I read a great little article in the Harvard Business Review recently. In Psst! Your Product Annoys Your Customers author Rita McGrath discusses ways to improve customers’ experience by taking away something they find negative about your product or service.
McGrath argues that anything customers find “irritating, inconvenient, painful, or even worse, scary and disgusting” can doom your prospects as a service provider.
Of course, my mind went straight to mediation and arbitration because “painful” or “scary” could be apt descriptors in some prospective clients’ minds. But my mind also went there because of the potential parallel between mandatory ADR and the pre-loaded computer software example in McGrath’s article:
The lesson here is that over time, there are predictable dynamics in the world of customer engagement. If a practice (such as pre-loading trial software) is lucrative, companies will engage in it. The more lucrative it is, the more they’ll do, to the point at which customers rebel. Why? Because yesterday’s tolerable features become less and less tolerable as they become more intrusive and customers more impatient. And if someone can make money getting rid of the tolerated feature, they’ll do it, creating the next battleground of competition. Be warned, banks that are gorging on charging customers fees, phone companies that load up on special service charges and technologies that require that you buy add-on products (such as printers that come without cables, and products that come without batteries).
It seems to me that the mediation world has two places in which there’s risk of building an annoyance factor.
Macro level: Mandatory clauses and programs. Increases in mandatory arbitration clauses in consumer agreements, and mandatory mediation in the courts seem ripe for the kind of backlash McGrath describes. Diane Levin at the Mediation Channel has written about the problems cropping up (see, for example, Why mandatory arbitration clauses are bad for business – and what companies should do instead) and Geoff Sharp occasionally gathers harsh public commentary about mandatory mediation at mediator blah…blah… (see, for example, Mediation does NOT work). There are numerous other examples out there if you want to take the time to sit down with Google.
Keep this in mind if you’re starting to get ticked at my words: It doesn’t matter that you believe mandatory mediation programs or arbitration clauses are worthy. The public doesn’t care what you think. They don’t care what I think. What matters is if some segment of the public, especially if it’s a growing segment, thinks there’s an annoyance factor, because of the implications for growth of mediation if that annoyance reaches a public tipping point. Or mediation entrepreneurs come along with a good antidote to the annoyance, as McGrath points out.
Micro level: Individual mediators’ services. McGrath’s words sent me on a one-hour car-ride reflection about my own services and the processes I use to engage and work with my clients. By the end of the ride I had identified a few places where I can clean up processes to reduce potentially annoying or inconvenient steps or requirements. I want to remove barriers, not add them, wherever it’s possible to do so. I wonder what you might find if you look at your own mediation business practices? What “pre-loaded software” can you eliminate?
Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MediatorTech.com.
My experience is that mandatory mediation works rather well, all in all. Our local judges all require it. I had my doubts twenty years ago, but I’m now a believer.