The 3-part method to systemize *your* customer journey
Get smarter about your business
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Recently, I rang up my doctors to get an appointment.
I Googled the practice to find the phone number, tapped the number into my phone, and rang away.
After about 2 seconds, I heard a voice that said ‘to book or change and appointment go to our website and click the big button that says ‘contact us’.
So I hung up, went back to the website, and clicked the button (which is about 18 times the size of a normal button).
I requested an appointment, and an hour later, I got a text saying I was booked in.
Happy that I didn’t have to sit on the phone and wait but I couldn’t help but think that this was perhaps a counterintuitive way to do things, me going back and forth instead of speaking to someone at the other end of the phone and booking me an appointment in 5 minutes.
But then I thought, actually, this was a systematic way to book patients, and it makes a ton of sense.
This means that appointments can be made in a ‘batching’ approach to ensure that the highest priority patients get the most timely appointments.
Let’s dive into why & how you can use the same thinking to *optimize* the design of your business.
Step 1: Designing your business to *work* for you
Working ‘on’ your business, instead of ‘in’ your business is a skill.
A skill that takes a while to hone but a skill that you should think about most weeks. If you can optimize your productivity by making subtle changes, you absolutely should — often, you find it’s the little things that make the biggest difference.
Working ‘on’ your business is about understanding what blocks progress and figuring out how to unblock those things with design or automation.
Today, we’ll work through an example for a business scenario I’ve made up for an estate agents.
The scenario:
Profits are down, and you think it’s because the team is too busy answering customer queries vs. actually going out and showing houses. There is a trend you see time and time again: the more houses you show, the more houses you sell.
But when you look around the office, most people are on the phone answering questions that feel a little like a waste of time.
The ‘blocker’ (so you think) is that people keep ringing up about information they can easily find on the internet. Here’s how I’d go about solving that problem.
Step 2: Start with data
The first step is validating your assumption.
Lots of businesses make the mistake of guessing and thinking they know the reason for a thing rather than looking at the data and seeing if that data validates their thinking or not.
The trouble is, when you make plans based on assumptions, you can very easily go chasing the wrong thing to solve.