Your Customer Works Hard For Their Money — Don’t Make It Hard For Them To Spend It
It’s the holidays and many of us are thinking about sending to gifts to friends and family. I thought it would be nice to send a selection of cookies to some friends in the US.
I went online t0 Mrs Fields Cookies to place an order. However, after placing the order, providing the shipping address and credit card information, at the very last step, I discovered I was not able to place the order because the billing address for the credit card was in Canada.
I called the Mrs. Fields phone number and was told the only way around this was to set up an account. Not Interested. Total waste of my time.
So I went online to www.giftbaskets.comand placed exactly the same order for Mrs Fields Cookies without any issues with my credit card billing address being from outside the US. Within 5 minutes I had placed my order and received a confirmation email. Woo Hoo!
Now here’s the interesting part. At Gift Baskets I paid a premium of $2.00 v.s Mrs Fields on the initial purchase price. However, I received FREE ground shipping versus paying $14.95 through Mrs. Fields. Resultant my purchase was less to use a third party supplier than directly from Mrs Fields.
Mrs. Fields placed a barrier to me purchasing directly from them. This time I simply purchased the same product, so they still received a sale — but would probably need to sell it to Gift Baskets at a reduced price resulting in less profit on the sale.
More importantly, I now have been introduced to another company that offers a broader range of products — so in addition to not ever returning to Mrs. Fields, I will potentially choose different offerings from Gift Baskets in the future versus Mrs Fields cookies.
My Perspective: Are you putting barriers up that push your customers away because “that’s the way we do things”?
Mrs. Fields effectively turned me from a customer, to a dis-satisfied customer, to a non-customer in one easy step. Simply because they made it hard for me to buy from them. I was standing in line with my purchase and money in hand and they set up a barrier to purchase.
Review your processes. Are you looking at these processes from your organizational perspective — or are you looking at them through the eyes of your customer?
During some recent client research, one of the staff made the comment “All our clients work very hard to earn their money — they don’t want to work hard to spend it”.
Words worth remembering!
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Bill is recognized as the Performance Excelerator™ because of his uncanny ability to create profound change and deliver extraordinary results with the most demanding organizations.
He works with senior leaders to inspire and develop high-performance teams that deliver exceptional customer service, higher productivity and improved profits.
For additional information please visit www.billhogg.ca or email: bill [at] billhogg [dot] ca
