Are you wrestling with cranky customers, low-vitality products, congested services, and an aching bottom line? You certainly don't need to. Why exactly does this occur?

One major reason is that consumers expect products and services to work exactly as advertised, in a confusion- and error-free manner. It's easy to understand why these expectations exist because we ourselves are consumers. If given a choice between something that's easy to use and functions correctly, and something that's not easy to use or doesn't function correctly, we'll pick the former every time.

When consumers aren't happy with the quality of their experiences, what will they do? Unless it's a catastrophic situation, will they contact you to tell you about it, so that you'll know how to correct the problem? Perhaps some will, to vent their frustrations about what they've been experiencing. But research shows that the vast majority will quietly take their business elsewhere, and you might not ever hear why. To help you put a stop to the silent exodus, this article suggests four ways to uncover the causes of "customer hassles."

First, Why Do Customer Hassles Occur?

You'd think that any company that provides a product or service would put itself in the shoes of its own customers, and thus provide the very best product or service possible. Unfortunately, that's not always the case, especially if there is not much competition in a certain market. Yet even when product and service providers have the very best of intentions, here's another pervasive problem...

Any products (such as tools, gadgets, or software systems) -- or even services (such as auto repair shops, telephone companies, or transportation businesses) -- can burden consumers by introducing complex requirements of their own.

Those requirements can include queuing time, waiting time, installing or upgrading something, setting things up, programming in some cases (think about your VCR), learning curves, maintenance, wrestling with bugs, troubleshooting, waiting on hold for customer support, and potentially much, much more.

These are all examples of customer headaches of various sizes. When these extra requirements begin adding up, no matter how "good" your product or service might be, hassles can negatively affect your customers' experiences with your offerings. These are just a few characteristics:

-- Hassles can range from something that seems relatively small and only mildly annoying all the way to making the product or service impossible to use for its intended purpose. They can drive customers crazy, or make them feel really angry or stupid.

-- In the worst cases, customer headaches can cause catastrophic ripple effects that affect wider and wider circles of people, circumstances, and/or operations.

-- No bargain-basement pricing can ever compensate for the worst hassles!

What's the Antidote?

In contrast, what would you want to see happen? You'd want to have headache-free offerings that attract loyal customers, right? Good! There's every reason why you would want that.

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