Practices that could hurt your business

It is a hot Sunday afternoon and you have been walking around the city for hours now. You are tired and thirsty. To make matters worse, hunger is making you dizzy and affecting your vision. You are left with no option other than ‘appeasing’ the rampaging hunger and thirst. You are lucky to see a nearby restaurant; you enter and order for pasta and a cold Fanta. When you ask for sauce, you are told to part with some extra money, which you pay grudgingly. But your troubles are not about to end. Later, when you buy some items at a retail shop on your way home, and ask for a paper bag to carry them with ease, you are asked to pay for it. Though the extra cost was minimal in both cases, you didn’t like the experience. You are not alone; many of us have gone through the same especially from fast food joints, which levy an extra fee for packaging on clients who order for takeaway. In fact, many businesses in the country have a habit of fragmenting costs without realising how much this costs them in terms of customer relations. In the first place, customers generally don’t like what I would call ‘hidden’ costs, which customers only get to know about later. It is no surprise that they affect customer relations and one’s shopping experience. This is why it is important for business operators to include all the charges on the price list and avoid ‘ambushing’ customers with additional fees. If you have a price list or a menu, then it should be up to date, with prices clearly indicated. Remember, customers come for a good experience at your store or hotel and not an unpleasant surprise. So ensure that all charges for products or services are clearly indicated. Secondly, it is important to desist from price fragmentation. It gives me a much better experience to pay one price than to pay for an item and later be asked to part with extra cash for something whose cost should, at most, be included in the item’s price tag. Another bad business practice related to pricing is the tendency to advertise the price of something without clearly pointing out that with taxes included the price will increase significantly. Airlines, for example, may advertise low ticket prices without telling potential customers that the air ticket price would most likely amount to as much as double the advertised price, when taxes are factored in. Like hidden costs and fragmented pricing, concealed taxes only serve to spoil a customer’s experience. One may get excited to pay for something that was advertised as cheap only to be shocked at the final price much later. It is almost as if you are trying to prank your customers by withholding details of the total cost. Such pricing habits constitute poor customer care. Calls for better customer care in Rwanda have been made over and over again but often the focus is simply on how staff deals with customers and rarely about other aspects of business such as pricing. As a business owner, you ought to know that price plays a big role in one’s psychological experience with your business. That is why smarter businesses can even advertise ‘near prices’ like 9,900 instead of 10,000 just to draw into the human psychological weaknesses of the customers looking out for affordable goods and services. During this year’s Rwanda International Trade Expo at Gikondo, I noticed many smart business people who were making lots of sales just by convincing buyers using a single price for about three items. Instead of pricing the items differently, they would get three related items and sell them as a package. In other words, they were playing into the general human preference for easy payments. All this falls under the general theme of easing payments. If you have a business and you want to improve on it, start by easing payments. What options do your customers have when it comes to paying? In this day and age if you only have one payment option then you are doing business the wrong way. Customers should able to pay for items using cash, mobile money or credit cards. With all the time people spend on the Internet, businesses should also think of embracing online payment systems. The more payment options you offer, the better. Whatever you do, make your customers’ life easy when it comes to payments because, ultimately, it is their money. Make the experience of parting with it as painless as possible. Blog: www.ssenyonga.wordpress.com Twitter: @ssojo81