One person didn’t want to update their email software. Nearly 1,000 volunteers paid for it.
Most of us do the same thing in our own businesses. We make decisions in a hurry, and behind each one sits the same quiet question: what’s easiest for me?
DM me to book. Fill in this form and email it back. Pay by bank transfer and send me a screenshot. I’ll confirm when I’m next at my desk.
None of that is lazy. It’s what happens when one person is doing everything and needs the business to fit around the rest of their life. The trouble is that nobody stopped to check what it’s like on the other side of the counter.
Easy for you isn’t easy for them
Back to those nearly 1,000 volunteers. It happened inside an organisation I worked with. We were designing the process for online events, and the plan was simple: a person registers once and the system does the rest. Confirmation email, event link, calendar invitation, then reminders as the date gets closer.
There was one catch. The person who looked after the group mailbox would have to upgrade to the latest version of their email software, and they didn’t want to.
That upgrade mattered, because the newer version could hide attendees’ details on a calendar invitation. Without it, sending invitations risked a data breach. So the invitations went, and the automation went with them.
Part of the reasoning was that they didn’t use their own calendar, so they assumed nobody else would either. My honest reaction was: who are you? Most people I know are juggling at least 3 or 4 calendars between school, work, and friends and family.
“Remembering” the thing you registered for 3 months ago was never going to cut it. If it’s on a calendar somewhere, anywhere, it’s far more likely to be remembered.
So no invitation went out, and everything relied on people reading their emails. Volunteers either added each event to their calendar by hand, or went digging through their inbox for the link when the event came around.
And it wasn’t a one-off. This was a series of at least 20 events over 6 months, with nearly 1,000 volunteers on the receiving end, all giving up their own time to be there. One person kept their software the way they liked it, and nearly 1,000 people got a harder experience to pay for it.
Small businesses do exactly the same thing. The only difference is that the person who doesn’t want to change the mailbox is us.
You pay for it either way
Friction in a customer process only ends two ways, and you pay for both.
The first is that you lose them. They don’t complain or tell you why. They don’t finish, and from your side it looks like a quiet week instead of a broken process.
The second is that you carry them through it yourself. You answer the same 5 questions, chase the form, resend the link and explain the next step again. This one is sneaky, because it feels like good customer service.
If you’re answering the same question every week, that isn’t service. It’s a gap in your process with a friendly face on it.
And it’s eating the hours your “easy” way was meant to save.
Go and be your own customer
Big businesses call this customer journey mapping, and it usually involves a whiteboard and a lot of sticky notes. You don’t need either.
Go through your own business as a customer. Use your phone, logged out of everything. Find yourself, work out what you sell and what it costs, try to buy it, then see what happens after you’ve paid.
Write down every point where you had to wait, guess, ask or repeat yourself. Those are the places your customers are dropping out or landing in your inbox.
Better still, hand your phone to someone who has never bought from you and watch. Every time you feel the urge to lean over and explain something, you’ve found a problem.
Then watch what happens downstream
This is the part people don’t expect. You fix the journey for the customer, and the business gets easier for you.
I’ve seen it happen. On one project we reordered the flow of a digital form and took out the steps and questions nobody needed. The number of “help me” queries roughly halved.
When the information is clear up front, the questions stop arriving. When buying takes 2 minutes, more of the people who wanted to buy do. When customers give you the right details the first time, you stop fixing mistakes at the other end.
It will cost you something at the start. Upgrading the software is a hassle, and setting up a proper booking page takes longer than typing “DM me”. But you do that work once, instead of doing the workaround every single week.
That setup is also far cheaper than it used to be. Confirmations, reminders and follow-ups are steps you can now build yourself with AI, without hiring a developer.
It’s also why I’d look here before spending a cent on more marketing. There’s not much point sending more people into a process that leaks.
Start with one
You don’t need to redesign the whole business. Pick the one journey that either makes you the most money or generates the most messages.
Walk it as a customer, find the biggest snag, and fix that one thing. Then do the next one.
Keep going until the easy way for your customer and the easy way for you are the same way.
And if you want help doing it, join my membership. It’s where we work through this kind of thing together.