If it feels as though something in your business isn’t working, it’s tempting to start thinking about throwing everything out and starting from scratch. You begin to see problems absolutely everywhere, and that can lead to a combative attitude and dramatic approaches that might not be necessary.
Instead, focusing your attention on quieter improvements could have the same level of impact that you’re hoping for without the enormous risk of tearing out the foundations. Sometimes, your customers might not even consciously be aware of what you’ve done, but they’ll have a much-improved experience as a result of it, and that’s what matters.
Streamlining
‘Streamlining’ is a popular buzzword that often doesn’t actually mean that much, so it’s important that you apply it in specific circumstances. Take your website or app, for example. Do you need multiple different pages for information that could be featured on the same page? Similarly, could you condense this information down so that you’re saying just as much with fewer words? Even taking out visual design can help your page be much more appealing to users.
More functionally, if your services use APIs, using an API gateway can help interaction with these to become much smoother, allowing easy access to each API instead of requiring a whole distinct transition each time. Again, it might not be an improvement your customers know to ask for, but the difference between brands that do and don’t consider these measures is very apparent.
Regular Maintenance
Your apps, services, websites – whatever digital (or sometimes physical) spaces that your audiences use, are easy to take for granted. As a user, you might find that you don’t think at all about a website that you go to regularly – you simply visit it, and use it, leaving after getting the service that you came for. If these services aren’t regularly maintained and every visit comes with the expectation of a problem or hurdle that makes using the service less easy, people might be more inclined to cut their losses and not bother out of convenience.
Will every user be keenly awaiting the list of updates and combing through the small changes that come to your website when you need to fix a visual glitch or update it to work with new technology? No, but it’s something they’ll notice if it falls behind.
Be Aware
It’s easy to get caught up in the idea of the business landscape being the most important, but the purely business world isn’t one that your customers live in. You have to be aware of the changing social landscape so that your brand can continuously try to be on your audience’s right side. Making a mistake or error that draws a lot of negative attention to your brand could be damage easily avoided, and it represents another situation where saying nothing at all can benefit you more than drawing attention to yourself – though there will also be times in these situations where speaking up is the best course of action.
