Capturing markets and annoying customers
A while ago I wrote about the incentives of providing good service — let’s dig a little deeper into a common business relationship that often causes this.
Let’s take an organisation with an infrastructure of ‘stuff’. They need to add a new ‘thing’ for customers to interact / use the service (e.g. contactless payments) to keep with the times.
But, they don’t have the capability to make ‘thing’ work on their own, so they approach software / hardware providers (of which there are usually only a small number of obvious providers).
Said provider promises the Earth: “Don’t worry! We’ll take it off your hands, no worries. We’ll take a cut of (thing) and you’ll NEVER have to worry about it!”
“Great!” thinks commissioning stakeholder. Supplier identified.
In a series of simple steps, said organisation has handed over the keys to a critical part of their service to a 3rd party, but the incentives aren’t aligned. Their brand reputation is now in the hands of someone else who often doesn’t really care — especially if said infrastructure is locked in for years.
Why, as the supplier, would you care about the service you offer to a captive customer, who’s yours by proxy? These customers often can’t take their custom elsewhere. With buyers and decision makers separated, things fall out of alignment.
I’m not proposing that all organisations can provide all of the elements of their service, far from it. What I’m getting at is that the behind-the-scenes legal stuff — the commissioning, the service level agreements — the length of contracts — these are the root elements that end up defining the customer’s experience (HR is another point of failure, but that’s for another time).
Where it naturally leads to, is that anyone commissioning parts of their service needs to be:
- design savvy
- user-centred
- a savvy buyer
- invested in customer experience ongoing (i.e. involved in managing the contract long-term)
- avoiding too much lock-in
The unfortunate truth is that for many commissioners, *their own* incentives are wrong. They often don’t have ‘skin-in-the-game’ long term, or the technological / design experience to know what good looks like. The supply of said ‘thing’ is a one-off act that often misses out the consideration of users.
As long as design maturity isn’t reaching far back into the nooks and crannies of an organisation, these problems will persist.
