Lately I have been wondering why I get annoyed by services offered by companies. Why does my telecom provider send me two birthday messages (one for my mobile subscription and one for my home subscription), why do I have to remember what the last maintenance guy did just to make my problem be solved quicker, why do I get a message when something is done correctly, instead of when something went wrong? And it’s not just these organizations, I see people within companies all react in the same way (or most at least).

It all boils down to one thing: we have been taught to think from the inside out: “MY processes / information work this way”, later followed by “the customer has some needs too, let’s give them some insight”. In my opinion, a simple patch to keep working the way we did.

From my view, the next logical step we should all practice doing is to do a 180 on our viewpoint. Let’s make the consumer of whatever we offer central, and design our process around this. You can practice this when writing a report, set up that new system or talk to a friend. As a company, talk to your customers and design your process around their needs. Don’t just patch, redo if that works better. Remember they are your raison d’etre, treat them that way. Any obligations you have to third parties you can treat as non-functional requirements but that’s it.
As a rule of thumb: you should be able to remove at least 50% of your buttons, questions, steps and complexity. Be creative in ways to support your customer.

I hereby post a call to action: anyone reading this go out and talk to your customers. Identify sub-optimal steps in your process and support them. Add a “User Voice” button to your website and read it. Better yet, appoint a role to someone with the specific intent to listen to the user voices and give them mandate to change. And of course, share this post among others, spread the word!

The worst thing that can happen is that your customers will be happy, however I predict your business and popularity will take off!