“Ignoring customers’ discomfort, whether it’s explicitly expressed or latent, brings the substantial danger of people turning away from your offering at the first sight of a better alternative.”
So says Gabor George Burt, the author of Slingshot and an authority on reimagining today’s business boundaries.
Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Burt made his case about the critical need to retain customers, using some great examples. For instance: referring to a certain East German car built from 1957 to 1991, he asked:
“Why was the outside of the rear window of a [BLANK] car heated?”
Answer: “So your hands wouldn’t get cold when you’re pushing it.”
Can you name that car? Probably not, even though more than 4 million of the 26-hp, 2-stroke vehicles were produced and sold for more than three decades. Moreover, its plastic frame easily shattered upon impact, and owners often needed to hold them together with rope or wire.
One more clue: The car’s interior was cramped and uncomfortable, and the steering wheel-mounted gearbox required exceptional dexterity. Give up? It’s the communist-produced Trabant. It remained virtually unchanged for 30-plus years, except that the 1983 model had a four-spoke plastic steering wheel that replaced the original three-spoke version.
Burt’s point in looking at the Trabant was its inability to provide any semblance of acceptable customer experience. So when communist East Germany fell, drivers suddenly found that the world was full of customer-centric cars. The Trabant was dead.
So how does a dealer make certain customers find their experience meaningful, distinctive and customer-centric? The answer is deceptively simple, according to Burt: continually monitor their experience to identify and remedy the products’ weakest points.
Burt points out that customers will clearly articulate the key causes of their displeasure, if you’re listening. Yet companies consistently ignore addressing such customer “pain points,” and instead focus on industry traditions, competitors or internally driven innovation.
Another interesting example Burt cites is Disney. We all remember that the inevitable part of visiting Disney theme parks is waiting in long lines. It definitely makes a Magic Kingdom visit less magical. Notwithstanding that Disney was well aware of such visitors’ displeasure, it didn’t address it beyond the idea of queuing.
In 1999, after 40 years of making us stand in line, Disney introduced the FastPass, a reservation system that substantially cuts down line time. It received a 95% visitor approval rate.
“We have been teaching people how to stand in line since 1955, and now we are telling them they don’t have to,” Disney proclaimed. “This is something that will have a profound influence on the entire industry.”
Disney created a theme-park industry innovation addressed a visitor problem. But it take effort to find what’s broken and commit to making changes.
As Burt emphasizes, today’s marketplaces are borderless, so you don’t have an iron curtain to hide behind or 40 years to make your corrective moves. Someone can and will lure your customers away tomorrow.
Every dealership has qualities and operating functions that customers view as less than desirable. Taking time to have staff search out, discuss, identify and resolve pain points can keep your dealership relevant and moving forward, especially when it comes to retaining repeat customers. Moreover, these days of slower boat sales represent the perfect time to undertake such a study in all areas of the operation and make changes.
Fail to do, and you risk becoming a Trabant.
