The Mesh - Lisa Gansky [35]
say. do. win.
People relying on your service need to know one thing, first and foremost—that your business can truly deliver on its promise. The minimum standard of trust is based on reliability and fulfilling expectations, both outright commitments and implicit ones. When customers arrive at the car-share parking lot, the cars should be clean, well maintained, and ready to go. Customers want to know they won’t be overcharged, and that the information about where they went or how long they were gone won’t be shared with anyone (especially, it turns out, their spouses).
Customers want to know that they will have access to the service when it’s needed. They don’t want to be disappointed. Of course, expectations vary. If a customer uses a car-sharing service once a year to go on vacation, her expectation is quite different from the customer who needs a car available three times a week to do important errands. Professionals may require a higher level of attention than nonprofessional customers, even if they have to pay a premium charge. The likely outcome here will be for car-share companies to brand themselves entirely around one market segment or offer a menu of services to appropriately target each type of customer. If someone tries out a tool library in the neighborhood because he’s curious about how to use a circular saw, it’s not the end of the world if it’s unavailable that day. But suppose the tool librarian said he had a router available, and the borrower needed it to complete a client’s urgent project. If in fact the router is broken, or otherwise unavailable, the tool librarian is in what is technically known as deep doo-doo.
Keep your core promises to your customers, members, market, and partners—and start slow. A wonderful Indian restaurant around the corner from my office got unexpected preopening press coverage. They had a line out the door the first week they opened their doors. Great, right? As it turned out, no. True, the food was delicious, but the restaurant staff hadn’t worked out the kinks in the kitchen or the front of the house. People waited an hour to get fed. Some of those customers will probably never come back. Worse, they may have shared their experience with a friend or made recommendations through an online community, such as Yelp. Unlike Vegas, what happens in the Mesh doesn’t stay there.
For a Mesh business, there are a lot of details to get right to make an experience free of speed bumps. It’s best to find first customers whose expectations are low and enthusiasm is high, not the kind of people who are easily irked or rarely amused. Because I’m an early adopter myself, I always say “early adoption” is French for “overpaying to have things that don’t work.” Still, in the Meshy world of rapid-fire social media, it’s best to make sure things do work—and that free early-in-the-market tests are conducted with an appreciative crowd of friendly, candid supporters. Start small, win big.
trials, the first date all over again.
For most customers, trust-building starts with a small commitment. Mesh businesses are often nontraditional and unfamiliar. They fly in the face of ownership or classic financing. To get past potential customer reluctance, Mesh marketers can suggest promising trials, which are often the first step to engage a new member. Grocery stores offer samples, such as herbal goat cheese on crackers, for a reason—to win over skeptics. The same thing can work for bike sharing or peer-to-peer lending. Customers are likely to first try a Mesh business when it’s least stressful to do so. They’ll start by identifying things that they consider too expensive to own or keep. Someone may want to try a table saw or a hybrid car before going ahead with a purchase. Perhaps she has a closet half full of things she no longer wears. These are good places to begin testing the Mesh. Even so, many people will wait until version 2.0 or even 3.0 is refined before jumping in.
Mesh businesses can borrow clever new ideas for offering trials to customers. One trend is “tryvertising,” where, instead