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Meet Your
Customers More than Halfway:
Anticipate Their Circumstances of Use (Part 2)
by Adele Sommers
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.
Copyright 2006 Adele Sommers
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You're
probably wondering why I'd make note of this, since
many places have plenty of snow in winter. It's not
often a newsworthy event, unless there's too much
or too little of it. 
