Customers value organisations that make things simple for them. Yet many businesses struggle to understand which benefits and features people appreciate. Identifying what customers truly value helps organisations develop exactly the experiences that make customers come back for more.
Simplicity can be impressive
Simple experiences make customers happy. Do you want people to talk about your organisation? Provide your customers with an “amazingly simple” experience! Customers are even likely to pay more for the benefit of a simple experience – and avoid the hassle of dealing with the competition.
Simplicity empowers customers
People feel first and think later. When customers experience that they are getting things done intuitively, they feel at ease and increasingly self-confident. As a result, their confidence in the organisation providing the experience improves. Products and services that require only a minimum effort from customers to understand, will outcompete more complex ones – as long as the core benefits are clear.
Understand what customers really value and provide simple experiences
Remove complexity, add simplicity
Remove complexity from the customer experience, and it lowers the barrier for new customers to get on board. Add simplicity to the customer experience, and customers are more likely to reward you with loyalty.
Simplify customer experiences to simplify business processes
Often businesses struggle to co-ordinate data and processes inside the organisation. This usually results in a complex experience for customers. Interestingly, organisations that design simpler customer experiences are more able to simplify their business processes too.
Making it simple to pay for every train journey. (Berlin)
Simple isn’t easy
The trick is to get to a common understanding of what customers value – across the organisation. Embracing one shared idea of the customer experience helps to eliminate internal processes and activities – that often add complexity for the customer. In the end, both customers and the business benefit from simplification.
Remove complexity, add simplicity, empower your customers
A real-life example
One of our clients was told by their customers that their paperwork was too difficult to understand. It weakened confidence in the company. The organisation invested two years in simplifying their contracts and letters to customers. An extraordinary effort was put into making their legal documents more understandable. On top of that, the size of documents was reduced by up to 75%. These simplifications had a significant impact on the level of trust the company was awarded by customers.
Simplify to help customers do more
Simplified experiences help customers feeling in control and competent. This usually results in increased confidence in the organisation, their products and their services. Simplicity also provides the assurance needed to self-serve and it often reduces the pressure on the organisation.
