Perfect Designing of Self – Service

A start-up promising weight loss to its customers offered a perk to its employees—breakfast. Not surprisingly, it had a healthy menu. The fruit section offered bananas and oranges. If an employee came late, she would like invariable find that the bananas were over and only oranges remained. Most employees walked away without taking an orange.

Why did they exhibit this behavior? The answer lies in a simple fact—banana is easy to peel and consume. Therefore it is preferred, although orange is tastier.

The Banana Principle is not new. It was advanced a century ago by Guillaume Ferrero, a philosopher, who postulated that humans operate on the Principles of Least Effort: given several paths, we pick the easiest.

The banana principle applies to business too. Till recently companies spent money on making a better product and trained people to provide after-sales service. But times are changing. New-age companies are investing in making the right products and designing an easy to use self-service platform. They provide tools to customers and empower them to help themselves.

The lesson for you: Follow the Banana Principle. Invest resources in providing a self-service platform that is obstacle-free, easy-to-navigate, offers frictionless checkout, and is secure. People will, on their own volition, choose to work on it.

Measuring a Self-Service Platform

How will you know whether you have succeeded in scoring a bulls eye in providing this kind of platform?

Do a poll among users of your platform and pose the following open-ended question to them?

Do you look forward to using the platform? Yes or no?

The majority response will give you an indication about whether your platform is user-friendly or otherwise.

If the majority of the responses are ‘yes,’ then that is good for you. But do not rest on your laurels. Conjure up strategies that will make the platform more customer-friendly so that more of your customers get converted into partial employees. If most of the responses are ‘no,’ immediately start working on strategies to make it customer-friendly.

Another way of determining whether your customers are happily becoming your partial or full-time employees is to do the Four Delta Test.

Take an airline. If it wishes to determine whether its guests are happily becoming its partial employees, it could record their response for two questions:

If the improvement is 4 points or more, your customers will willingly and happily continue to be your partial or full-time employees.

How Can You Apply This Concept to Your Business?

You, too, should invest in developing strategies and resources in converting your customers into ’employees’ and seek their assistance to save cost, generate revenue, achieve business goals, and solve business challenges.

Customers will become ’employees,’ provided they see benefits in taking up additional responsibilities. You should focus your resources on the following things:

You provide tangible benefits like financial benefits to customers who become your ’employee.’ When you do that, the word will spread. It will motivate more customers to become your ’employees,’ thereby setting in motion a self-perpetuating and virtuous cycle.

Offering intangible benefits like a sense of accomplishment, feeling of pride, increase in self-worth, or the notion that they control their time. Or reducing anxiety, the feeling of guilt, and inner tension.

Providing a platform that is easy to use, navigate, discover, and obstacle-free. At regular intervals, administer Four Delta Test and act upon the results.

Providing intelligently-embed principles of behavioral sciences to influence customers indirectly without overtly coercing them into anything. Remember not to manipulate them to help achieve your goals.

Then, you may sit back and witness how:

Customer satisfaction scores soar, even as costs and customer complaints plummet.

Business revenue heads upwards, margins expand, and business challenges get slain.

Is this not enough of a reward for converting your customers into ’employees’?

At HyperEffects, we pride ourselves in our ability to get your business on a platform that is used and utilized by millions every day. You can also get a personalized mobile app to connect with your clients on a personal level with customized offers, push notifications and many other interactive features that will save you the hassle of constantly being on calls. Enrol today for our free one-hour session to understand more about this. We are here to help your business grow!