Customer Experience by Don Peppers

Author:Don Peppers
Language: ara
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781483563473
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2016-03-23T04:00:00+00:00

Improve the Experience by Not Giving Customers Choices

Yes, I know it sounds absurd, particularly from a one-to-one marketing “guru,” but not giving customers choices will often improve the customer experience. Let me start with a story from my own life.

A few days after our family moved into a new house, my wife took me furniture shopping. We needed a new sofa, she said, to match some of the other new stuff we had acquired for our expanded living room. As we neared the furniture super store, I saw a billboard atop it proclaiming “Thousands of Sofas to Choose From!” and my heart just sank. This was going to be just AWFUL!

As contrary as it might seem, you are not doing your customer any favor by offering thousands of choices, or even dozens. The act of choosing is an imposition. It’s friction, plain and simple, because you’re asking customers to do your work for you. Yes, the customer will want something just right, and yes, every customer may want something different. But the choosing of it is still an onerous activity.

It is a well-known principle8 in the direct marketing business that one of the surest ways to reduce the response rate in any communication with a customer is to require the customer to make a choice. Want fewer people to respond to your offer? Be sure to ask whether they prefer Option A or Option B. Want a further reduction in response? Offer Option C. Requiring a customer to make any choice at all is, by itself, an extra burden of effort. More often than not, in a direct marketing campaign this effort alone will overwhelm whatever likelihood you had of getting a response.

This doesn’t mean that choice is always wrong, but you have to approach it carefully. One wise use of customer choice is for gathering insight on a particular customer – learning the customer’s actual preferences. An automotive company I once worked with launched a loyalty program and offered new members their choice of gift for joining: a pair of racing gloves with the brand’s logo on them (it was a kind of sporty car), or a package of three children’s videos, or a collapsible umbrella and road atlas. In this case, making the choice was extremely simple, didn’t involve a decision about how much money to spend, but simply what free gift to accept. And the option chosen revealed a great deal to the auto company with respect to how to treat each different customer in future interactions.

Another wise use of choice is when it serves as a mechanism to stimulate customer thinking, or to give them ideas. Not all customers really know what they’re searching for. They may prefer to meander a bit, trying to zero in on something. But the fact that a particular customer likes to meander is itself a bit of customer insight you should also tuck away. Different customers view the shopping experience differently.

If you have a wide variety of sizes, specifications, prices,

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