PureStone Partners LLC

• How much time do we spend making the customer experience simple?
• Is the customer on-boarding process painful, or straight forward?
• Do customers get lost in our beauracracy, our legal needs?
• How many customers do we lose in those final steps?

We spend tremendous time developing technology – whether externally for paying customers, or internally for process improvement.  Yet, we often spend very little time planning for the adoption phase.

What do our customers want – stuff just to work the first time, to be easy to use and provide the value they paid for.   If we are spending millions, if not billions on product development, why do we not start with the end in mind (see Jonathan Becher’s – Manage by Walking Around blog)?  Especially in the age of the internet, people need to be able to sign up and get started without complexity, nor mind-numbing data entry.  There is a time and a place for each of those, and it is not necessarily right after “hello”.

One great shiny example is Apple.  Most of their products are far more simple to operate than their competitors.  Think of how easy to use each of their products are, then think about using them as part of a network of parts and it gets even more simple to use.