Today our guest contributor is my Miracle Worker, Felicity, who talks about a problem recently encountered by her daughter. I’m sure we’ll all identify with it.

My daughter got a new mobile phone recently, only to discover there’s an issue with the software governing the front facing camera, which means although the foreground is clear, further away is fuzzy. Which is completely useless for her, considering she constantly films that way. All her videos are slightly blurry. Got very frustrated with trying to get it fixed/replaced. One part of that was trying to play with demo models in phone stores, to see if it was a software issue, or whether it was only her phone being faulty.

Only to discover that for security reasons, all the phone stores now basically lock their phones to display stands, so you can’t actually pick them up and try them out. The angle of the stand might be very appealing for displaying the phone, but it’s useless for putting the phone through its paces. You can’t even use the rear facing camera, and the front facing camera basically films the roof.

I can understand why they do this – as one salesperson told us, they used to have them on a cord, and people would just pick them up, cut the cord and run off with the phone.

But their solution is totally useless, as the demo phone is essentially impossible to test effectively, other than to swipe a few things around on the pretty screen.

Why pick a solution that is so frustrating for the customer? Surely there has to be a better solution.

Winston adds: Its all about empathy isn’t it? You know the adage, spend three moons in your customer’s shoes and find out what irritates them. then solve the problem.

Happy customers mean more sales!