To think and talk like your customers

When companies use their internal jargon in external communication, ordinary customers end up having to solve linguistic mysteries to get their shopping done.

The local optician has come up with a clever system for managing queues. By letting people choose among different errands at the ticket dispenser, they can avoid that a person who needs to be fast-tracked to an appointment ends up behind someone with a longer service errand.

However, when I enter the store, a disorganised mini-queue has formed for the ticket dispenser itself. An elderly couple are thinking long and hard about their choice of errand. In the end, I ask if I can help them anyway, and quickly add that I don’t work in the shop, so as not to create unnecessary expectations. They wonder why their particular type of errand is not on the list, I advise them to press ‘other’, and then I press ‘collect client order’ for my own errand.

While I’m waiting for staff to bring me my new sunglasses, more customers come in, all more or less confused, staring blankly at the queuing machine. I try to help them with their queries. Does it say book appointment or booked appointment, someone asks. Answer: booked appointment. What should you choose if you want to collect your glasses? Answer: Collect client order. Aaahhhh, the customer responds. So that is what it means. Well why don’t they write that then?

Good question. Probably because a customer may have bought different things. It’s impossible to list them all, no-one would bother reading and the text wouldn’t fit on the button. But client orders? Not everyone may recognise the word client. Or even identify with being a customer, for that matter. A lot of the time at the optician you feel more like a patient. And an order? Isn’t that something that companies place. It sounds complicated and important.

‘I just read ‘collect’, I reply, adding that it sounds like a familiar thing, like collecting my children from school.

Buying online – shopping or service?

The next day it’s time to collect something else. A parcel from a large furniture company has arrived at the post office, or rather the supermarket. No queue, no questions, so far so good.

Back home, it’s not long before I get a follow-up email from the company: Would you like to share your experience of the support services we provided? To be honest, I don’t really know what they refer to, but I go ahead anyway, always happy to voice my opinion.

After filling out a couple of questions in the online form, I start getting confused. How do you rate the competencies of the service staff? How did you experience getting your furniture assembled by the staff? Why did you choose not to take the furniture home from the store by yourself?

What do they mean? I haven’t been to any department store. I’ve just ordered a few autumn treats for myself. New mugs, cushion covers, some nice flowerpots. Ordered online as usual, like from any other company. Almost all department stores also offer online shopping nowadays.

Much later, I realise the thinking behind the strange set of questions. The furniture company thinks they’ve provided a support service to me by having a member of staff walk around and pick up the stuff in a warehouse and then send it off by post. Apparently, someone in charge of customer care don’t seem to see online shopping as part of the normal business of the company. It is as if they assume that the standard thing for a customer to do is to go to their department store, touch and feel the products, then go and have a think over a coffee and a cinnamon roll in the restaurant and eventually decide that no, I’m not taking the products home now, I’ll go home and order them online instead.

Client orders and customer support services. It seems to be difficult for companies to use plain language. And even more difficult to think like their customers. Buying something online becomes a ‘support service’ and a product bought by a customer becomes a ‘client order’. In these examples the internal company perspective has formed the communication, with the result that customers have to adapt to how the company thinks instead of the other way round.

A simple tip for those of you who work with service design is to consult your users. Not afterwards when the product or services is out, but earlier in the design process. I’m sure there are many of us who would happily take part in user tests from time to time, rather than filling out yet another customer survey filled with jargon that we struggle to understand.