Lots of comments seem to miss the point of this article. The point being made is to put the concerns of the customer first before yours. I see the opposite happen all the time in software development. You have two systems that somehow don't talk to each other. Instead of implementing some kind of connector between them, you make the customer log in twice and transfer information between the two systems. In this case, the maker has prioritized their convenience over that of the user. This is the wrong approach. Before someone gets pedantic, obviously, if you have analyzed the costs and decided it makes sense, then go ahead and do you but don't just make default decisions to benefit yourself at the cost to your customer
A month ago my wife and I passed a business while on vacation to a location we frequent. She remarked "oh it looks like they closed down, that's too bad" Upon closer inspection there were in fact open, the two employees present had parked in the back, leaving a completely empty front parking lot.<p>The parking location is not all to blame, but at the time I remarked "the employees should really park out front to help it appears as though there are customers".<p>Obviously if your lot is frequently full this isn't an issue. This was in a rural location where most likely that never happens as it was a large lot, and not a business that would see surges of customers.
The last example is the best - that making your service hard to cancel means your customer's enduring memory is of pain. And it validates the customer's decision to leave, because there must be other better options if you are so desperate to stop them going.<p>When a customer phones up to cancel, we do it immediately and make sure they know there are no hard feelings on our side. We ask if there was anything we could have done better, and tell them we'll still be here if they ever need us again. We get a significant number of customers return.
I think this can be a two way street. I don't own a retail business, but I feel like, as a general rule, clients who complain about things like parking tend to not be the best clients.<p>I think it's totally valid in the sandwich shop example, where people will literally choose something else based on what they have to walk past to get to your door.<p>But for a professional service where you have an ongoing relationship worth potentially thousands of dollars per year, if someone is put off by a lack of front row parking, what other utterly trivial things are they going to find fault with? Those tend to be the clients that ask for the world and get it at a bargain and then still complain about the bill.<p>It's not that I'm not happy to go the extra mile for good clients, but there are definitely good clients and not good clients and creating a rule that you should always delight everyone all the time means you're going to waste a lot of time trying to delight people who complain about having to walk across the parking lot...
It's a bit amusing that if you look at the picture of the parking lot showing where the author's dad worked and where he parked, his parking spot is not way off away from everything else, it's actually in what would be prime parking location for some other businesses' customers. I feel like there's a lesson about externalities there.
As a small business owner, I saved hundreds per month by not driving to work at all. I biked or walked. To enable this, I intentionally purchased a home within walking or biking distance from the office and located the business is a town with a low enough cost of business to allow that.
Old quote, can't rememeber where I first heard it:<p>"At universities, the employees get better parking than the customers".<p>Although it wasn't true at my alma mater, where the only difference was that for staff and faculty the university would deduct the parking fees from your paycheck. For your convenience.
The credit card/tab point is a really good one, IMO. There's something really offensive, as a customer, about walking into a business and being immediately subject to the assumption that I'm there to rip them off. Why would I want to patronize your business if you want to treat me like a criminal?<p>A particularly infuriating example of this is bookstores that demand you turn in your bag at the desk. I just walk out.
In reference to making it hard to quit a service... "In reality, it is a great way to ensure a customer never comes back and likely does not recommend the company to others. This approach is trading short term greed for long term growth. A leader obsessed with customer experience would make sure canceling their service is painless as it will likely lead to revenue in other ways -- counterintuitive right?"<p>I want to believe. But seeing how painful it is to leave Facebook + iCloud, I find this hard to believe. It feels idealistic, but I wonder if the data says otherwise. People are lazy. It's unethical. But people are lazy.
"Morning dropoff is stressful, to say the least, <i>we are always late</i>, my kids never cooperate,..."<p>I know this is just a throwaway comment in the article but my god does it bug me when parents use their children as an excuse for being late. Yes, kids are sometimes tough to get out the door but it's <i>your</i> fault that this somehow catches you by surprise every morning.
The overall point is excellent and typically misunderstood by companies large and small (think about what your customer wants, not what you want), but there's another reason to park in front when you're starting out: to make the business not look empty!<p>That is, early adopters may like to try out a new business, but a business with no customers, no cars etc can lead people to think it's unsuccessful/undesirable.<p>This is why early stage customers like to put the logos of customers on their home page.
I’m surprised this doesn’t go without saying. As a divemaster intern I never dared even park in the lot during school days. I found a spot on the street. In college I was a paintball ref. There were separate lots for employees that was farther away from customer lots.
There's always an exception. While running a brick and mortar business for 3 years, I found that when parked around the corners (out of a courtesy to my customers) I looked either out of business, closed, or dead.<p>Our business ran on weekends. Everyone else in our complex was closed on the weekends.<p>We started parking our cars up front because people were FAR more likely to come inside if it looked like other people were there.<p>Otherwise, we noticed that they would sometimes drive by slowly, try to peer in our windows, then drive off.<p>So, parking up-front for us was just marketing.<p>But I get it. Give the best spots to your customers if possible. The customer experience must be optimal. They aren't always right, but it can still feel good.
> Customer Experience is All About the Little Things<p>Big things are expected and are exactly what you pay for. Neglect them and you'll lose all your business, because you're offering nothing.<p>But when costumers are comparing two companies (or small business, whatever), it's the small details that will make difference.
This reminds me of Jiro Ono and Jiro Dreams of Sushi [1]. He would notice, for instance, that his customers are left handed and adjust the way they then would get served.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiro_Dreams_of_Sushi" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiro_Dreams_of_Sushi</a>
Here in the United States, there are two major, competing home building supply stores: Home Depot and Lowes. At Home Depot, all the doors will open up when I walk up, whether they mean for them to be entrances or exits. At Lowes, only the one labelled "Entrance". I think that sums up the two companies' priorities.
>In reality, it is a great way to ensure a customer never comes back and likely does not recommend the company to others.<p>I've make significant lifestyle changes just because companies pissed me off enough to create a personal grudge. For example, I was an Xbox fanboy starting around 2005. Several years later I got a girlfriend and bought her an Xbox Live Gold subscription so she could play with me. It turned out not to be her thing, so I tried to cancel the service, except Microsoft made it an absolute nightmare. Reps bounced me from person to person, and several times I received a monthly bill despite the rep assuring me the account had been canceled. It filled me with such rage I canceled my own Live subscription, sold my Xbox 360, and swore off console gaming entirely. I'll be in the cold, cold ground before I give Microsoft another damn cent.
I have recently become a customer of Bulb for my energy. They won me because when I tried to sign up and this failed, they followed up with an email explaining that my existing supplier had a weird set up for my smart meter which made it impossible to take over automatically and how to get them to fix it, which appeared to have been written by a real human.<p>In most companies, that'd just be an error in a log file somewhere. They then followed up later to ask if things had been handled well. They also have one single, good value tariff with no option not to have green energy.<p>Principled, with A++ customer service and a competent mobile app, complete with a time line for switching and starting my account with them. I'm totally sold. They could be quite a lot more expensive than my existing supplier and I frankly wouldn't care given the whole experience so far.
If you advocate for the club-line effect to draw in customers so it seems popular. You’re probably the kind of person who falls for that sort of thing.
It's a great metaphor but reality seems to be that there are a lot of good practices followed by so many people that it is impossible to keep track of. A <i>via negativa</i> approach to this might be easier. Does someone know of a compendium of bad business practices ? Life would be a lot better if we can first avoid the bad practices , no? :-)
The overarching concept is to be conscious of when you inconvenience other people (like customers), and avoid it at much cost (but not any, of course).<p>This seems to be the cornerstone of Western etiquette. It can be different in Asia, where it may be more important to "save face" and let others also save face.
> It would be one thing if the bar was making the customer’s life easier so when they were done they could simply walk out effortlessly paying the bill but that is not the typical case.<p>It is the case in Germany.
When starting to read the article, I thought it would be either about meeting potential customers in the parkinh lot or spending that time to walk with your kid..
Sure, this would be nice - and yet, he's still sending his kid to the school. And the school is still running. It seems to make no difference in this case.<p>So, what are the reasons to actually focus on customer experience? When does it pay off? (Not as often as you'd like. Amazon is a prime - pardon the pun - example that once you have enough of the market, you can let customer experience go downhill, because people value convenience over experience)