Our firm recently published an interesting B-to-B focused report on the importance of making it easy for your customers to do business with your company. The report, The Value of Making it Easy detailed the customer interactions that are the biggest trouble spots in five areas most common to almost any business. Based on feedback from customers in B-to-B companies, here are 15 questions to help you conduct a quick gut check on how easy it is for your customers to work with you.
PURCHASE PROCESS
1. Do you provide enough guidance on what to buy?
2. Is pricing difficult for your customer to figure out?
3. Are your self-service portals difficult to navigate?
LEAD TIME/DELIVERY
4. Do your lead times meet customer requirements?
5. Do you meet agreed-upon delivery commitments?
6. Do you provide access to self-service updates?
INSTALLATION/ONBOARDING
7. Do you provide effective self-service training?
8. Is your product/service difficult to figure out?
9. Is there a logical handoff or knowledge transfer?
PRODUCT SERVICE EXPERIENCE
10. Do your products perform as expected?
11. Is it clear how product features are to be used?
12. Is your product too complex, making it tough to use?
CUSTOMER SERVICE/SUPPORT
13. Do support requests take too long to resolve?
14. Do you have effective self-service portals?
15. Do customers know who to contact?
These 15 questions are not arbitrary. In fact they are based on the most common obstacles cited by B-to-B customers in our research.
It’s clear that being easy to work with is more than a nice thing to do. Done right, companies that make it easy have more loyal customers, more repeat business, and more opportunity to cross-sell and up-sell -- all leading to
more stability, faster growth, and significant cost savings.
Patrick Gibbons
Principal/SVP
Walker
P.S. If you are interested in more on the topic, here is a link to a recorded version of a recent webcast summarizing the report which was published.