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.
One of the things I do for my clients is help them connect to their customers, validate a market need and refine their product to meet that need. The only way to do this is by communicating with those customers, whether it is through a survey, interviews, or personal visits. I emphasized the need to communicate with your customers last week in the post “
Seems like a simple mantra, but it is amazing how often it doesn’t happen. Here’s a quick test. How many people on your leadership team, say director level and above, have communicated with a customer or prospect this week? If your answer is zero then you ought to be worried.
Every VC, or venture angel has heard it. Maybe you’ve even said it. In answer to the question “who’s your competition?” The simple answer comes back:
It seems so simple, and yet so few startups really take the time to do it well. The most basic and fundamental step for any new company, or an old company introducing a new product for that matter, to take is to intimately understand the pain of their customers. Too often early stage companies and product initiatives get caught up in the uniqueness and sophistication of their technology. Developing unique technology with a sustainable competitive advantage is very important, but it is secondary to developing technology that your customers critically need and will pay for. Take a moment and see how you answer the following questions:
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