Mike Marois died on June 6 and it was left to my friend Marc and me to arrange his burial and funeral. We were the guys who knew him well enough to do it because his sister lived far away and couldn’t do anything to assist. While the circumstances of Mike’s extraordinary life are an entire blog unto itself, for our purposes the focus is on what we do as a company to make life easy for our customers.
Because of the sheer number of complications surrounding his demise, Mike’s body could not be remanded to a mortuary or funeral home. I soon found that funeral and service notices could not be accepted by the newspaper except from one of those sources. I only found this out after a trek through the newspaper “Hall of Hell.”
The daily news is peppered with references to newspaper’s that are dying and expiring. The news is almost funerial in its self pity. What frosted my butt was that there was no way to get customer service in a timely manner in my time of need. The newspapers that relied upon my advertising dollar to survive made it almost impossible to spend that dollar with them.
For example, the LA papers website had a link to Obituaries but that led to 70 obituaries, not to the “how to place an obituary ad” section. In fact, there is no “how to place an obituary ad” section! How stupid is that? Not only is there no link to that information but the link to the “contact” phone numbers is so buried that it took eleven minutes to find it, ‘way down at the bottom of an endlessly scrolling home page. It was as though the management said, “We don’t want to stay in business by providing customer service. We want to go out of business so we can have a pity party for our demise.”
We always get in trouble when we think like a company. We never get in trouble when we think like a customer. If the newspaper had thought like a bereaved citizen then the result would have been a different story. It would have been the story of a $972.70 sale ($9.25 per 25 character line plus $300 for the photo) instead of the everlasting ire of a “never again” customer.
Does your company make it easy for customers to be customers? Do you look at every single point of entry into your business to uncover the pitfalls and bottlenecks that inhibit a customer’s business? If not, you’d better do so in a fat hurry. Like right now. Today. Time’s short and time’s a’wastin…. Now… go eliminate a few bottlenecks in your sales path.
Happy Selling!