The Disappearing Act

A business can become so good at its work that customers cease to notice what they are paying for.

A swan has an excellent public-relations department. Everything above the water suggests that movement is a matter of personal elegance. The feet have been omitted from the presentation.

Many well-run businesses achieve something similar. The booking works. The room is ready. The delivery arrives. A small complication is dealt with before the customer learns that it existed. Months of preparation appear, on the day, as nothing much happening.

This is what good service should feel like. It also creates an awkward commercial problem. If the effort disappears completely, the customer may conclude that there was very little to do.

The penalty for getting good

Imagine two technicians fixing the same fault. One identifies it quickly, replaces the right component and leaves. The other spends an afternoon investigating, makes several calls and eventually achieves the same result.

The first has supplied a better afternoon. The second has supplied a more visible explanation for the invoice.

This is a hypothetical comparison, but it exposes a familiar difficulty in selling expertise. Customers can observe time more easily than judgement. They see the minutes spent fixing a problem; they cannot see the years spent learning which minutes are necessary.

Competence compresses work. Unless its value is explained, that compression can resemble a lack of effort. The expert has become better at the job and, inconveniently, worse at demonstrating how difficult it is.

A glimpse behind the curtain

Research offers an interesting illustration. In five experiments involving simulated online travel and dating services, Ryan Buell and Michael Norton examined what they called the “labor illusion”. Making a service’s apparent effort visible could increase its perceived value; under some experimental conditions, participants preferred a slower service displaying that effort to an immediate service returning identical results. Their study appeared in Management Science in 2011.

That finding is not a recommendation to make customers wait. Nor does a simulated website establish what will work in every workshop, hotel or consultancy. It does suggest that the experience of receiving a result includes an interpretation of how the result came about.

For a business, a sensible experiment is to make genuine work more intelligible while keeping the service fast. An explanation can do a job that an unnecessary delay should never be hired to do.

The invoice arrives alone

Consider a designer who removes a confusing step from a booking form. The finished page looks simpler. A client comparing the old and new versions may count fewer boxes and wonder where the work went.

The designer could send a long account of the effort involved. A more useful explanation would show which decision the visitor no longer has to make and why it was getting in the way. The point is to connect the change with the customer’s task.

A maintenance company faces a related problem. A visit that finds no fault can look unproductive. A concise record of what was checked, what was observed and what needs attention gives the visit substance without inventing a disaster that supposedly would have occurred.

Without that explanation, the invoice arrives carrying a number and very little company. The customer is left to reconstruct the value from memory. Businesses should hesitate before delegating their pricing argument to someone who was busy doing something else.

Show the decision that mattered

Transparency does not require a documentary about every order. A customer who buys a pleasant evening is unlikely to want a seminar on restaurant procurement between courses.

The useful detail is the one that changes their understanding of what they received.

An installer might explain why a particular fixing suits the wall. An accountant might identify the discrepancy resolved before a report was completed. An embroidery workshop might show the test that revealed a small letter would close up, followed by the adjustment that kept it readable.

These are illustrative examples, not claims about work carried out for a particular customer. Their common feature is a meaningful decision. Each makes judgement visible in a form a non-specialist can understand.

“We checked everything carefully” asks for belief. Showing the relevant check gives belief something to work with.

Beware the theatre of effort

There is an obvious temptation to turn this into a performance. Add a progress bar. Produce a thick report. Send more updates. Make the customer feel that a great many important things are happening.

Some of those things may be useful. Others merely make the business harder to deal with.

An update earns its place when it reduces uncertainty or helps someone make a decision. “Your order is progressing” says little. “The sample has passed inspection; dispatch is planned for Thursday” says more, provided both statements are true.

The same discipline applies to prevented problems. It is reasonable to report a fault found and corrected. It is much less reasonable to attach an imaginary financial catastrophe to every routine inspection.

Customers should learn why the work matters. They should not have to applaud how exhausting the supplier found it.

Make expertise easier to buy again

A useful place to begin is the handover. Choose one service customers repeatedly question on price. Add a brief explanation of the important decision, the check performed and any practical next step.

Then observe what changes. Are there fewer clarification emails? Do customers understand the recommendation? Does the explanation help the person who must justify the purchase to a colleague? Reorders and price objections can be tracked too, without assuming every change was caused by a new paragraph.

The ambition is modest: let the customer leave with an accurate account of the value, expressed in words they can repeat.

A swan is welcome to keep its feet a secret. A business sending an invoice may benefit from offering an occasional glimpse beneath the water.