At Inc.com’s page, Productivity@Work: “The starting point for improving customer experience is to literally map all the experiences a customer considering buying your product or service might have,” says Rita McGrath, an associate professor at Columbia Business School in New York. She suggests looking critically at all the steps you require for someone to become a customer and eliminating any that aren’t absolutely critical. For example, if you market via the web, try to make do with the most minimal information until the customer is actually ready to buy. “Most small business owners are astonished at the number of roadblocks that exist in what I call the ‘consumption chain’ when they are pointed out to them,” she says. To read the entire post, click here.