The #1 Lesson from Japan on Business Growth?

Last week I was in Japan which is why I didn’t write a new newsletter. Instead, you got the one on measuring business success by how many vacation days you can take without your business falling apart. I am happy to report that while I was gone for eleven days things ran beautifully without me.

I still checked in on email every day, but I can honestly say I spent less than an hour a day on work and I could have done none at all but I felt like since I could check in then letting even a small amount build up for no reason would just be silly.

My time in Japan was a lot of fun and I’m glad we got to go and spend time together as a family and see the sights. While we were there, we visited Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka and had a very good sampling of what the country has to offer.

But the visit also highlighted something for me that ties back to owning a business and is something we can all work to do better at to the benefit of our businesses. 

The truth about traveling in Japan as non-Japanese people is that it’s pretty hard!

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Everything you can do at home without even thinking about – getting around, finding something to eat, talking to people; all these things are much harder and sometimes impossible over there!

For example, just checking into our hotel – a process I’ve done a thousand times in the US and in lots of other countries – was a struggle. The staff didn’t speak hardly any English and they needed us to fill out some forms, pay a separate hotel tax, and we ended up in two separate rooms on separate floors which we could not explain well enough to fix. 

None of these are a big deal but they add to the stress of an already unfamiliar situation where you are also tired and hungry and trying to adjust to all the other new things around you.  

And this kind of thing kept happening. Everything was different and new and there were no clear directions to follow on things even as simple as getting hot water in the shower or turning the air conditioning on. Of course, when you travel you don’t want it to be identical to home and that’s part of the adventure, but it can also start to wear on you a bit.

But my point isn’t about the inconveniences of the trip – I loved my time there and it was a hundred times more positive than any negative issues we faced! Instead, what it highlighted for me was the key thing that you can do in your business to make it more successful.

How To Improve Your Customer Experience Right Now

What it highlighted for me is that when things are easy, obvious, and comfortable then the experience seems positive. Duh. 

The flip side is when things are confusing, difficult, and uncomfortable then the experience can be disappointing, regardless of whether you got what you came for overall.

Think about the painful process of buying a new car. Or trying to decipher a bill from a medical visit. Do these have to be so hard? Of course not.

The way to address this in your business is to look at the entire process from your customer’s perspective and find every point of friction or potential hassle and see what you can do to eliminate it. 

You probably can’t get all of the items right away but you can tackle them from worst to least over time and continue to make the experience better and better.

If you can’t put yourself in your customer’s shoes, ask some people who can be honest with you (ideally people who are actual customers or could be!) to review each step in your process and give you specific feedback on which parts were confusing, annoying, unnecessary or difficult.

For each place where you can make positive changes that will help the process, then go ahead and start improving!

Here are some random examples that come to mind for me:

• Businesses that don’t answer the phone with a real person who can actually help
• Deliveries or service appointments that are hard to schedule or require huge windows of time
• Instructions that come printed in 6-point font and were written with Google Translate or worse
• Excessive hard-to-open packaging for stuff that doesn’t need it
• Invoices that are confusing to make sense of and tell what you are actually being billed for and why
• Requests for information that require WAY more info than you should have to give to get a quote or further details
• Things that require extensive setup when you’d expect it to be plug-n-play
• Lots of extra fees added to things that could come with an “all in” price
• Simplified set of choices or options vs having tons of decisions to make around getting a product or service

If you think of the things that you dread and cause frustration and anxiety and then consider whether you are doing any of those things to your customers it should be obvious you’d want to stop or at least improve as much as possible. If you don’t you run the risk of another business soaking up your customers with a better experience that beats what you offer.

What made travel in Japan hard was the same thing that can make dealing with a business difficult – confusion, lack of clear steps, bad communication, and stress.

If you can eliminate that from your customer experience word will get out and your business will grow at the expense of the businesses that don’t care and won’t improve. Plus, it’s easy to do and many of the changes won’t cost you anything to implement. You can’t ask for more than that!