Interactions that put the onus on the customer, soaking up their time and energy, are quickly put off or replaced with those that are less demanding. Few things generate more goodwill and repeat business than being effortless to deal with. In this chapter we will cover the most useful, practical ways that you can improve the customer experience by reducing the burden of effort put on the customer at each step of the journey.
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY
Whatever the stock market does, whatever style may be fashionable, there is one trend that will not change: we will always seek to do more with less effort. Even those who want to test their endurance to the limit demand equipment that is lighter or faster to get them across the finish line first.
Technology exists to make our lives easier. If you are not constantly striving to reduce the effort required by your customer, you are easy pickings for a competitor. Even if no direct competitor sets up shop, technological developments will run you out of business. My local bike shop recently closed down, and when I asked the owner what happened he told me, ‘The Internet happened.’ Well it didn’t happen yesterday, that’s for sure. What really happened was that he chose not to respond to the advances in technology, and he chose to keep his business in a wholly inconvenient location. More people are cycling than ever, and by contrast the shop in the next town is doing well.
Let’s start by considering three basic things that you can focus on to reduce the effort required from the customer:
- Time on task – by reducing the amount of time a customer spends on a task, all other things being equal, you reduce the amount of effort involved.
- Convenience – great products and services fit seamlessly into the customer’s life: convenience is king.
- Simplicity – everybody benefits from simplicity: novices, expert users, and the company behind the offering. The more straightforward a product or service is to use, the less physical and mental effort is required.
These serve as excellent high-level rules of thumb to refer back to. The following general guidelines are all combinations of these three principles and, while by no means exhaustive, should provide a good starting point for reducing the effort required on the part of the customer.
- Less, but better
- Prioritise
- Limit choices to a manageable number
- Reduce time on task
- Reduce wait times
- Reduce the possibility for error
- Use convenient channels
- Be in the right place, at the right time
- Speak the customer’s language
Less, but better
Dieter Rams, whose minimalist designs for Braun are a clear influence on Apple, wrote that ‘Good design is as little design as possible.’1 He even called his book about design at Braun Less, But Better.2 The simpler something is, the less effort is required. The most fundamental way to do this is what John Maeda, author of The Laws of Simplicity, calls ‘thoughtful reduction’.3 There are three things in particular that we should strive to reduce.
1 FEATURES
In Chapter 5 we explored how continually adding features to a product can have a detrimental effect. The more features there are the more expensive it gets to add new ones, the more it costs to maintain, and usually the slower the performance. At the same time it becomes more difficult to use. Also, the longer your feature list at the start of the project, the more expensive and time consuming it will be to bring it to market. Ask yourself ‘What are the non-essential features? Can we remove them?’ Remember, if they really are great features you can add them in later.
Less but better – WriteRoom
I am writing this book on a word processor called WriteRoom. It has almost no features, just a green cursor on a full black screen. With no intrusive navigation, menus or options I can better concentrate on what’s important to me: turning my thinking into words.
2 TASKS
If the consumer has a clear goal in mind, it can be helpful to frame each action required as a barrier to completion. Using the set of stages and steps you have identified, start looking for ways in which the list can be pruned. Ask yourself ‘Are there opportunities to do the task on behalf of the customer? Can we de-duplicate any data entry tasks? Can tasks be combined? Could a step be automated so the customer doesn’t need to do it?’
Reducing switching penalties – First Direct
If you set up a new current account with the bank First Direct, their ‘EasySwitch’ team takes care of the tiresome admin for you, moving over direct debits and standing orders and setting up the text message banking for you.
Effortless set up – Vodafone Red Box
A major frustration with setting up a new phone is copying over your contacts. Vodafone now offer a service that does this for you in their stores.
Task consolidation – Joseph Joseph
Kitchen and cookware brand Joseph Joseph make a range of wonderfully innovative products that help reduce effort by supporting multiple tasks, like the ‘Chop2Pot’ hinged chopping boards that form a chute when you squeeze the handle so you can guide the food straight into a container or pan, and the ‘Rinse&Chop’ which combines a chopping board and strainer. Joseph Joseph have become one of the fastest growing companies in their market. Opportunities to reduce effort are everywhere!
3 WORDS
Consider this extract from The Elements of Style: ‘Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.’4 This is easier said than done, but worth the effort. Where instructions are necessary, make them clear and concise. Where a customer requires information, get them to the facts. When faced with the task of writing something, ask yourself ‘How can I communicate this clearly and concisely?’
Omit needless words – rework
This business book shrunk from 52,000 to 27,000 words during editing. It gets the reader straight to the good stuff, and because it is so short it is more likely to be read in its entirety. The result: a best-seller in both the UK and USA.
Prioritise
Even after pruning the features and tasks, it is likely that there will be a lot left. This is fine. You can still make a feature-rich experience effortless by prioritising. In almost every product or service there is a core set of tasks that everybody uses. By making these as effortless to use as possible, everybody benefits. You can work your way through the list to the more advanced features over time. In The Simplicity Shift, Scott Jenson provides a simple technique to prioritise a task or feature list:5 using the consolidated list of steps that you have created, or a feature list if you have one, rank the items on the list in the following two ways, from the perspective of your customer profiles.
- How frequently the task will be done/feature will be used – rarely (1), moderately (2), frequently (3).
- How important it is to the product or service – low (1), useful (2), critical (3).
Once you’ve got this, use the following process to prioritise your tasks:
- Force an even distribution – if there are 12 features for example, only allow four in each category.
- Add together the rankings – e.g. if a feature or task is frequent (3) and critical (3) it gets 6.
- Order the features or tasks by their total score – this is your prioritised list.
- Get to work on the top third of the list.6
This is a very worthwhile exercise since it will force you to focus on what is most important in your product or service. We rarely get the time or budget to do everything we’d like, but this is no bad thing. Constraints can force us to come up with much better solutions. As the great designer Charles Eames once said, ‘I have never been forced to accept compromises, but I have willingly accepted constraints.’7 Try to look at these constraints in a positive rather than negative way, as challenges to be overcome rather than barriers to success. They are an inevitable part of life.
Limit choices to a manageable number
In the early 2000s few brands made a compelling argument for simplicity like Nokia. My friends and I all had Nokia phones and we loved that you could pick up any model and be able to use it straight away. Scott Jenson’s book The Simplicity Shift even used them as a case study for how simplicity can drive success in the marketplace.8
Nowadays Nokia are more likely to be a case study of what not to do. At the time of writing their website offers 25 models, and if I narrow it down to just touch-screen smart-phones there are still 14 to choose from.9 The Lumia 710, 800 or 900; the 808, the E7-00, E6-00 … I give up. There is no immediately visible difference between them and the naming is totally arbitrary. The onus is on me to research them. Who can be bothered?
The more choice there is, the greater the effort required to decide on a course of action. This applies to everything from choosing which product to buy in the first place, right down to choosing options from a settings menu on the phone we do end up with. Assuming that we have already reduced the product and service as well as we can, and have prioritised what remains, there are four further techniques we can use to reduce the burden of choice.
1 PROGRESSIVE DISCLOSURE
This technique involves separating information out into different layers then showing only what is relevant at that time.10 A common example is menu systems on websites or computers, where rather than showing every option at once, you choose from one list, then another – the options are revealed progressively to keep the volume manageable. This technique can dramatically reduce the burden of choice, the likelihood of error and improve learning efficiency.
2 THE FIVE HAT RACKS
This model, like progressive disclosure, is a wonderful nugget from the book Universal Principles of Design which I highly recommend. The five hat racks refers to five ways in which information can be organised: category,time, location, alphabet, and continuum. We could order a list of books for sale by category, such as business books or fiction books; by time, such as date of release; by location – of publisher, author or subject matter; alphabetically, by author name or title; or along another continuum – highest-rated or best-selling for example.11 Where there are multiple options, organising them in a way that makes sense to the customer will make choosing easier. Ask yourself ‘How should this information be organised?’
3 THE ONE RIGHT WAY
Flexibility is the enemy of simplicity. To create a great customer experience we must balance the customer’s need for control and freedom of choice with the need for simplicity. There may be a variety of ways to perform a given task, and the temptation may be to cater for all of them – in a store, on the website, over the phone, with an app. You may end up creating unnecessary work for yourself. If you design a web-based solution that is good enough, you may find that the staff in the store and call centre can use it too. It may even work well enough on a phone-sized screen that you needn’t ship the feature as part of an app. You may find that 98 per cent of customers use the same method. Don’t let the tail wag the dog by expending unnecessary resources on a tiny minority. Ask yourself ‘Is there one right way of doing this task?’
4 OMAKASE
This Japanese phrase, often used in sushi restaurants, means ‘I’ll leave it to you’.12 The customer delegates decision making to the chef, taking away the burden of choice entirely. I often wish I had to make fewer decisions in life, and have never struggled with delegating tasks where it will free up my time. As a keen photographer I often get pictures framed to put up in the house, and have used one local framer exclusively for years. He has visited me to drop off pictures and knows the decor of the house well. For the last year or two, whenever I drop off anything new I leave it up to him to decide what will best complement the picture and the environment in which it will be hung. I could spend endless hours fussing over different finishes, mounting styles and fixings. Why not leave it to the expert? I for one wish there were more opportunities for Omakase. Ask yourself ‘Should we offer to decide for the customer?’
Omakase – iPod shuffle
For anyone with a large music collection, deciding what to listen to can be a challenge, so we often tend to end up listening to the same things over and over. The shuffle function on the iPod makes it easy by playing random tracks from your library. It’s a great way to rediscover forgotten favourites, and if you aren’t in the mood you just press next.
Reduce time on task
Even after giving our task list a thorough pruning, doing what we can to consolidate, automate and otherwise reduce the burden on the customer, we will likely still be left with a lot of tasks. Using your prioritised list, starting with the most frequently used and critical tasks first, find ways to make these tasks as simple and efficient as possible. Often all it takes to come up with ideas is to think actively about them in the first place. Ask yourself ‘What would make this task quicker and easier for the customer?’
Streamlining repetitive tasks – Ringo Mobile Parking
This mobile parking system is well designed. It remembers the vehicle registrations for multiple vehicles, the locations you parked at recently and your bank details. To pay for parking at my local railway station I use the keypad to enter the number of days I wish to park for, then confirm payment using just the three digits from the back of the debit card.
Reduce wait times
Nobody likes to be kept waiting. It feels like a waste of time, and can be extremely frustrating. When mapping out the stages and steps of the customer experience I suggested noting down wait times as their own steps. Now it’s time to see how we can reduce the impact of these flat spots on the customer experience using four techniques.
1 ROOT CAUSE ANALYSIS
Nobody designs an experience to keep people waiting around. It’s a symptom of some other issue: slow servers, increased demand for the service, not enough staff, poor process design. Whenever wait times crop up, ask yourself ‘Why does the customer have to wait? What is the root cause? How can it be reduced or removed entirely?’
Reduced wait times – Kwik Fit Car Insurance
Car insurance company Kwik Fit has a free callback service that will hold your place in the queue. The service is activated when you call them, so they already have your phone number; all you do is say your name and confirm the number was correct, then hang up and get on with something else.
2 RE-SEQUENCING
We are often able to eliminate wait times by doing tasks in a different order such that the dead time is used up on another activity. Ask yourself ‘How can we re-sequence tasks to eliminate dead time?’
3 INFORMING
If customers must be kept waiting, it helps to keep them informed of progress. (The importance of this kind of feedback is discussed more thoroughly in the next chapter.) Ask yourself ‘How can we keep the customer informed about how long they will be waiting?’
4 ALLEVIATING THE BOREDOM
Waiting around is boring. If you know that the customer is likely to be waiting around, try to make that wait as pleasant as possible.
A fun distraction
One coffee shop I saw in New Zealand had a lemon floating in a tub of water on the counter where you waited for your drink. If you could get a dollar coin to balance on the lemon without it rolling into the water you got your drink for free. Opportunities are everywhere!
Reduce the possibility for error
Errors create re-work, which increases the effort involved to complete a given task. Minimise errors by preventing them where possible. If it is not possible to prevent an error from occurring, put in place means to detect the error promptly and help the customer recover from the error as quickly and easily as possible. The topic of errors is covered in far more detail in the next chapter.
Use convenient channels
The excitement around multi-channel customer experiences is caused by their potential to increase customer satisfaction through convenience. Click and collect and online check-in are both good examples. The question you should ask yourself is ‘Which channel or touchpoint is most convenient for the customer to perform this task?’ Remember, multi-channel isn’t the same as omni-channel. The key is to identify which channel or touchpoint is most appropriate.
Channel appropriateness – NHS Direct
NHS Direct is an excellent free service available in the UK where you can call to speak to a nurse if you are feeling unwell, who can advise you as to how serious the symptoms are, and a suitable course of action. This reduces the burden of unnecessary appointments at doctors’ surgeries, while being more convenient for citizens who may otherwise have to make an appointment and visit the doctor only to be told they need some rest. At the other end of the scale, if you really are unwell they can call an ambulance for you.
Be in the right place at the right time
Somebody once told me a well-designed product or service was like a good waiter: attentive, polite, but unobtrusive when not needed. To do this, a waiter must be in the right place at the right time to provide the service you require. The joy of online shopping is that it is always open. The same is often not true of shops or call centres. Ask yourself ‘Are we available to serve customers at times that suit them?’ If you have a physical presence, ask yourself ‘Are we conveniently located for our customers?’
Speak the customer’s language
Half of the problem in the example from Nokia earlier in this chapter is the naming of the products: they are neither memorable, nor do they reveal any useful information about the product. This is part of a broader problem in business. Time after time I find myself repelled by unfamiliar acronyms, technical jargon and marketing nonsense. There is no quicker way to alienate and infuriate your customer. Ask yourself ‘Are we speaking the language of the customer?’
Getting it right – Amazon
No discussion of effortless customer experiences would be complete without a mention of the online retailer Amazon, whose attention to detail and systematic reduction of effort has been a significant contributor to their success. Their patented one-click shopping system, as the name suggests, allows the customer to buy a product using just one click of the mouse. Wishlists, customer reviews and recommendations all make deciding what to buy easier. They have extended this approach to their e-book reader, the Kindle. Their website boasts that you can be reading a book within 60 seconds of ordering it, and that the battery lasts for up to a month12 – great examples of reducing wait times, channel convenience, and eliminating repetition in action.
The 3G service to download contents to a Kindle e-book reader comes fully set up with no bills or commitments, eliminating yet more tiresome tasks. It is no surprise that when we think of online shopping most of us think first of Amazon. They have even made returning goods as simple as possible, something that is often problematic for online retailers.
Summary
- We always want to do more with less effort.
- Technology exists to make our lives easier.
- To reduce effort, consider three parameters: time on task, convenience, and simplicity.
- Reduce features and tasks, and omit unnecessary words. Remember: less, but better.
- Prioritise tasks and features so that the most frequently used and important ones can be made as effortless as possible.
- Reduce the effort required when making decisions by limiting choices to a manageable number.
- Streamlining tasks means less effort is needed to reach the customer’s goal.
- Reduce wait times where possible.
- Errors create re-work. Eliminate them where possible.
- Use convenient channels.
- Convenience is serving the customer in the right place at the right time.
- Speak the customer’s language. Less but better – WriteRoom