The great barrier thief over IP

Your website might be why you’re losing customers.

Back in the mid ’90’s someone smart wrote a book about why companies go bust called the great barrier thief. The crux was that companies drive their customers away. They put barriers in between them and their customers by their own policies, behaviour, staff attitudes and operations that people get sick of and then they leave.

I first came across this from a presentation by Mike Donald, the MD at Terralink. He’d just taken over the role and was charged with turning the business around after it had been put into liquidation. His philosophy works and Terralink is once more a thriving business that as many loyal customers.

How does this apply the internet? Here are two recent examples ..

1. I’d used my mobile phone provider for a number of years on a prepay account and they had performed well. So I switched to an account. The barriers then began to spring up:

• I tried to switch online and it wouldn’t work (I ended up joining in store and they took a number of weeks to get me across).
• I went to their website to view a bill and it wouldn’t let me.
• I tried to pay online after getting the amount and it wouldn’t let me.
• I even tried to set up global roaming online and same result.

This went on for a number of months until I threw my toys and left. To be fair, once receiving my final complaint, they tried to fix the issue but it was too late for me.

Not having a fully functional online  service is a barrier and the staff attitudes I initially encountered lacked interest in resolving the issue. They drove me away.

2. I recently bought a book off this UK website. It didn’t arrive after the promised shipping time. I tried to track the parcel on their website but that wasn’t available, nor was the shipping company’s name.

While on the website it turns out the period shown on my online receipt was wrong. The timings were different.

I kept waiting the additional time. Upon receiving nothing I emailed in. Turns out the website I bought from doesn’t in fact own the store the website promotes as its own. I don’t mind affiliate marketing but their should have been some form of disclosure.  And because of that I would have to contact the store owner.

I contacted the store owner by email and they passed me on to their fulfillment provider. The fulfillment provider said they didn’t have a relationship with the original website so they couldn’t help me. Hmmmm …

Naturally all three businesses will never darken my web browser again. I wrote to all three CEO’s and the Office of Fair Trading to complain.

Then out of the blue I got a letter from business number three to ask why I had returned the book to them and where they should send it. So clearly non-delivery was my fault. I must have got it and posted it back!

They obviously had the right address but I wonder if they put enough international postage on it. I’ll never know.

I now have the book.  But they no longer have a customer and that value chain involves three businesses.

Not having the correct information, not being clear who I was dealing with and not taking responsibility are barriers.

The point of both of these examples is that the website and the subsequent fulfillment need to be correct and need to work. If this doesn’t happen you are putting a barrier between yourself and that customer returning to you.

Marketers, business owners, designers or whoever it is responsible, get your website right. Otherwise it will become a reason to lose customers, not win them

The internet is dead

Welcome back the world wide web.

The world wide web. It’s the next big thing.

The internet is moving from being domain based to event based supported by embedded applications that do not necessarily reside in the host domain. Users are moving from one supplier of information, goods and experiences to another just as they do on the high street but rather than jumping through search and bookmarks (ok, both of which are still growing) they jump within social networks or the pages of one habitually visited website.

These websites can be social networks i.e. linkedin, facebook providing applications from slideshare or mobwars respectively; or aggregators like Google Reader. So the information, goods and experiences that people have, will come through a net of sites that are caught by the owner of a customer. Domains no longer own a customer. Only the supplier of the experience.

Welcome back the world wide web and goodbye to the internet. All products, even financial products where regulation interrupts immediate sales as it requires rigorous investor background checking and open consumer protection. Why? Because it’s who owns the customer that counts, it always has. Consider KYC, anti money laundering and fraud regulations that must be fulfilled prior to a transaction of buying a term deposit, shares or even the use of a credit card occurring. In these cases whoever owns the customer is king.

When the customer commits to a supplier it stops them from shopping around unless they join all providers of that security/account/card. But what if you could sign up to one provider who got you through all the regulatory necessities so as a customer you can plug into any provider at any time? Your choice would then depend on product selection and price right? The free market wills it. The providers increasingly unproductive cost base requires it.

Also consider accommodation affiliate marketing where a nice brochure website syndicates the customer out to a chosen provider for booking a cottage. Why not give the customer the choice and have all the cottage providers on a best price basis so they compete for your customer’s dollar in real time?

Syndication of information, goods and experiences can appear as an event in part of the work flow of any website with relevant content. As soon as you get your head around that fact, the possibilities move well beyond your domain being the centre of your universe. You save money on advertising to get them to your site because someone else is already doing it. You scale quickly in return for providing a revenue source to portals struggling to justify their costs of content creation. You lend off someone else’s brand to gain trust for the customer to hand over cash. You close the sale before they search for a trademe/amazon/strawberrynet solution. Domain led internet businesses are not the future.

The internet that concentrates on the biggest sites or search engines is not the future. Passive browsing that moves the customer between events in a continuous work flow is the future.  So goodbye to the internet and welcome back the world wide web. The next big web thing doesn’t operate on a domain.  It operates on any domain.