Making Your Service Harder To Use Irritates Customers
Quite often the actions your company takes to solve one problem cause other problems for your customers. Before you change the way you deliver or provide a service, consider the total impact before you take action. Some example scenarios:
Requesting feedback that your company never uses. When you collect information about product usage or request feedback from customers, but never actually use the information to improve the service is a huge irritation. This happens too often, but why would you ask something your not going to use? Bad habits maybe?
Solution out-weights the problem for most customers. In the case of Cox High-Speed Internet's blocking of POP services, the problem they are trying to solve only involves them, but they are punishing all their users with a possible solution. By inconveniencing customers, they are more likely to switch providers.
Adding more steps to get the same results. Often when solutions providers try to tie-in related products, but is often the result of re-engineering without considering a users prospective. These extra steps increase the amount of time it takes to get a desired result, customer know other versions of the same service saved them time. Frequently customers will stay with the older product or choose a comparable product from a competitor.
Bundling unrelated accessories to make a product look more valuable. Do product developers add a few extra features with no apparent reason? Each product (or service add-on) feature must justify its existent in the customers mind. Adding features just to have them confuses buyers who could profitably benefit from what you offer.
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