that great companies are made and fanatical customers are nurtured. Would I have noticed if Hertz had only had one key on the key chain? Probably not. But, would I notice now if one of their competitors only had one key? Most definitely.

In a world of too many features, gadgets, and competitors, a relentless focus on the customer experience is still the great differentiator because so few companies really do it.