Causing Your Customers Unnecessary Pain?

Many organizations are causing their customer's significant pain when interacting with their businesses. At best they are costing customers unnecessary time and inconvenience when getting to the customers desired results. At worst, the customers are so turned off that they are searching for other options. This is because organizations are primarily interested in their own goals and outcomes and do not really understand the journeys customers want to take. To that end, we have created a customer pain index for a better understanding and we are completing a book for organizations to have a great customer excellence program. If you want to register for one of the first 300 copies of this new book click here.

The customer pain index above is adapted from the pain chart you are likely to see in a Doctor’s office, medical facility or a hospital. On the horizontal axis, the level of pain is measured from no pain to high levels of pain. On the vertical access, the level of loyalty is measured from loyal to “heading out the door”. This is a chart where you don’t want to be at the upper right portion of the chart, but many organizations are hovering there because they are not feeling any pain themselves. They believe that customers forget and won’t leave them. They say to themselves” After all, aren’t we the best? We design surveys to show that very fact.”

The Current State of Affairs:

Typically organizations buy or build unfriendly silo transaction systems and then accountants and business unit heads try to cut costs by letting the customer do as much of the work as possible. The accountants say “Let’s add a voice recognition system that upsets the customers to save labor costs” and “let’s manage the average call duration to zero.”  This is short term profit drive driven thinking that gets an organization in trouble as services and products have little or no differentiation. The more enlightened organizations add better processes and change the customer experience to make it a bit friendlier. This gets customers to a near neutral situation where they are not motivated to change as the pain is somewhat tolerable.

The End Game; Customer Excellence:

The better of the enlightened organizations start creating, mapping and measuring the customer journey throughout their organization while attaining the customer’s goals within organizational goals and tolerances. This is the beginning of the “customer first” kind of thinking. While this is a good start, the very best organizations that are aimed at customer excellence, look at the customer's journey from end to end, even if there are parts of a journey that do not occur within the confines of said organization. The best of the best study the end to end customer journey and define new and innovative business models that cater to the whole journey that really gets at what the customer wants.

Net; Net:

Many organizations are fooled into thinking cost containment and not profitability based on balanced revenue and cost targets. Customers will care for your organization that has their best interests in mind. This means a broader and longer-term view when it comes to customer excellence. Don’t be that organization that wants to be in the red and orange zones of the customer pain index. Do focus on customer excellence, not just customer experience. If you might, click on this link for one of our books for free.

Co-authored by Jim Sinur, Gero Decker & Mark McGregor