Where do I start with my Customer Experience programme?
One of the questions that comes up again and again is where do I/we start on improving the customer experience? Well you can put in place a VoC platform and wait for the results to come in and then act. You can mine the VoC gold mine that exists in your contact centres if you have call recording in place and if you are adventurous then you can listen to social media. Or you can map/assess the entire customer experience and then start making changes.
Why not start by making it easy for ‘customers’ to buy from you?
I have a different suggestion: why not start with the broader purchase process. What do I mean by that? Here is what I am thinking:
- Do your target customers know about you? [Advertising / WOM]
- Do your target customers want to buy from you? Have you given them a good reason to buy from you? [Think Nokia and smartphones right now due to OS issue]
- Do you help your customers to make the right choice: product, price, payment…? [Options, Configurators, Customer reviews…]
- Do you make it easy for your customers to buy from you?
- Do you make sure that your customers get what they bought when they are expecting to get it and the goods are in the right condition?
- Have you made sure that your product is easy to set-up and use? [Design, Training, Instructions, Helpline]
- Does you product actually do what it says on the tin? [Marketing, Selling, Quality]
- Have you given the right thought to the returns process? [Monitoring, Impact, Ease/Difficulty, Cost, Relationship to earlier steps in this purchase process]
I am sure you can figure out the benefit of starting here: by making this process effective you will be helping your company to increase its revenues and profits. Better still it works for both parties: nothing annoys a potential customer more than visiting your store, making the decision and then finding he cannot buy because you have put hurdles in the way.
If you think you have this sorted then think again
You might be tempted that you have this cracked – that this process (from the customer perspective) is as good as it can be. As a customer and as a business consultant I can assure you that the vast majority of organisation can do better – a lot better. Allow me to share two examples with you.
I popped into my local grocery store on Saturday morning at around 8am to buy some milk. I arrived and was delighted that there was no one there except me and the lady behind the counter. The only issue is that by the time I had picked up the milk and walked up to the counter ( 1 – 3 minutes) she was no longer at the counter. I looked around and saw that she was outside arranging the fresh produce. She saw me looking for her and yet she continued with her stacking. I left the milk on the counter and went to her competitor. He didn’t leave his counter so I was able to pick up the milk, pay and be out of the shop within two minutes or so.
You might be thinking that this issues is limited to the small ‘Mom and Pop’ stores. I assure you it is no – as my next example will show.
On Saturday afternoon I was on a mission to get my mother’s house insured and so I turned to Google to find price comparison engines. The first one I tried is a well known brand. It looked easy to use so I dived in and started entering all the details. Once that was complete it went off to find and rate the insurers for me. The problem was that it seemed to take forever – Internet time forever. I assumed that something was wrong and opened up another tab (on the browser) and started tapping in the details into another well known price comparison site. I got to a certain stage where I had to enter my credit card number. Yet, it would not accept my credit card number – it kept telling me it was wrong. Why? The designers had clearly put in a business rule that says that the credit card owner (Maz Iqbal) had to be the same as the person who was taking out the insurance (my mother). They had not thought that my old mother might not be using the Internet. Or that she might not have a credit card. Or that I arrange and pay for her insurance every year as a gift.
By this time I decided simply to go and check out what price her existing house insurer was quoting. So I went the website and start entering her details so that I could get a quote. I got to a certain stage and decided to check out the terms and conditions. Once I had done this I found that I could not go back to the quote process and where I had been. I had to go back to the start again! Thinking I had made a mistake I entered the details and this time ‘the system threw me out’ when I started playing around with the options to see the impact on the quote. So I gave up here and went on to another site.
This site was well designed and the designers had done their homework. When it came to payment the site spotted that the credit card owner (me) did not match with the person taking out the insurance (my mother). And the site gave me the option to tick a box that in effect said “I confirm that the owner of the credit card has given me permission to use it”. And then it went on to ask a number of security questions to confirm that was so. I ended up buying here because the designers had made it easy to do so.
To sum up: two well know brand name comparison sites and a well know insurance brand that spend money on expensive TV advertising ‘selling’ how great they are lost out on my business because they made it hard for me to buy. Instead I went and made my purchase from someone that did make it easy for me to buy. Which begs the question: How much of their TV advertising is wasted simply because the purchase process has not been designed to make it easy for the customer to buy?
Are you still confident that you have done all that you can do to make it easy for people to buy from you? Sure?
