H&M invented a new kind of shrinkflation, taking the size of male underwear down. L suddenly meant M and a few years later: XL suddenly became L. I will never buy from them ever again. (And no, it wasn’t me who widened. I have kept old trunks as evidence.) It’s like adopting the length measurement of “New km” that are shorter than the currently common km. It will give cars better mileage. It will also make cities further apart, meaning ticket prices must go up…
CRM-systems (almost all famous ones qualify!) that make life difficult, especially regarding data exports like export files removed, feeble export structures, corrupt formatting, limited number of exported columns, search caps, field length limitations, can only export one lead at a time, exports requiring pro-plans, features that locks out other features, etc…
I have lived long enough to see far too many shortcuts affecting how I interact with suppliers. As a client. As a consumer. This insanity has to stop. The people advocating it must lose their jobs, since they are effectively killing brands, trust, and legacy. Let’s put a name on what is happening: PAIN SHIFTING. Teams cut corners to hit a KPI metric, hide a cost, reduce effort, or ship something “hopefully good enough” that turns their internal problems into the customer’s problems. The internal story may sound efficient and usually looks great on a Spreadsheet. The external reality oozes of disrespect. Customers notice. Customers remember. Customers tell others.
A shortcut is not innovation. A shortcut is a transfer of pain. It moves time, risk, complexity, and cleanup away from the seller and onto the buyer. It drains goodwill from every interaction: onboarding sessions that wastes an afternoon instead of 45 minutes, support that steals your clients’ time and goes around in circles, contracts written to trap or obscure, products shipped with known defects, “updates” that remove features customers relied on.
This blog post is written from my view of what matters most and is driven by principle. It is intentionally blunt. If a decision makes a customer’s experience worse, it is a bad decision. PERIOD! If someone argues that customers “will adapt,” “won’t notice,” or “don’t care,” that person is not protecting your business. That person is burning it down slowly, one LONG-TERM costly action at a time.
The Shortcut Sickness
The modern shortcut has a recognisable smell: it saves the vendor convenience/money while increasing the customer’s effort/pain/cost. You see it in product design, service deliveries, contracts, logistics, and even tone of voice. It is the polite version of contempt.
This is not a debate about premium positioning or hard choices. It is about a basic business ethical line that also makes perfect fiscal sense in the longer term. It’s simple: Never push harm downstream and call it strategy/service. A customer-first manifesto starts here. The customer experience is not a cost centre to be squeezed. It’s the actual product. Your customer gives you money, be grateful and protect that!
Shortcuts tend to cluster around the same excuses:
- We need to scale. Translation: “We want fewer humans involved.” That can be fine, until it becomes “we will remove support and make the customer do the work.”
- We need standardisation. That can be good, until it becomes: We refuse legitimate edge cases and blame the customer for having them.
- We need to simplify. That can be great, until it becomes: We removed features without providing alternatives.
- We need to enforce policy. That can protect everyone, until it becomes: We use policy as a shield for laziness, poor support and slow service.
The damage is cumulative. Each shortcut introduces friction. Friction becomes delay. Delay becomes distrust. Distrust becomes churn, cancellations, stalled renewals, angry procurement cycles, tense QBRs, chargebacks, negative reviews, and public complaints. Please note that, in the long term, nothing positive ever comes from shortcuts that push customers away. There are only negative consequences.
The worst part is possibly the internal normalisation and managerial endorsement. Team gets used to customer pain signals. Support tickets become noise. Complaints become edge cases. People begin to talk about customers as obstacles to efficiency and start forgetting the reason the organisation exists and where their paychecks come from.
The antidote is not slogans. The antidote is discipline. Refusal to ship customer pain. Refusal to hide trade-offs. Refusal to pretend the buyer is lucky to be there. Your organisation can be ambitious without cannibalising its own customers. Your processes can be lean without making your customers into buffer zones. Your product can be simple without being of poor quality or difficult to use.
A shortcut-free culture is not soft. It is demanding. It forces clarity on what you are promising, what you are delivering, and what your customer will actually experience on a Friday evening when something goes wrong.
Trust Is the Only Compounding Asset
Trust behaves like capital. It grows through consistent delivery. It erodes through surprise and neglect. It collapses through deception. Building trust takes decades and strong effort. Ruining it can be achieved in minutes.
Customer trust is not won through marketing or using deceptive language. Your customers are not stupid (unless you target MAGA people) and will see through your veils of deception. Trust is won through small operational truths: accurate invoices, predictable delivery, clear documentation, respectful support, honest timelines, realistic claims, transparent limitations. If these details feel minor inside your organisation, you need to understand that they are existential to the buyer who is betting on you. Please remember that when isht goes south, as it always does from time to time, never blame your clients, suppliers or some random external events. Own up to it! Take responsibility. That builds trust like no marketing campaign or new PowerPoint ever can.
My manifesto, which puts the customer first, treats trust as the most important output of my daily work. It shows up in questions like:
- Are we easy to do business with when everything is normal?
- Are we fair when something breaks?
- Do we tell the truth when we mess up?
- Do we accept responsibility?
- Do we fix root causes, or do we close tickets?
Let’s take a look at this from a different perspective now. Shortcuts punch holes in trust through three common mechanisms.
First: surprise. Hidden fees, ambiguous terms, silent downgrades, aggressive auto-renewal tactics, feature removals framed as “optimisation.” Surprise forces customers into defensive behaviour. It makes them start taking action against you: They add approval layers. They demand audits. They insist on penalties. They stop believing in you and go elsewhere with the money that is your salary increase and Christmas bonus.
Second: forced labour. When onboarding becomes a scavenger hunt, customers pay twice: once in money, then again in time. When self-service is an option, it is empowering. When it is the only path, it often translates to total abandonment.
Third: blame-shifting. “That’s not supported.” “That’s user error.” “That’s in the documentation.” These phrases can be true in narrow cases. Used reflexively, they sound like a catholic confession: The vendor cares more about minimising engagement than about being useful.
Trust is also about dignity. Look at yourself! If you are disrespected, would you happily pay for another pony ride? Respect means you do not trap your clients or do cosplay as a leech. You do not make cancellation painful. You do not hold data hostage. You do not treat confusion as a revenue opportunity. You do not treat a complaint as an attack.
Here’s a practical test, the regret standard. Once a customer experiences the full reality of their relationship with you, would a normal client feel regret after choosing you? If you have seen it, or if the honest answer is “yes,” your business is NOT accumulating trust.
Protecting trust is first and foremost a leadership job. It requires incentives that reward durable satisfaction, not short-term extraction. It requires a mindset that treats customer pain as a defect, not as a strange market reality. It requires the courage to say no to internal proposals that look clever on a spreadsheet while causing damage out in the field.
Quality Without Excuses
Shortcuts often hide inside the word quality. Too many companies have developed a culture that treats quality as a luxury, possibly a nice-to-have for later. That thinking is backwards. Quality is the mechanism that prevents the customer from paying for your internal compromises.
Sonos delivered an app overhaul that removed core functions and shifted a lot of pain to the customers as they effectively became involuntary beta testers for a system they had already paid for.
A customer-first manifesto for quality starts with a simple operational promise. It goes:
The customer must never become the test environment, the project manager, or the cleanup crew.
Quality means more than minimised waste:
- Reliability: predictable performance, stable uptime, controlled changes
- Usability: fewer steps to a result, clarity of language, accessibility
- Supportability: fast diagnosis, helpful responses, accountable escalation
- Maintainability: clean handovers, version control, runbooks, documentation that match reality
- Security and privacy: sane defaults, least privilege, responsible disclosures
Quality is not perfectionism. Quality is respect expressed as engineering, operations, QC protocols and craft. When quality is treated as non-negotiable, customer satisfaction becomes stable. The business becomes stable right after that. Only apply the word Innovation for things that are expected to actually improve customer satisfaction and minimise customer churn/harm.
Ethics in Pricing, Packaging, and Process
Regus always adds the line item “Kitchen Amenities” to their clients’ invoices, including those with virtual offices. And it isn’t even a choice. Actually not even useful. So they also added the House Keeping Rule: You may not bring your own drinks to your Regus office… *pft*
There is a clean ethical position on commercial behaviour: charge fairly for real value delivered, present terms plainly, and protect customers from surprise.
A customer-first manifesto for commercial ethics rejects tricks. It rejects confusion. It rejects “gotcha” mechanics that rely on exhaustion, complexity, or fine print.
There are ethical ways to design pricing and packaging that customers accept with clear eyes:
- Transparent tiers: clear feature boundaries, clear limitations, clear upgrade paths – without moving goalposts
- Usage alignment: pricing tied to measurable consumption that correlates with value
- Predictability: caps, alerts, and controls that prevent bill shock
- Service clarity: defined response times, defined scope, defined responsibilities
- Exit dignity: cancellation that is straightforward, data export that is practical, no retaliation through degraded support
The unethical versions are easy to spot:
- Fees that appear only after commitment
- Renewal traps
- Forced bundles that ignore customer needs
- Paid access to basic fixes for vendor-caused issues
- Interfaces designed to mislead
Ethics also lives in process. Customers do not want to be managed. They want to succeed. Your process should reduce customer burden, not increase it.
- Procurement should be efficient, with documents that match how you actually operate.
- Onboarding should be guided, with a clear path to first success.
- Support should be accountable, with ownership and follow-through.
- Communication must be honest, especially when you make mistakes.
When something goes wrong, the ethical playbook has its ABC:
- Acknowledge impact in plain language.
- Provide a timeline that you can keep.
- Offer a workaround where possible.
- Fix the root cause.
- Make the customer whole in a way that is fair.
This is not charity. It is competence. It reduces friction, escalations, and long-term distrust. It makes customers willing to extend grace when the next problem appears, because they have evidence that you behave responsibly.
This approach attracts serious customers. It keeps serious employees. It creates a reputation that does not depend on spin. That reputation becomes your moat, built from consistent integrity.
Your Cheatsheet
The No-Harm Decision Test
A change is rejected when it increases customer effort, risk, or confusion without delivering a clear customer benefit.
The Transparency Rule
If you would not explain the change plainly to a customer before they encounter it, the change is not ready.
The Accountability Rule
When the organisation causes harm, it is responsible for remediation. No blame shifting. No ticket theatre. No “policy” shields.
The Dignity Rule
Make it easy to buy, easy to use, easy to get help, easy to leave. A trapped customer is not a loyal customer.
The Quality Gate
No release without a clear rollback plan, customer-facing notes that are accurate, and verification that common real workflows still work.
The Incentive Audit
If internal incentives reward speed over customer success, adjust them. Bad incentives produce polished failure.
The Shortcut Naming Practice
When someone proposes a corner cut, name it as such. Say “this transfers pain to customers,” then quantify the pain in time, risk, and operational cost. If that clarity doesn’t change conversations fast, you’re sailing on a sinking ship.
Quality does not require heroics. It requires consistency. It treats customer satisfaction as a professional obligation. It treats customer pain as a defect. It treats trust as something you earn by behaving as you would, even when it would be easier not to.
If this reads harsh, good. The harm is harsh. Customers are tired of being treated as an afterthought. Employees are tired of being told to compromise. Brands are tired of bleeding trust through a thousand cuts.
Stop the shortcuts. Fire its advocates. Promote the builders who protect customers, even under pressure. Legacy is built by what you refuse to do. Boeing is a fabulous example! Their shortcuts killed people. Shame on the people who made that happen!
We have been supporting cross-border commercialisation in Japan since 2007 and are eager to explore your needs and expectations in customer experience excellence and trust-building. You are warmly welcome to book a meeting directly here or send an email to info@biosector.jp
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