Meet Your Customers More than Halfway: Anticipate Their Circumstances of Use
(Part 2)
by Adele Sommers, Ph.D.

Gaining an understanding of how your customers might want — or need — to use your products and services can guide you in creating offerings that help people succeed in many situations and circumstances.

In Part 1 of this series, we first considered the normal or routine conditions under which people might want to engage with what we offer.

This article, Part 2, addresses an often-overlooked arena — how people might try to use products or services in unusual or even extreme circumstances.

Anticipating these possibilities in advance can mean all the difference between customer success and failure, especially if what you offer is a complex or mission-critical product or service.

Routine Circumstances Revisited

Using the ideas presented in Part 1 of this series, you may have identified some new ways to design your offerings to accommodate the routine conditions under which people might want to use them, such as:

• At home or in one’s personal life (e.g., sitting at a computer or entertainment center, while doing chores, during quiet time, or relaxing with family or friends)

• In the office or in one’s professional life (e.g., sitting at a computer, meeting informally with others, giving a presentation, or planning a training program)

• At school or in a similar learning situation (e.g., sitting in a computer lab, participating in a training session, or completing assignments)

• Traveling (e.g., by foot, in a car, or on a train, subway, bus, plane, or van)

• Exercising (e.g., when walking the dog or bicycling, jogging, or using various types of exercise equipment)

How Do You Anticipate Your Customers’ Non-Routine Circumstances of Use?

Since you have some ideas about routine circumstances, next ask or ponder what could happen if people tried to use your offerings in those same situations, but in various risky or incomplete states, or in stressful or isolated conditions.

For example, consider whether your offerings will work in a “bulletproof” mode in bad weather, during off-hours, or in remote locations.

In sub-optimal conditions, how would your products react? Would they either halt their actions harmlessly, without doing damage, or would they complete their actions and function flawlessly? Either result is superior to simply limping along.

Here’s an example. Imagine that Acme Fabrication needs to install new enterprise-wide production software and has only one weekend in which to do it during its busy year-end season. Because of the impact on daytime production schedules, companies like Acme often must install this type of mission-critical software during off-hours.

However, the vendor for this particular software system provides no technical support after hours, claiming that the procedure for installing their product is simple and mistake-proof. Thus, Acme’s controller, Rebecca M., will attempt to complete it without help, starting at 5:00 p.m. Friday.

By Sunday evening, Rebecca runs into major snags, and the system documentation offers no help for her dilemma. Working alone late at night with incomplete information and under great pressure to complete the job, she is left with a gut-wrenching decision: whether to 1) give up and reload Friday night’s backup, 2) wait until Monday morning to contact technical support in hopes of salvaging the current setup procedure, or 3) forge ahead until early Monday morning, hoping that through pure experimentation, she will figure out and resolve the problems before the production staff arrives.

She chooses the third option. Rebecca finishes installing the software and because the system doesn’t supply any warnings to the contrary, the company begins to use it. No one realizes until two months later, however, that the system has been corrupted, dating all the way back to that first weekend.

Acme must then shut down production operations and embark on an expensive and time-consuming resolution. Rebecca is furious with the vendor for failing to adequately test the software setup process, make fault conditions more obvious, and otherwise provide needed levels of support for off-hours activities.

From this example, it’s easy to see that leaving gaps in the handling of unusual customer situations can sour an otherwise promising relationship, if and when such weaknesses become apparent. These situations fall short of outlandish scenarios, such as when customers subject products to deliberate acts of destruction or use them for things for which they clearly were not intended.

But a prudent analysis of what could happen in anything other than perfectly sunny, 8-to-5 conditions can reveal where you may need to bolster your product’s functionality, your service levels, or both.

In conclusion, consider that your customers’ usual and unusual circumstances are flip sides of the same coin. When you acknowledge both, you help ensure customer success with your offerings in a variety of modes. Meeting your customers more than halfway can reap long-term benefits in the areas of retention, repeat business, and profitability.

To download the related checklist, click here.

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About the Author

Adele Sommers, Ph.D. is author of “Straight Talk on Boosting Business Performance: 12 Ways to Profit from Hidden Potential.” To learn more about her book and sign up for more free tips like these, visit her site at www.LearnShareProsper.com

This article may be distributed freely on your Web site, as long as this entire article, including the links and full “About the Author” section, are unchanged. Please send a copy of, or link to, your “reprint” to Adele@LearnShareProsper.com.

Copyright 2006 Adele Sommers, The Enterprise Prosperity Guild, All Rights Reserved.

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