Seth Godin wrote a post today on the subject of helping your customers avoid taking responsibility. He offers:
This is a great opportunity for marketers and others that want to engage with the public. If you can figure out how to communicate, “it’s not your fault,” then people will be grateful, and they’ll return. It might not be right, it might not be mature and it might not be the behavior society wants to advance, but it works.
So with that in mind, it’s easy to see why some websites just don’t work. They don’t deliver what the customer is looking for and they certainly aren’t helping the business succeed. The Internet was brand new when these sites were constructed. Companies were faced with an overwhelming number of decisions. Who should design the website? Should we have a database? What information should we share with our customers? Should we hire a copywriter? There are so many questions to ask, in a new market where everyone thinks they have the answer. Decision makers become paralyzed by the paradox of choice. We haven’t even discussed the pressure of being a first-mover online!
Seth continues:
Even better, figure out how to teach your customers to enjoy taking responsibility. It’s the long term solution that builds a healthy relationship between customer and vendor… you coach them on good choices and they embrace what happens after they make them.
Can you see the opportunity? Businesses can turn their problems around! The web has evolved in the past ten years. We’re not stuck publishing content only to play the game of ‘wait and see’. A/B testing allows us to fine tune our websites and make the right decisions on content, design and functionality. There are best practices on using all sorts of technologies – database driven applications, online stores, social media – we’ve seen them work and we know how to tap into these technologies to deliver results. There are web design and development firms out there every day helping organizations make the best decisions. It’s their job to coach their clients and help them grow.
You can do this for any industry. There are always reasons lurking beneath the surface to explain away a misguided decision. That is your challenge. The opportunity is found in identifying those situations and improving the results.
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