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If you approve or create online forms or deal with consumer interactions, I hope you'll think about the following:
1. If you have more than seven items in a pull down list, you have failed.
Human beings have no trouble keeping seven ideas in their head (hence the seven digit phone number). So, if asked you, "what's your favorite kind of music among: polka, reggae, ska, jazz and country" you can probably juggle those ideas in your head all at once. But if I asked you to pick among 25 movies in a list, it's a lot harder, because you have to keep going back and forth to see if you've got it straight.
So, for example, don't give me a list of possible job descriptions and ask what I do. If it's got 60 items on it and there is no direct match (well, I'm sort of in management and sort a writer and sort of in car repair) then my brain freezes over.
Computers are smarter than people. Don't use long lists of multiple choice when a simple fill in the blank will suffice. This is why asking for my state in a pull down list is inane. Just let me type in the two letters. (Hint: that's why Google works. It's fill in the blank, not multiple choice).
2. For non-complete lists, alphabetical order makes no sense
Sure, if you want to list a group in which I'm sure to find what I'm looking for (all the authors on Amazon, say) then alpha is smart. But if you're showing me, for example, a menu of items for dinner, or the names of your kids, then surely there's a sensible way to index them that actually adds value. "Here are the appetizers," makes more sense than putting avocado salad next to almond pudding.
You could, for example, list your items by price, or by popularity. But putting the "Melissa" model slightly above the "Sherwood" is just wasteful.
It's almost impossible to communicate something clearly and succinctly to everyone, all the time.
So misunderstandings occur.
We misunderstand a comment or a gesture or a policy or a contract.
And then what happens?
Well, if we're engaged with someone we like or trust, we give them the benefit of the doubt. We either assume that what they actually meant was the thing we expected from someone like them, or we ask about it.
If we're engaged with a stranger or someone we don't trust, we assume the worst.
The challenge, then, is to earn the benefit of the doubt. How many of your customers, prospects, vendors, regulators and colleagues give you the benefit of the doubt?
If you worked at it, could you make that number increase?
Many people buy a car (probably their single biggest discretionary purchase) based on slamming a door, kicking a tire and judging the handshake of a salesperson.
We choose a surgeon based on the carpeting in his office and a politician by his hair cut.
During the first week of swine flu vaccines in New York, most parents (more than half!) chose to keep their kids out of the program.
Interviewed parents said things like, "I'm not sure it's safe," and "I wanted to see if it affected other kids..."
No mention of longitudinal studies or long-term side effects. No science at all, really, just rumors and hunches and gut instincts.
This gut-instinct approach served people well for hundreds of thousands of years, but it's pretty clear that it doesn't work in a complex world. Eating salmon at a wedding feels 'safe' because we always have, but of course any professional scientist will tell you that farmed salmon is an ecological disaster. You can't see the problem, so you ignore it.
Audiophiles spend thousands of dollars rewiring the electrical lines in their house with .99999% pure copper, ignoring the fact that the power from the street is in the same old cables. Adding decimal points to our irrationality doesn't change much.
The problem with being an amateur scientist is precisely the reason that marketers relish the opportunity to sell to us, the amateurs: we make stupid decisions, easily manipulated by those who might choose to do the manipulation (on their behalf or on ours).
The news here is not that people are irrational, giving too much credence to the dramatic and the local and the short-term (that's not news), but that people have added a veneer of scientific rationality to their irrational decisions. Armed with Zagats or internet data or some rumor off Snopes, we act as though now we're supremely rational choicemakers.
This is one of the problems with breast cancer screening. It appears to give information, really good information, but in practice, it doesn't. Since the information is vivid, we give it too much credence.
The challenge for people trying to market vaccines or highlight long-term side effects of various consumer choices is that it's much easier to spread a story about exploding cars or hair falling out than it is to spread a story of 'nothing bad happens' or 'no one got the swine flu and died' or 'three years from now, this section of ocean will be dead.' We prefer the vivid anecdote to the dry and statistically useful fact, which in a complex world, is to our detriment.
PS if I was marketing the swine flu vaccine, I'd name it after a kid who died last season and put her picture on the release form. Alas, teaching amateurs like us to be real scientists is going to take a while.
If you walk into a company-owned cell phone store to sign up for a contract, what are you worth?
Given the huge gross margins at AT&T and Verizon and the standard two-year contract, I think it's easy to figure on more than $2000 in lifetime value.
If you ran a business where a customer represented an additional $2,000 in profit, how would you staff? How long would you make someone wait? If staff costs $25 an hour, how long would that extra person take to pay off?
Few businesses understand (really understand) just how much a customer is worth. Add to this the additional profit you get from a delighted customer spreading the word--it can easily double or triple the lifetime value.
So, a chiropractor might see a new patient being worth $2,500, easily. And yet... how much is she spending on courting, catering to and seducing that new customer? My guess is that $50 feels like a lot to the doc. Instead of comparing what you invest to the benefit you receive from the first bill, the first visit, the first transaction, it's important to not only recognize but embrace the true lifetime value of one more customer.
Write it down. Post it on the wall. What would happen if you spent 100% of that amount on each of your next ten new customers? That's more money than you have to spend right now, I know that, but what would happen? Imagine how fast you would grow, how quickly the word would spread.
Here's how you'll know when you've really embraced this--a good customer at your podiatry practice (or supermarket or tax firm) walks out the door in a huff and you turn to your partner and say, "There goes $74,000."
Random thoughts from all over for those of us hungry for new ways to think. This month's list is here.
The previous list was blogged in September.
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