Will You Guarantee Your Work or Service?

Will you guarantee your work or service? This was a question asked the other day and I had to jump in. The answer is typically no.

It isn’t that our service isn’t measurable and it certainly increases conversion rate, but it is the same reason that when I did consulting I never offered a guarantee. There are just too many moving pieces and all too often the client or customer does not listen.

For our software, we make best-practice recommendations, and all too often a customer will ignore them and do quite the opposite. This may completely remove the original benefit they were to see or could even hinder the results and return a negative experience.

Add the second problem that it is really hard to isolate a change and measure it. All too often there is a total site design happening when we are brought in. It is impossible to know what part of the change did what. Even if you aren’t going through a redesign there are still a ton of moving parts.

Take a simple example where you add Searchspring Search to your website and around the same time marketing increases Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and starts driving a ton more traffic, that is low conversion rate. Conversion rate has now dropped and fingers start pointing. 

People often point to A/B testing to ensure the impact is known, which would allow for isolation of the above example if you have a way to run two products side by side, many do not, and even if you do, are you fully capable of isolating the cohort to ensure the test is accurate?

But back to the part about best practices. All the advice in the world isn’t worth much if the customer does the opposite or nothing at all. In consulting I used to joke “I will guarantee my results if you guarantee you will listen”. It was half joke, half true.

We know our product increases conversion by 10-20%, I just wish I could guarantee correct adoption for all to see the benefits.

So, next time you are buying a product or service and want a guarantee, think about what you are asking for and that the results are equally on you in order to realize them.