Customer experience: who’s the weakest link?

Companies  invest a lot of money to find, acquire and retain new customers. For example in the service industry, the marketing cost for the website, brochures, events, commercials, … is in general 5% of the turnover. The total sales cost (sales salaries, sales materials, sales enabling tools (crm), training plans,…) can go up to 10% or more of the turnover.

This means that service companies invest about 10-15% of their turnover to interact with their customers and prospects. However, little investment is done to improve the quality and effectiveness of the customer interactions and experience. Today, due to digitalisation, there are  many different channels to interact and  many different timings to get your messages across customers depending on the buying state they are in. The complete customer interaction process becomes a lot more complex than before.

Knowing that the perception about your company deeply depends on what the customer sees (services), reads (social media) and hears (peers) about you, it becomes important that each message  is consistent, reflects the same image and triggers the same buying emotions  in order to gain confidence.

The customer interaction Paradox:

Have you ever reflected on the fact that each of your employees spread messages about your company via LinkedIn, Facebook, twitter or other social media? Do they have guidelines for this? Do they have the skills to do it right?  Have you already calculated how much time is spent  between your service people and the customer to implement or deliver the solution that you have sold? Several studies are showing that, in general, 20% of the interactions with your customers are happening during the sales process and 80% during the implementation of your solution.

However, a lot of effort is spent ensuring the client interaction skills of sales people but little is done for the service professionals who handle the vast majority of your company contacts with your clients. Customer experience is not only about ‘what’ you have done but also ‘how”you have done it. Service people are mostly less interested in sales and the effects of their interactions, but in fact, they should! They have a big impact on the customer’s  willingness to buy from you again, and more importantly, on what this customer is telling about you via social media.

The same is true for Marketing people. A lot of marketing budget goes to studies and tools about customer segmentation and product differentiation, which is indeed quite important. But in reality, we see too many marketing professionals struggling with the content of their messages. Sometimes because they are missing insights in buying behaviour or in client industry trends or simply because they don’t have the knowledge about what works and what doesn’t.

Conclusion:

Companies should invest a lot more in improving the interaction skills of their marketing and service people in order to gain confidence and trust from the customer,  which will finally result in a much better overall customer experience and increase sales revenues.