Consider This When Looking to Improve Your Customer Value Proposition

Hi, everybody. 

I wanted to talk about really common problems that we see in customer journeys that often get overlooked because they're not direct at that point of interface between a customer and the company, whether through human beings or an automated interface. 

Some of the most compelling problems that we see repeatedly don't have to do with that interaction. They have to do with what happens outside of that interaction. 

 One great example is the fulfillment process. You can make the sale, but if you've got problems shipping the product, delivering the service, or an onboarding process for an online service, like a SaaS product, that alone can create a tremendous amount of frustration on the part of the customer.

 The worst-case scenario is causing them to abandon the product and demand a refund, or they want to ship the product back to you. All of these increase your costs, and now you've lost the customer that you spent so much money to achieve. 

 We often look at the interaction between our employees and the company as somehow the magic point of this is what we need to fix.

 We spend a lot of money on training agents. We have all kinds of KPIs and metrics that we hold our agents and our associates accountable for. 

 We spend a fortune on Voice of the Customer programs, whether they are surveys, focus groups, outbound communication, mystery shopping. But again, it's often the elements outside of that interaction where the pain points are.

 So one of the things that I think is important is to analyze if you are comprehensive as you look at your customer journeys? 

 Because it's not just about the sale or the inquiry, but it's about the entire process that results in the customer successfully using the product or service they purchased. 

 So looking at things like fulfillment, onboarding, functionality, and last but not least: how is your invoicing? Is it accurate? Is it timely? Do you get that? 

 We usually have these problems, but we just deal with them through the customer service front end. Again, driving up customer effort, driving up customer frustration, and increasing our cost. 

 So these are just a couple of things to think about as you think about what to be looking at in ways to improve that customer value proposition.