Do you have to be sorted?

No, this isn’t some Harry Potter reference. For my 17th anniversary, my husband and I got each other a new printer. I know – but we’re nerds and we’re cheap. We got an HP6500 for those out there who want to know. It replaced a 10 year old HP that wasn’t networkable (oh the horror!) and was still using Appletalk to work with the Macs that live in this house. Scary, I know. But I digress.

So we got our printer and it has a feature I love. It prints with the results face up and it prints last page to first so when you pick it up, it is in order! No really! Okay – so why am I excited?  Obviously I’ll get used to it like, tomorrow and won’t notice anymore but for now, this is a major change. It means when I pick up the doc I don’t have to do anything but start reading which is what I wanted to do in the first place.  In the past, I had to flip it over or sort it or do other things to begin reading. A small annoyance granted, but still, it was there.

So I ask you – do you have to be flipped over or sorted for customers to start getting what they actually need?  Do you ask questions you need answered first rather than talk about what they want? Do you have barriers to get to information?  What could you do to allow them to get right to work and start reading?