Make Your Company a Habit

What makes you effective at work? Perhaps you'd say it is your excellent communication skills, your deep background in your field, or perhaps your ability to think on your feet. Chances are, you wouldn't focus much on your habits. Yet your routines are a powerful force that affects your daily behavior.

Habits are associations that relate aspects of your world to an action. Your brain is a habit creating machine that allows you to perform those actions without having to think. An organized workspace allows you to focus your thoughts on the difficult new problems that you face without having to think about mundane aspects of work like filling out routine forms, pulling out a sheet of paper to take notes, or picking up the phone to answer a call. Indeed, if you move to a new office you probably find the first few weeks uncomfortable because your old habits no longer work and you have not yet developed new ones. You suddenly find yourself thinking about all kinds of simple tasks.

Whenever there is a consistent relationship between the world and an action, and you repeat that action several times, you will develop a habit. This habit will form whether you practice the action deliberately or just repeat it in the course of your daily routine. Not only are habits crucial to your personal success, they are also central to the behavior of your customers. Unless you are in a business where you interact with each customer only once, your customers have habits related to their interactions with you. Here is what that means for your business.

Stop asking your customers why they do what they do. We all love surveys. You ask people questions, and they answer them. But if your customers are on autopilot much of the time, then they are not aware of many of the factors that influence their actions. That means that what people tell you in surveys and focus groups is not an accurate readout of what really influences their behavior. It is better to use methods to observe what people are doing than to ask them directly.

Learn your customers' habits. As much as your customers may like your business, they do not want to have to think about every interaction they have with you. Every time that you redesign a corporate website, a product's packaging, or a user interface, you are disrupting your customer's habits. Not only is it frustrating for customers to have to relearn how to do something they used to be able to do without thinking, each time your customer has to think, it opens up an opportunity for them to think about switching to a competitor.

Design for habits. When you do have to redesign something, make sure you know which aspects of the old design are influencing your customers' habits. Make an effort to keep those elements as consistent as possible to minimize the disruption of the new design.

Nurture new habits. Customers have to repeat a new behavior before it becomes a habit. The studies on habit development suggest that there are many factors that affect exactly how many repetitions that is, but 20 is not a bad start. Help customers repeat a new behavior enough times for a habit to form. Get to know how your customers interact with you and work to create that practice for them.

Influence the environment. Habits are affected by what is easily seen. If your customers need to use your product or service regularly, then you need to make sure it stays in their environment. For service companies, this means finding ways to stay front-of-mind. For product companies, make products attractive enough to be kept out rather than put away in a closet or drawer.

Disrupt habits for competitors. Chances are, there are at least a few people out there who could be your customers but are loyal to a competitor instead. Those people have habits too. Study the habits of people who use your competitors. Find ways to affect their environment to get them to think about their choices. Of course, you need to make sure that any changes you make don't disrupt the habits of the customers who are already loyal to you.

In the end, the importance of habits inverts a common wisdom about successful businesses. You may think that you want your customers to think about you often. In fact, you often want your customers to act without thinking.  

Make Your Company a Habit
Art Markman
Wed, 29 Jun 2011 18:10:52 GMT