A business must defend all points of entry
A point of entry is any method a customer can interact with a business. Most businesses have about three or four points of entry:
- a physical location,
- a website (possibly a live chat),
- a phone system, and
- a mobile application.
Imagine that your business is a castle that has three entrances. If you get attacked, would you send all your knights to defend the main entrance, or would you defend all entrances equally?
The logical thing would be to defend all entrances equally, because should one point of entry fail, and the enemy makes it inside, there’s a good chance all is lost.
If you want to take this a step further, one could argue that you’d defend the entrance that is attacked the heaviest, which is also quite logical, but nevertheless, you’d still have guards at the other two entrances.
The point is, if a business has three points of entry, you must guard them all.
It would appear that the phone suffers the most, which is what prompted me to write this today, and it’s especially true when it comes to restaurants and retail locations.
Whether it’s a poorly designed phone system e.g. the automation and the time it takes to resolve your problem, or the point of not answering the phone at all, it simply leaves a negative cloud over your head.
The best case result would be a lost sale, but the truth is, people always remember the bad experiences over the good ones, simply because we’re conditioned to always expect the best customer service wherever we go.
Featured image by Andreas Weilguny.