Put Your Customers on Rails

Talking with Todd Earwood over lemonades today got me thinking about what every customer really wants… They want the buying experience to go off without a hitch, obviously, but they also want to coast through the experience as if they were on rails.

What do I mean by that?

When you’re on rails, there is no room for deviation… it’s a linear process. We’re going from point A. to point B. and we’ll be there in X timeframe. There is no approximation, there are no maybes, it’s cut and dried.

After hanging out with some of the local start-up crowd over the past month, it seems that’s what they are all striving to provide, whether they’re dealing with consumers or businesses. They all want to get the customer experience right.

Of course the caveat to making your customer feel like they’re on rails is to actually know what you’re doing. I haven’t got the feeling that people in start-ups actually know what they’re doing all the time and, ironically, I don’t find anything wrong with that statement. People in start-ups know enough to get going and they know how to learn enough to keep going, but the customer ultimately decides which direction the business goes in, not the business.

Therein lies the rub.

How do you figure out where your customer will be, to meet them when they get there, and make them feel as if you’ve been doing it forever?