How do you measure growth as a company? If you are a media company like Comcast, you would perhaps track it with metrics like new customer acquisition, and client retention.
What if I were to tell you that these metrics, meant to measure your company growth, could be the reason for reputational and revenue loss?
In 2014, Comcast subscriber Ryan Block posted a long 18-minute conversation he had with Comcast support staff that showed them continuously blocking his effort to cancel his subscription. This post went viral and spawned a number of similar recordings that showed aggressive and manipulative tactics displayed by Comcast staff towards false billings, and avoiding cancellations.
Comcast’s tactics led to a widespread outrage among customers, with Consumerist labeling the company "The Worst Company in America" for 2014.
Your company needs a Client Experience stack
A lot of startup and emerging businesses look at client experience as an indulgent expense - something that your business can consider investing in once you have grown big enough.
But that’s the wrong way to look at it. Client experience can make or break a business. Customers are no longer looking at just the deliverables - speed, clarity, and consistency in providing these deliverables are equally important.
A well integrated client experience stack can turn those fragmented customer touchpoints into a well-oiled revenue engine.
A client experience stack is a curated set of software and applications that can help businesses manage, analyze, and optimize their customer touchpoints. The ideal CX stack should centralize your customer data, personalize your outreach, and streamline your sales and support systems.
A quick word of caution here - setting up a CX stack is not the be-all and end-all of good customer experience. A CX stack could not have prevented the outrageous CX issues that plagued Comcast in 2014. It is merely the starting point.
However, it empowers businesses that have the will and intent to deliver good client experience by providing them with the necessary resources.
Designing an end-to-end client journey
The client journey often starts way before they qualify as a lead. The first touchpoint could either be inbound or outbound.
Inbound touchpoints could be marketing assets like blog content, brand mentions across other websites or publications, a social media comment, or an AI search recommendation. While it requires a lot of effort and resources to activate these touchpoints, the real initiation comes from the client themselves.
On the contrary, outbound touchpoints are channels that are initiated by your teams. This could be a cold email or phone call, a direct mail advertisement, or even a simple "hello" at a trade fair. These conversations do not happen unless they are initiated by your team.
Following this touchpoint, each client goes through a rather unique set of steps that define their lifecycle journey with the organization. These steps can not only help you identify your customers’ current cycle, but can also assist with identifying the glaring gaps and opportunities through the process.
Requirements gathering & onboarding
Traditionally onboarding can be a messy affair - clients have unique journeys and requirements. And you cannot catch all of this over email or through a bunch of calls.
Project management
In itself, project management can be a long, multi-stop process that invokes contributions from multiple internal and external stakeholders. This stage of the customer lifecycle has the highest number of frictional elements, which is why adopting a CRM with project management capabilities can help streamline collaboration, improve visibility, and reduce inefficiencies.
Deliverables management
These are the project outputs that the client is paying the business for. Depending on the length of a project, deliverables are either handed out in tranches or in one go. The promptness and the quality of the delivered work can determine client satisfaction and their future engagement prospects.
Feedback & iteration
Business projects are seldom executed flawlessly in the first attempt. Each deliverable goes through several back-and-forth exchanges where feedback and changes are recommended and a new iteration of the deliverable is released.
While iteration is an inevitable component of any project, some projects may get stretched beyond the deadline and could cause avoidable frustrations among your clients.
Billing & payments
The end of a project is marked by invoicing and payment. Depending on the nature of the project, these payments could either be made periodically (monthly or quarterly), or based on completed milestones.
Credibility & social proof
The end of a project does not necessarily mean an end of the relationship. Besides future engagements, end of projects can also contribute to building lasting impact on the credibility of your service through testimonials and customer reviews. Besides establishing social proof, such testimonials also help brands improve visibility in AI search.
Poor delivery throughout the project could impact your relationship with not just the one client, but could also impact your credibility and future customer acquisition.
Eliminating friction in client workflows
Business processes routinely see disjointed systems that are evident to all stakeholders. Such processes either exist due to the lack of a better process, or because of built-in constraints in the system due to regulations or compliance requirements.
For example, an Asian business servicing clients in the west may face timezone related delays in project communication. These are frictional elements that clients are aware of even before the start of a project.
While this can bring down the efficiency of the project, they are not the biggest contributors to client unhappiness.
Instead, projects break down due to seemingly minor breakdown in processes. This could be as simple as repeated back-and-forth email conversations to confirm project requirements, or unable to get the required answers outside of business hours.
These issues marinate and can blow up into major frustrations with a project leading to poor overall client experience.
Some of these are easily fixable. A slow loading website could contribute to user frustrations, and this can be fixed by moving to more powerful server solutions like VPS or dedicated hosting.
Implementing a solid client experience stack can help minimize these frustrations across the lifetime of a customer and thus improve the overall speed and efficiency of the project.
Here are some of the key friction points in a client relationship and how they can be solved with a CX stack.
Communication overload
Repeated back-and-forth conversations is a scalability killer. This is especially true during the initial outreach or onboarding process where the business may need several rounds of input from the client.
A lot of the initial friction in client experience comes from lack of product market fit. Even in cases when PMF exists, poor communication of your offerings could alienate your customers and make it difficult to acquire and nurture leads.
Invest in tools that could help target the right audience and personalize your communication at scale. Also look at tools like Decktopus that can empower your sales teams to accelerate communication by building personalized sales decks at scale. All this helps lower client anxiety and fosters a better relationship in the early stages.
Onboarding experience is another aspect that heavily impacts the way your clients look at your business. Executing a flawless client experience here can have a multiplying effect on the overall journey.
Client onboarding tools like Contentsnare can help remove friction from the onboarding process and enable seamless gathering of documents and information from clients.
Feedback delays
Project management is an iterative process where each subsequent step can add value only if the feedback provided by the client is timely and decisive.
Sure, poor quality and delayed feedback are definitely issues that are caused by a client. However, the onus is on your business to ensure that you seek the right kind of feedback and do that in a timely manner. After all, when a project goes bad, the reputation hit is only faced by the provider and not the client.
It is for this reason that it is important to keep all lines of communication open at all times. Using a tool like Jivochat can help businesses seek inputs from customers even during your business off-hours. Using the Jivochat AI agent, you could make the process more efficient by answering 80% of the queries without the need for a human agent.
Furthermore, AI agents could help you proactively seek feedback from customers along every step of the journey. SurveySparrow’s Echo, for instance, replaces traditional feedback forms with conversational systems that ask better questions and track sentiments that can help deliver better quality outputs.
Slow turnaround times
This is perhaps the most common frustrations that clients have about the businesses they work with. Slow turnaround times can be due to a number of different reasons - poor stakeholder management, unempowered or overworked staff, or simply inefficient project planning.
A lot of this can be overcome through more efficient workflow planning. Modern examples of CRM tools like Creatio show that efficient workflow patterns help teams stick to processes, eliminate sidequests, and meet client requirements.
Finally, consider automating routine tasks as well as content automation. There are two advantages to it. First it saves time and makes processes more efficient. More importantly, it avoids errors that can creep up with human-led processes.
Avoid data silos
Data silos are perhaps the root cause for several of these other frictional elements mentioned in this article. When customer data from multiple sources do not talk to each other, it results in additional steps and wasted time in just retrieving the right data required to resolve a customer issue.
This causes additional waiting time, increase in turnaround times, and also communication overload that can all cause customer frustration.
Automate business processes
A lot of customer frustrations stem not from the workflow itself, but due to the time it takes for the customer to go from one step to the next. This could be the hold time during a customer support call, or the turnaround time for the resolution.
Automating business processes can do two things - they eliminate human error that causes these issues in the first place, and also help customers get their issues resolved more seamlessly. Self-serve tools like Kapture CX can help customers resolve 90% of their queries without human intervention, thereby eliminating a majority of the reasons that cause customer frustration.
Lack of transparency
Some amount of friction in client experience is sometimes inevitable. It could be due to factors outside the control of your organization. This could be attributed to delay from suppliers, network downtime, or simply because your team needs more time to investigate potential issues.
The absence of regular updates or uncertainty regarding what comes next could cause anxiety and friction in customer experience.
Fixing these frictional elements requires a mix of product and process upgrades. Set up regular updates regarding the status of a ticket to the customer. Client experience improves with timely notes and reminders from the business about the status of their issues.
In addition to this, improve product workflow to notify customers of their progress during any interaction. For instance, a simple progress bar in a survey feedback form could tell the number of steps to go, and this can greatly reduce customer anxiety.
Auditing your CX Stack
The objective of a CX stack is to make it easier for your business to meet your client experience KPIs. As such, constantly auditing your stack and making changes to them is a necessary endeavor.
Step 1: Value stream mapping
Start by breaking down the entire customer lifecycle into its individual steps. This could be lead acquisition, client nurturing, onboarding, etc. For each of these steps, trace the workflow from the first trigger all the way down to the final handoff (where the client moves to the next step in the lifecycle).
Here, audit every tool that is used - this could email, CRM, electronic signature software, dashboard portals, etc. Study and document where the information moves from one person or tool to another person or tool.
Several consulting groups like Xoriant deliver AI-powered solutions precisely to make business workflows more precise and automated. This avoids situations where errors could creep up when information transitions from one stakeholder to the other.
Step 2: Identify Friction patterns
Once the value stream is mapped, it is time to document the friction patterns. Walk through the process exactly as a client would, to find where they have to wait or repeat themselves. These are the recurrent "energy drains" or structural bottlenecks that can cause delays or friction in the process.
Also, study the reason for this frictional element to exist. Does your team have to manually copy-paste data from one tool to another? Is there a holdup due to a manual approval that can be automated? Or, do you have multiple tools that do not talk to each other?
In addition to this, managing your client expectations is a critical component of project management. It’s always a good idea to underpromise and overdeliver on your project. That is, be conservative in your timeline planning, but always work aggressively towards meeting your targets ahead of schedule.
Step 3: Rebuild the flow
Once the friction patterns are identified, rebuild the flow to eliminate them. You could do this by replacing multiple tools with one that can handle all these tasks. You could introduce integrators that can automate the process of data flow as well as assist with content automation.
Ensure every single step of the process has a clear owner so that you can eliminate scenarios where delay is caused by multiple teams at loggerheads due to unclear ownership.
