Most businesses, big and small, are guilty of some level of Me Mentality. Sure, huge corporations can get convoluted in their processes and end up showing the customer with less than courtesy, but it’s really not much different for small businesses. When you provide for yourself and your family by selling something you created, it’s easy to make decisions based on a feeling of “just barely making it.” You could attempt to make things easier on yourself at work, which might be a good thing, but I think your intention is missing something.
We don’t often think about how a person will react to the way we handle a situation, or the way we do business at all. When we’re making changes to a payment process or introducing a new product, we might be thinking of the end result. What we don’t realize, though, is the customer will never see that end result if we put them off with something we did along the way. Remember, the consumer’s perspective is a bird’s eye view; they see every little piece of their experience with your brand as an indicator of what your business is like.
So if you’re an online business and your checkout page asks for a work, home, and cell phone number, that doesn’t speak to the customer-first philosophy of your business. By the same logic, if you make a conscious effort to simplify things for your customer, that will speak volumes about the kind of people involved with your organization.
Here are some key parts of your customer’s experience that you should take the time to pick apart and change if necessary to avoid the Me Mentality. Whatever you sell or whatever you provide, it should be:
1. Easy to find.
The customer relationship doesn’t start when you find them, it starts when they find you. Whether they are actively searching for a product like yours, or they don’t know they even need it, you should always be trying to put your brand in the view of that person who needs your solution. This doesn’t necessarily involve new techniques like SEO (search engine optimization), although that helps. It goes a bit deeper than that, and much more benevolent. You need to be where those people are, and appeal to their interests.
2. Easy to buy.
We’ve all encountered products that we want but are difficult to obtain or pay for. The internet has made this a common occurrence because it’s not hard to find out about a product on the internet, but it’s another thing to find where it’s sold. Most of the time, though, buying is just not a simple process, unnecessarily. The old “if they want it bad enough they’ll get it” mentality doesn’t work, because the customer is most delicate when they are closest to buying what you sell. No one likes the actual payment aspect of buying something, so make it easy on them.
3. Easy to use.
This boils down to making a good product, but it’s about more than making your customer happy. It’s about forming your customer’s perception of your brand, even after the sale. These days it’s not hard to feel like we’ve been duped after buying something, so remind us that you are fully committed to providing a solution to a genuine need by creating a product that has value beyond its price tag.
4. Easy to own.
We don’t often want to buy something that requires our time, our skill, or our money. In fact, we usually buy something to alleviate the depletion of one of those things. We also expect not to be left on our own with your product. A company that has their customer’s back is a company interested in bettering human interaction, because providing honest solutions to modern problems is an act of selflessness that builds the framework of our communities. So stand behind your solution and do whatever it takes to make sure your customer’s problems are truly solved.
Once you start thinking of your customer’s experience first, it will become easier to design your processes around the people you are helping. Your brand will begin to be recognized as an authority on the problems you solve–not because of your product alone, but because of your attitude. Start eliminating the Me Mentality and form your entire brand identity around simply solving problems.