How Retailers Can Effectively Annoy Their Customers

If it was your goal to annoy your customers, supplying them with a poorly written user manual would be an effective way to go.

Too often, “reading manuals appears to cause annoyance and negative emotions.” This is among the findings of a survey conducted by the School of Design at Queensland University, published by Oxford University Press.

A majority of the manual readers in the survey were “frustrated” by them, found the manuals “unhelpful” and even felt “defeated” when reading them.

This is clearly not how you want to make your customers feel once they decided to buy your product.

Signalling quality

The best way to avoid this:

Give your customers a really good manual. Doing so means giving them confirmation that they made the right decision when they bought your product.

“A good manual signals overall product quality”, says Michael Keppe, CEO at Impala Services. “It reassures the customer: You did the right thing. You can go ahead and do this again.”

Getting this wrong can be devastating for the way customers perceive the quality of the product they just bought.

Bad impression

Here are some of the most common ways in which a manual that didn’t receive enough attention can spoil the good impression that a product would otherwise make:

• There is not enough information
• There is too much information
• Readers have a hard time finding the information they need
• The design looks unprofessional
• The manual is not sufficiently thought through, it looks like an afterthought

The result: The whole thing comes across as cheap and confusing.

Don’t become your customers’ enemy

This makes customers likely to perceive the manual and by extension the product and the manufacturer as enemies who bring frustration and annoyance into their homes.

That’s no way to talk with a customer. And it is easy to avoid.

The solution

Have an experienced specialist produce excellent manuals for you. That’s what we do at Impala Services.

We have more than 20 years of experience in this industry. Some of the best global businesses are among our clients. Get in touch to find out more.