Practice Management

Keeping clients: Why not compete on "Ease-of-Use"?

By Dan Hull

If the following seems like a previous post, you are right. We'll keep posting a version of it until "ease-of-use" for services as a term of art/catchphrase replaces "customer service", which seems to throw people:

What if the services sector competed for clients on the basis of "ease-of-use"? Develop and apply ease-of-use concepts for products and goods to pure services? Our clients' services? Our services? Law. Accounting. Consulting. Advertising. And anything where a service or product-service mix is part of what you pay for. In other words, pretty much everything--and the direction global markets now march, in good and bad times.

Consider for a moment just products. In 2006, The Folgers Coffee Company was awarded an Ease-of-Use Commendation by the Arthritis Foundation for its AromaSeal? Canister. If you're a Folgers® drinker, you notice that Folgers® added an easy-to-peel tin freshness seal (no need for a can-opener), a new "snap-tight" lid and even a grip on its plastic red can.

The great companies many of us represent do spend money and expertise on making their goods, equipment and products usable. Think about your car, your luggage, your TV remote (well, strike that one), your watch and even grips on household tools. Think about Apple, Dell and Microsoft. Each year they think through your experience with their products and try to make it better. Continuous improvement models for "things."

Folgers® did it for coffee cans. IBM and CISCO have ease-of-use programs for the products they sell.

Full post as published by What About Clients? on November 04, 2008 (boomark / email).