Curious thing happened yesterday. Client stopped in and mentioned that they’d stopped by twice and we weren’t in before realizing we had a new entrance door. I then started checking with other clients who stopped by and several admitted being confused at first by our new entrance door.

Time for pictures, a new insurance entrance door blog post and big loud d’oh!

We changed our entrance door from wood to glass and while it looks much nicer and more professional, it confused some clients who were used to seeing a particular entrance type. Even though we added a more commercial open/closed sign and business hours and a sign next to the new door with our business name the new glass door itself was still causing confusion.

As simple as a door. Wood versus glass. It occurred to me that for years we’d had the same door and people were programmed for seeing a very specific entrance to our business. Like changing your hair from blonde to brunette.

To the right of our business is an apartment and they have a seldom-used secondary door that looks very similar to the door we used to have and some clients were trying that door which is almost always locked. Even though that door was a good 10 feet from our entrance door people were checking that door, seeing it was locked and driving away.

Yikes. So I talked to the neighbors and created a sign with a big, green arrow pointing to the left as the correct insurance door. Got their permission to put on their secondary door and am hoping this will do the trick in easing the confusion.

I never contemplated that a new door in the same business location would cause any confusion. How could I have done a better job explaining we had a new door? I came  up with the following ideas:

• make a blog post before the new door was installed letting clients know that our entrance door had changed.
• call clients who regularly come in and let them know. It’s not like we have so many since we are rebooting our business this year that it would have taken a long time to make these courtesy calls.
• email clients and let them know of the change. We are doing a better job than we had before collecting email addresses, so sending out a blast email just letting folks know could have been helpful

Truth of the matter is that I never even considered that changing an existing business door would do anything other than have clients say: “hey you have a nice, new door.” Live and learn, all right. I’ll be more careful in the future. Although in the 15 years we’ve been in business this is the first new door we’ve had installed, so who knows when or if ever we’ll have this scenario present itself again.

Speaking of green, our company logo color, happy St. Patrick’s Day to all those who celebrate. Don’t be drinking too much green beer tonight and stumbling in the wrong doors now..

Did this post make you go hmm?

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