How easy is it to be your customer?

You work hard to offer high-quality services/products to your customers. You want to serve your customers, and you want your business to be successful. You go to great lengths to make sure your customer gets “functional” value: solid legal advice, accurate accounts, suitable financial advice, a safe and effective medical device, etc. But that’s not enough.

The value that your customer experiences is the functional value of your service/product, minus the cost, minus the time your customer has to invest, minus their effort.

So every bit of effort and every minute the customer has to spend unnecessarily erodes the value of your service/product.

Effort consists of both physical and mental effort – including worry and inconvenience – throughout the customer journey. We live in stressful times so peace of mind is really valuable.
If you are a lawyer and you don’t keep your client updated with progress on their case, they may worry and contact you – which is extra effort from their side. If you are an accountant and you promise a client’s accounts by a certain date but don’t deliver on time, your client may be stressed. If your customer experiences a problem with your product and you make if difficult for them to report the issue, you are even further reducing the real value for the customer – on top of the product issue.

Another way of looking at it is that if the customer has to spend unnecessary time or effort, you are effectively charging them extra.

How can you avoid value erosion: unwittingly diminishing the value of your service/product?

• Take the time to thoroughly understand your customers and their situation: What do they wish to achieve by using your services/product? What else is going on in their life that is relevant? What is most important to them?
• Put yourself in your customers’ shoes: Think from their perspective and (re)design the customer journey to be easy and seamless. Don’t expose how you work internally to the customer. True customer-centric design requires specialist expertise. Make sure you invest in it – it will pay itself back.
• Keep your promises: Prevent that the customer worries. Don’t make rash promises and follow through on what and when you say you will do.

Do you know whether you are delivering optimal value to your customers or whether value is being eroded at points during the customer journey? Some ways you can check:

• Have feedback conversations with your customers: Feedback from your customers should be listened for and solicited throughout the customer journey. I don’t mean an online “rate my service” survey but a personal conversation – it will give you rich insights.
• Gather and analyse insights from staff: Your staff will be aware what pain points the customer may be experiencing – but maybe there is no mechanism for them to feed back their insights – or they don’t consider it to be part of their role. Change that.
• Do a systematic audit of your customer journey: This requires specialist expertise and you may benefit from an outside perspective. You can also do a self-audit using a structured approach. My Action Planner guides you step-by-step through a comprehensive customer experience stock-taking exercise. I recommend you do this collectively with your staff.

Apart from the Action Planner you will also benefit from my book "The Most Rewarding Way to Improve Profitability — How to create excellent customer experiences" for more insights into how you can make your customer experience topnotch.

Or feel free to contact me for a complimentary sounding board conversation — catherine [at] strategic-consulting.scot

Related articles:

• The three pillars of customer experience excellence
• The value chain: a valuable tool for improving your customer experience