The Part Your Customers Can Feel

Almost none of it, and that is worth sitting with for a moment before the last chapter goes anywhere else.

A customer cannot see that two systems now talk to each other. They cannot see that nobody retypes an address three times, or that the checklist selects itself, or that a licence is no longer the reason they were kept out of something. Internal improvements register internally, which is why they are so hard to justify upward and so easy to postpone.

The market only ever perceives the interface. So of everything in the previous seven chapters, exactly one outcome makes it out of the building: what it feels like to deal with you.

That is why this is the last chapter rather than an afterthought. It is the only part that a customer can feel, and it is the only part an operations director can take to a chief executive without a spreadsheet.

Because it is an admission, and everybody on both ends of the phone knows what it is admitting.

Somebody rings to ask where their order is. The answer exists. It is in a system, or a thread, or a colleague’s head, and it has existed the whole time. What is missing is not the information. It is the arrival of it.

So the customer waits, and somebody promises to come back to them, and quite often does. The transaction survives. What does not survive is the impression, because the customer has just learned something about how the business is organised that no amount of brand work will unlearn for them.

Somebody asks where their order is. The answer already exists. It is just three people away.

Obviously not, and yet that is exactly what per-seat pricing quietly decides for a great many businesses.

Once every external participant costs money, access gets rationed on cost rather than on whether somebody seeing a thing would help. So the customer emails to ask rather than looking. The supplier attaches a PDF rather than submitting properly. And your own staff become the workaround, relaying by hand what the software could have shown for nothing.

Remove the commercial reason and an entire category of manual work goes with it, because it only ever existed to work around a licence.

We did this to ourselves before recommending it to anybody. On our own systems, who sees the work is decided on whether it helps, not on what a seat costs.

Not what you would hope, and the thing they do say is worth more.

Customers almost never attribute their preference to operational competence, because they cannot see any of it. They experience the whole of the previous seven chapters as one impression, and they describe it in about four words.

The most useful sentence any client has ever given us was written in a public review, unprompted, by somebody describing his own customer rather than us: my customer loves me. That is the entire point of this chapter, arriving from the only direction that counts.

The version we can only partly evidence is the softer one: that people find you easier to deal with without being able to say why. One client has said something close to it about working with us, which is not quite the same as his customers saying it about him. It is the thing we most want to be able to prove and it is not proved yet.

With a screen the customer opens themselves, showing results rather than jobs.

That is the actual finish line of the sequence this series has walked through. Not a dashboard for the business, though there will be one. A place the customer goes because it is faster than asking, and it tells them what they wanted to know rather than what the system happens to store.

Getting there took eight chapters to describe and it starts with something much smaller than any of this: one thing somebody currently does by hand, done by the software instead, with nothing switched off and nothing for anybody to learn. Everything after that is a consequence.

And the people who resist it, and there are always some, keep the old way. They are not being difficult. It just runs by itself now.