Putting the customer back in focus

Doing business has come a long way in the past 20 years or so.

Only two decades ago Cash was King and there were no credit cards to speak of.

Really, we were all still in the stone age. Buying something meant handing over your money and taking home your product.

Today, at the end of 2009, most of us don’t even see our money anymore. It might as well be Monopoly money. Many households pay their bills by direct debit or internet banking. Some of the products or services received are of abstract nature such as mortgages, electricity bills, council tax and such.

Electronic money for abstract products.

Now in the early stages of internet trade, Amazon.com understood very well, that most customers would be a bit worried about buying on the internet and potentially losing their money, being ripped off without being able to pinpoint the crook.

Not exactly a great business proposal: ‘yeah, just give me your money, right, and we’ll register your order and send you the books and cds later when we have them in stock’. They will turn up in a few weeks or so, but we can’t say when exactly…’

Imagine that at your local market. ‘Allright, mate two pounds of bananas and a pound of apples’. ‘That’ll be 2 pounds and fifty pence, please’. ‘Thank you. Now we’ll send our truck round to deliver your fruit order in a few days or so’. ‘What?! Are you our of your mind?’ No doubt, an enormous fight would have erupted leaving the local market stalls in a pile of rubble by mid-morning.

Anticipating this, Amazon decided to seek out and mitigate their potential customer’s deepest and darkest fears: paying for an item so that it would be legally their property, and subsequently losing it or losing control over it. A horrible scenario for any punter.

Amazon decided to create complete tranparency even prior to the order was placed. With estimated delivery dates, information whether an item was in stock, where it might be shipped from. Once the order was placed, the customer would get a ‘Where’s my stuff?’ option, an email when the goods had been shipped and a refund policy for everything that would not show up as promised, no questions asked.

I am convinced this is what made them successful. After all, neither their product or prices are really that unique.

It’s the way they changed doing business on the internet by mitigating the customer’s fear of losing an item or losing control over an item.

Amazon.com also correctly anticipated that a customer having to wait for a purchased item would not really mind as long as he or she continued to feel in control. Knowing when it was shipped, where from and when it would arrive has proven to make all the difference.

From basic ‘cash on delivery‘ to ‘pay now, get your product later‘.

25 years ago all of us would have insisted it could not be done. Amazon.com did.

I find myself wondering what ‘cannot be done’ today, Dec 2009.