The Five Customer Experience Mistakes Eroding Profits
The latest episode of Kantata’s Professional Services Pursuit Podcast, hosted by Banoo Behboodi, features Jessica Noble, Head of Strategy and Managing Partner at Magnetic Experiences. Jessica is also an author, a speaker, and an expert on customer experience. This is the second part of our conversation with Jessica -the first part focused on how to survive and protect margins in an inflationary market. You can listen to part one of the podcast here or read the blog overview at this link.
The second episode with Jessica covers some key topics from her recent book, “The Five Customer Experience Mistakes You Don’t Know You’re Making That Are Causing Profit Erosion.” The blog looks at two of the five mistakes that are covered in the full episode. To learn more about these five common mistakes that lead to profit erosion — and to hear tangible solutions that will help you combat the impact of these mistakes — listen to the entire podcast episode or read the transcript here.
Five Mistakes Eroding Profits
- Flying blind and making decisions without proper data or insights
- Relying on heroes to deliver great customer experiences
- Neglecting to dig into root causes of subpar customer experiences
- Failing to walk in your customer’s shoes regularly.
- Lacking a laser focus on your ideal customer or your target client profile
Failing to Walk in the Customer’s Shoes
The fourth mistake outlined by Jessica is the failure of companies to actually take the perspective of their clients, especially those experiencing subpar customer experiences. While they may ask their clients for feedback on their experiences, it’s likely they are lacking perspective on some key shortcomings that would be quite simple to overcome if approached properly. Companies often claim to have a firm grasp on their customers and their needs, but they have failed to account for all the events along the customer journey that impact satisfaction and overall experience.
According to Jessica, “When I talk to executives and we’re talking about their customers, I would say more often than not, they’re very confident that they know their customers, overly confident, I would say.” As for why executives are so confident, the issue is that they have information but “it’s either, one, very dated information – they talked to a lot of customers 3, 6, 9, 12 months ago – or they talked about a role in a company, the CEO or the CFO, as opposed to actually experiencing what they serve and deliver them first hand.”
Lacking Laser Focus on the Ideal Customer
The fifth mistake outlined by Jessica is especially common for organizations in a period of growth, especially those shifting from small or medium to enterprise-sized clients. Issues that could be previously handled on a manual or ad-hoc basis now require processes and systems to overcome. Breaking into a new part of the market isn’t as simple as winning a few clients in that space – there are implications to consider about what the shift means for your organization’s understanding of its target customers. Enterprise-level clients bring new demands that are increasingly complex and oftentimes have never been seen before. Any organization hoping to scale and deliver quality customer experiences to both SMB and enterprise-sized clients must have a firm grasp on a variety of demands. Key to delivering on these demands is simply understanding the customers you are serving, their demands, and acknowledging that their needs are different once you break into the enterprise space.
Jessica says, “When you start serving more and more clients outside of your target profile or target company, it can be very costly to provide an experience that they appreciate to the same degree as a client in your target profile. You need to understand all customer profiles, what is it that they want, what is it that they need, and what is it that they value, and truly, what are their expectations at every key point in the journey so that you can prepare to meet those needs.”
The Revenue, Margin, and Customer Experience Impact of Mistakes
To understand the impact of these mistakes, Jessica recommends calculating the impact of a mistake vs. the effort it would take to prevent mistakes like that from happening. This can be done by asking yourself the following questions: How many times is this issue occurring? How much time is it taking? What is it costing us?
“A great place to start to build momentum is the areas that land in ‘low effort, high impact.’ So it’s not gonna take a ton to fix them, but it’s gonna have a big impact. And there are usually so many more of these types of things then you’ll ever imagine. And a lot of times you’ll have a system and it can actually solve the thing that is causing a lot of pain… but you don’t even know that because you’re not using that part of the system. Maybe you didn’t need it when you implemented it, maybe it was deprioritized, but if you used it now or if you did a low code automation, you could address it quickly.”
Want to Learn More?
After asking yourself the key questions surrounding impact vs. effort, Jessica recommends using a simple four-step solution to address some of the issues that can be considered “low-hanging fruit.” To find out what these four steps are, listen to the entire podcast or read the transcript here.