Don’t make the sale hard

When you have a customer asking to buy from you, particularly when you haven't had to do any (or minimal) sales activity to attract that potential customer, the golden rule is to make it easy for them to complete the purchase. A customer who is ready to buy and needs no advertising or sales effort is surely a prize customer? Unfortunately not, as my recent experience illustrates.

I've been trying to organise having a flat in London (as well as my home) as I'm spending so much time in London, and became fed up of staying in hotels. A number of letting agents were contacted with a brief and a number of viewings arranged. However, the story below is related to a letting agent who was actually contacted by a previous customer and was referred to. This agent said that he was shortly having a flat become available which fitted almost exactly my requirements, where as all the others involved some compromise somewhere.

So, ideal flat, right price, and a referral agent to handle to process, great! However, the journey to obtaining my dream flat has been far from smooth. The agent has failed to understand me as a customer and instead of making it easy to business with him, he's made it extremely difficult. He has been hugely disruptive with his broken promises, which have impacted on my travel/accommodation arrangements. It has also made it extremely difficult to plan my move.

Now, if they had got their act together I could have moved in weeks ago and they would have gained an extra month's rent, but instead the property has sat empty. Surely with such market pressures, agents should be very focused on the customers and the service they deliver, shouldn't they?

This experience provides us with a timely reminder of the following golden rules:

1.  Understand the process and its impact on the customer experience

What they failed to do was to explain everything that needed to happen in order for me to move in. Instead, I had no explanation of requirements like references, inventory company visits. They failed to manage my expectation of the entire process, and, guess what, there were some surprises and yes, things became urgent, incurred extra time, effort and cost purely because the 'process' wasn't explained. Most importantly, don't assume the customer knows what needs to happen - for me this was my first rental so I had no idea.

2.  Don't sell the customer one thing and then deliver something else

Be honest. If you don't know, find out. Don't bluff as the customer is likely to find out and then start to question. Then trust and confidence will drop.

3.  Understand your customer and adapt your sales/service to match

I was an easy sale for the agent, yet they made life extremely difficult - their cost of sale could have been extremely low in this instance, mainly a paperwork transaction and yet they made it out to be a big deal. Don't over complicate things for your customers - if they would like x and are sure about what they want (exception is for where regulatory requirements stipulate you must do otherwise, eg purchasing financial products), make it as easy as possible for them to do business with you. Don't distract them if they are insistent, the customer will just feel that you are trying to cross sell/upsell something else - ultimately the customer is making a decision to buy.

4.  Don't rely on the product alone

If the customer really wants the product and it's unique to your business, how far can you rely on just the product? A product can be copied/adapted by one of your competitors and they could deliver it with exceptional customer service. Once they've done that, it's highly likely that customers will switch, because they have the choice.

It's an interesting dilemma for customers - emotional versus rational (buying) decision making. The challenge for them is when you are emotionally (and perhaps rationally) attached to the product, but the service is poor, how far do you take it before you sacrifice yourself to not having the product you really want.

If you do have an exclusive product that the customer wants, yet your service is not good - whilst you may achieve the sales for that one product, you are not building a long standing customer relationship. They are unlikely to be loyal and if you have a range of products, they are unlikely to buy other products when they could obtain those products elsewhere. And, perhaps most importantly, they will not advocate you to others.

When considering the customer experience in relation to an emphasis on product vs service, think about whether it is really sustainable to operate in a way where the only reason a customer buys is because they really want that product? And in the current climate of delivering service cost effectively, why incur extra cost whilst providing a poor customer experience?