The Customer Will Adapt, We Hope...

A few weeks ago, I was at a community meeting in one of our local pubs. The pub had recently been refurbished and now has a large television that is difficult to miss. I mentioned to the manager that the place was looking great, and we got talking about the TV.

I told him there was only one problem: I never know what matches they are showing.

It wasn't really a complaint. I genuinely would like to know. If they were showing a match I wanted to watch, there is a good chance I would message a few friends and suggest meeting there. The pub is local, I like the place, and I would much rather watch a game there with friends than sit at home.

He said they were working on communicating the schedule better, so I suggested putting it on their website.

They don't have one.

He said they were thinking about posting the information on Facebook and Instagram instead, which is when I explained that I don't use either.

I even offered to create a simple website for them for free. Partly as a favour to a local business, admittedly partly because it would solve my own problem as well. They could continue posting everything on Facebook and Instagram exactly as they planned, but also update a simple page with the match schedule. It would give them another public communication channel without requiring customers to belong to a particular social network.

They weren't particularly interested. Maintaining another place to update apparently sounded like more hassle than it was worth.

Which is completely fair. It is their business and their decision.

But I found the reasoning interesting.

Updating another channel would be inconvenient for them.

The alternative was that I would have to join a platform I deliberately don't use to find out when I could spend money in their pub.

Apparently, the customer would adapt.

Some exclusion is a choice

I don't avoid social media because I struggle with technology. I have spent most of my career working with it, and I use plenty of technology every day. I just don't particularly want Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or similar platforms to become part of my daily life.

Some of that is also because I have children. It is difficult to tell your kids that they don't need to spend their lives on social media if they see you constantly checking it yourself. I would like them to understand that they don't need a hundred accounts, hundreds of followers or a constant stream of likes to have friends or be popular.

This carefully considered parenting philosophy is not always universally appreciated.

When one of their friends is allowed to have something they aren't, my argument can be reduced rather efficiently to:

Dad is evil.

And from their perspective, I can understand that. If their friends are communicating somewhere they aren't allowed to be, they don't experience it as a thoughtful discussion about technology, privacy or screen time. They just know their friends are somewhere they cannot go.

There is also a slightly ridiculous contradiction in my attempt to make phones less important in our lives. More and more of the things my children do require me to use one.

Schools have apps. Sports clubs have apps. Other activities have their own systems. Then there are WhatsApp groups, emails and links that lead to social-media platforms I don't use.

None of these organisations is doing anything unreasonable on its own. A school chooses a system that works for the school, a sports club chooses one that works for the club, and a community organisation uses something its volunteers already know.

But I am the person at the other end of all of them.

Everyone has made their own communication a little easier, while I have somehow acquired the job of assembling it all.

That feels very familiar.

The work didn't disappear

I have seen versions of this throughout my career. Organisations improve processes and reduce costs, but the effort they remove doesn't necessarily disappear. Sometimes it simply changes owner.

That isn't automatically a bad thing. If I walk into a supermarket with a Coke and a packet of crisps, I will probably choose the self-service checkout. It is quick, I don't have to queue and I can be out of the shop in a minute. Give me a trolley full of groceries and I may feel very differently.

The technology hasn't suddenly become bad. The amount of work I am being asked to take on has changed.

The same applies to plenty of things we now barely think about. Each request is small:

• Download this app.
• Create this account.
• Scan this code.
• Use this checkout.
• Talk to this bot.

I happily do some of these things because they make my life easier. The problem starts when an organisation removes effort from its side of an interaction and assumes it has therefore removed effort from the experience.

A chatbot that answers my question immediately is useful. A chatbot that cannot answer it but prevents me from reaching someone who can has achieved something very different. The same principle applies to self-service, apps and most of the technology we put between organisations and customers.

The distinction isn't really between technology and people. It is between giving the customer another convenient option and making your convenient option the customer's only practical choice.

That is why the conversation in the pub stuck with me.

The website would have created a small amount of additional work for the pub. Someone would occasionally have to update it. Facebook and Instagram were easier because they were already using them.

So the inconvenience didn't disappear.

It moved from maintaining another communication channel for the business to maintaining another social-media account for the customer.

I know which option they preferred.

The customer will adapt

This becomes more interesting when you think about what the business can actually measure.

Imagine the pub starts posting its match schedule every week. People view the posts, share them with friends and come in to watch a game. From everything the pub can see, the approach is working. They might reasonably conclude that Facebook and Instagram are effective ways of communicating with their customers.

I won't appear anywhere in those numbers.

In this particular case, the manager actually knows why. I told him. Most businesses won't get that luxury.

Usually there is no customer explaining that they would have bought something if only the process had been slightly easier. There is no abandoned transaction because the transaction never started. There is no complaint to investigate because the customer doesn't care enough to complain.

They simply don't turn up.

Businesses have become very good at analysing what people do once they enter the systems we create. We can measure clicks, transactions, abandoned baskets, support contacts and customer satisfaction. It is much harder to measure the person who decided that downloading another app, creating another account, navigating another chatbot or joining another platform wasn't worth the effort.

Most of us adapt, especially when each inconvenience is small. I do it myself all the time. Perhaps that is why it becomes so easy to assume that customers will continue adapting indefinitely.

That assumption can be surprisingly comfortable because the evidence appears to support it. The people who accepted the process remain visible. The people who quietly rejected it often disappear from the data.

I have seen the same underlying problem inside large organisations. A decision can make perfect sense from the perspective of the team making it while the cost, risk or effort simply appears somewhere else. The important question isn't only what we removed from our own process, but what happened to it afterwards. Did we actually remove the work, or did we just give it to someone else?

That is probably why such an ordinary conversation in a pub stayed with me.

I am not going to create an Instagram or Facebook account just to find out which match they are showing. The manager knows that because I told him. I even offered to help create another option, and they decided it wasn't worth the additional effort.

That's their choice.

Mine is simply not to go.

Neither decision is particularly dramatic, and perhaps that is exactly why I find the example useful. There was no argument, no dissatisfied customer survey and no complaint. A business decided that supporting another communication channel wasn't worth the inconvenience, and a potential customer decided that joining another platform wasn't worth the inconvenience either.

Somewhere between those two perfectly reasonable decisions is a transaction that will never happen.

Multiply that across all the apps, accounts, automated processes and self-service experiences customers are increasingly expected to navigate, and I wonder how confidently any business can assume that the customer will always adapt.

Most probably will.

We hope.