Easy to do Business with (ET-DBW)

Making your organisation easy to do business with is not a simple undertaking. With regulators, external standards and internal regimes to comply with, it's little wonder that some organisations are more than a little difficult to deal with.

Imonic's experience has shown that the same business can be easy and fluid in certain areas, thereby requiring minimal effort on the part of the customer (e.g. gaining a quote or ordering), while dealing with other parts can be little short of a nightmare (e.g. setting up accounts, getting the correct invoices or even paying your bill).

Being easy to do business with (ET-DBW) can bring considerable advantages

• Easier for the customer often means easier for the firm
• Increased profitability
• Improved loyalty - customers want to give you more of their business because it's less effort
• Processes have to be more robust hence fewer mistakes will occur.

It must not be forgotten that being ET-DBW is a customer view, not something that you can decide yourselves. Customers therefore need to be asked and even cajoled into helping you find different ways of getting there. The best approach is to dissect the interactions (refer to interaction management) and take sample groups of customers to work with.

It has been proven repeatedly that being able to make life easy for customers is a sought after trait, which lends itself especially well to P.R.

In our view the critical factors for success are: understanding all the ways in which customers interact and rating these; segmenting representative and vocal customers to work with; creative exercises to 'pull' ideas; thorough testing on small samples followed by a P.R. campaign. This is firstly to tell customers what you are doing and why, explain the new options they now have, and also to attract new business.