In the days of cabled telephony the the last mile problem was a much talked about issue. It referred to the incongruity that it was easier to run a cable across oceans than to hook up all the houses and apartments on a particular street. Laying a cable across oceans is not easy – it is very hard – but the sum of the logistical, people and regulatory problems that are involved in laying cables in streets in multiple cities can make laying a cable across an ocean appear a more surmountable challenge.
These days the same phrase is used within the context of e-commerce. It’s comparatively easy to get a truck full of products to a warehouse, but more complicated to then distribute each of those products to different addresses, where there are different levels of accessibility and availability and the costs will rise quickly if the customer isn’t there to receive the package. Companies who distribute their products via e-commerce are aware of the last mile problem and invest a lot of money to manage it.
The last mile phrase encapsulates the idea that in spite of all the effort and investment of digging under oceans or making big warehouse the most difficult challenges – and the biggest danger to customer satisfaction – is right at the end of the process and related to what often seem to be small, inconsequential issues.
Why?
Control. The last mile is applicable to so many products and services because at the end of the process, as you are handing over to other people – distributor, retailer, customer – the very last things that are needed to get your service or product up and running are now out of your control and into the hands of people who you have little or no contact with or influence over, creating multiple opportunities for failure and misunderstanding.
What does this have to do with instructions?
Instructions are last mile because you have to outsource the setup or build of your product to the customer, something that ideally you would do but economics, logistics and convenience dictate that you can’t. Compared to everything that a company does to get the product into the hands of a customer, instructions often seem like an unimportant detail and are not thought of as an integral part of the customer journey.
Many times, companies who have invested lots of money to build, market and deliver a great product and brand, let themselves down at the last moment: the customer gets the package, opens it up and finds the instructions to build or setup the product are unclear or seem more like a brain teaser and certainly do not live up to the expectations that were created by all the previous steps in their customer journey.
Recently we saw a great example of this, a toy company who had built a pan-european brand of top-tier toys. However, when the toy arrived the instructions to build it were bad: while they seemed to be done with care and the illustrations were good in and of themselves, there were too many and in some steps it was difficult to see what was going on. The instructions had been printed on 2 sides of A4 paper, that is one printed sheet in the box, but clearly could have done with more room.
I went to the website and found the instructions of the other toys. It was a great website, clear and easy to navigate. Looking at the instructions for other toys I saw the same thing, none of the toys had instructions of more than 2 sides of A4, regardless of the complexity. This may have been for economic reasons, or because they wanted the instructions not to be intimidating. For whatever reason this decision was taken, it created a negative customer experience. After all, who wants to be anxious and unclear when setting up a toy that their child will play with?
Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory
In a world where businesses are focussed on the total customer experience, too often the final instructions are not reflective of the care that the company has put into other parts of their customer journey. Why does this happen? Why do companies pay less attention to their user instructions when they are such an important part of the customer experience?
- Can be a high cost item that gets done once and then isn’t returned to.
- Many companies outsource manufacturing and with it the job of creating instructions.
- Customers can now go to the internet and find help from a web page or YouTube and so a company may not be aware of issues.
- Instruction Success is not a metric that most companies are focussed on.
Are there other reasons why your company doesn’t pay attention to instructions? Let us know, we’d love to talk to you and get your ideas and feedback.
