A Lesson on Ease of Doing Business

One afternoon at a shopping mall during the busy Christmas season, a consultant ventured into an athletic shoe store to buy some new running shoes.?

This consultant was a specialist in retail, he consulted both for retailers trying to improve their operations, as well as for manufacturers trying to sell their wares to retailers and retail chains. So, whenever he went out on his own to buy anything he was always an observant shopper.

On that day the shoe store seemed to be especially busy so he took a place in the queue behind two other folks being helped by one of the sales reps.

As he waited, he saw that the salesman offered the same off-brand (lesser known brand) shoe to each of the customers – customers who looked like they would have been willing to pay full price for a better brand name.

The first customer, he said, had been interested in a pair of Nike basketball shoes, but the salesman first brought out this off-brand, at about half the price of the?Nike, and the customer ended up buying them.

The same sales process, with the same result, ensued with the next customer, a woman who originally said she was interested in the Reebok cross-trainers. But the salesman again talked the customer into trying out the cross-trainers from this off-brand first, and she bought them.

After watching two sales snatched from the jaws of well-known national brands, the consultant’s curiosity was aroused. So when it was his turn to buy, he first asked the salesman why he had switched the two previous customers to this particular off-brand – a brand he’d never even heard of.

After all, the consultant said, these customers seemed to have been willing to pay higher prices for the well-known brands.

?Oh, the salesman replied, it had nothing to do with margin or pricing, nothing at all. But he seemed a bit nervous at having been found out, and the consultant persisted.

Was this off-brand paying some kind of bonus commission, then? Or was there some kind of contest or promotion going on? No, the salesman said. No, that?wasn’t?it.

Then the clerk gestured toward all the people crowded into the store on this very busy afternoon.

Look around, he said. See how busy it is in here? I don’t even have time to slip away for a coffee or a bathroom break on a day like this, that’s how crowded it is!.

But this particular off-brand? Whenever they ship their shoes to the store, the laces are already in them, so it saves the clerk a lot of time, not to have to lace up one of the other brands”

The story illustrates the importance of making it easy for your customers to patronize your business.

In this case, the Shoe store is the customer of the ‘off-brand’ shoe manufacturer, and by taking the extra time to lace their shoes before distributing them to stores, they made it easier for salesmen in the Shoe store to sell their product – The sales reps are happy, their customers are happy and the shoe manufacturer is happy!

In my experience analyzing customer feedback across Banking & Health insurance, lower effort always yields higher customer satisfaction

#Ease of doing business is an important driver of customer loyalty, when you make it easy for customers to use your products or services, you have an edge over the competition.