Across the customer journey, from prospecting to onboarding and through to renewal, a positive customer experience is not only expected, but vital to the long-term success of your company. Making assumptions about your customers at any stage of the journey can have a negative impact on their experience. The outcome of this impact can be higher churn, less repeat business and lower customer satisfaction.
Every department within a well-functioning company has different goals: sales targets, release dates, lead generation, renewal rates, time-to-value, etc. All of these goals are more likely to be achieved if customers have a positive experience. You cannot afford to not actively think about customer experience in all aspects of your organization. In this article, let’s walk through the customer lifecycle to uncover 8 well-meaning assumptions that companies make that can impact the customer experience.
Sales/Marketing Assumptions
Customers Want Features
Companies do not sell features; they sell value. Features are a means to an end for the customer, not the end itself. A common assumption is that listing features for a customer will help close your sale. That may technically be true, but ultimately, doing so can lead to a poor customer experience later on post-sale. Selling features can give the customer a feeling of being misled as they attempt to drive value from that feature.
These problems are caused because descriptions of features are not always aligned with the value those features provide. For example, if you sell a specific integration that the customer wants and don’t talk about the value of that integration, you will often incorrectly set expectations. The selling point isn’t that you have that integration; it is what that integration can do. When a customer asks you if your product does something, responding with yes is selling a feature. A better approach is to ask “why?” or “what do you want to accomplish?” Sell the value of a feature by understanding the customer’s business needs upfront, and speak to how your product can solve that problem.
Sales is One-and-done
Making sales is important, but doing so at the cost of setting the customer and your other teams to fail will not lead to long term success. The assumption that the prospect-to-customer sales cycle is over once the contract is signed can lead to future churn issues, customer dissatisfaction, higher support volumes, and more escalated accounts.
The reality? You are never truly out of the sales cycle, especially in the SaaS world. That means every person in your company needs to work together to make sure renewals happen, including the initial salesperson speaking to a prospect. If you are not planning from the initial conversation for the prospect to adopt, achieve success, renew and potentially expand your product footprint in their organization (known as the LAER model), then you are not providing the best customer experience.
Onboarding Assumptions
Customer Capability
A common assumption is that all of your customers share the same skills or background and that creating a repeatable, cookie-cutter implementation strategy is the best way to create efficient training. This assumption causes significant problems in setting your customer up for success through either underestimating their skills, which leads to boring your audience, or overestimating them and leaving them more confused. Neither of these scenarios sets the customer up for a positive experience. Spend some time at the start of each new customer launch to understand the customer’s needs, what value they wish to drive, and assess the level of detail for your introduction. Do they need to focus on the basics or the more complex parts of your product? Should more time be dedicated to terminology and workflow or to exploring deeper features and functionality? Answer questions like these, then proceed with your onboarding program. The program remains repeatable, and you use one of a set of approaches based on their needs.
Business Needs
Often, products can solve more than one business need or solve them in multiple ways. Onboarding has to be streamlined but also has to understand what the customer is trying to achieve to help focus the customer on the right path. Assuming the business needs of the customer can lead to them not understanding how to achieve their desired outcomes. Business needs should be validated during the sales process and then expanded on as part of onboarding. Getting into the weeds is incredibly useful here: Is there a specific metric or report they require? Is there a better way to drive that with your tool? Are the right people in the room for any training? What guidance can be provided based on analytics on what makes similar customers successful? Remember that onboarding/implementation is the foundation of making the customer successful with your offering. Assuming anything in this phase of the customer journey will propagate negative effects throughout the remainder of the lifecycle.
Support Assumptions
Customers Lie
On customer support teams, the assumption that customers lie can destroy a customer experience. Rarely is it an outright accusation of lying – it is more likely the phrasing or a lack of effort to move the case forward. It usually starts with a support agent’s inability to reproduce a problem. The gut reaction is to tell the customer to try again. With limited information and few, if any, questions about the customers’ specific scenario, the support agent makes some assumptions about what the customer is trying to do, cannot reproduce the problem and says: “Please try again.” This phrase is a slightly more polite way of saying “I don’t believe you.” A different approach would be to learn more about the customer’s situation and details. In software, for example, that could be the browser, device, product version, operating system, internet connection etc. All of these elements could affect the behavior and are more likely the root cause as opposed to the customer lying about their problem.
Not Our Problem
All products these days are complex, especially in the software world. When a customer experiences an issue with your software, they rarely see all of that complexity. Assuming customers care that your product uses third parties for solutions like content delivery (CDNs), data storage, or other software building blocks can lead to them not feeling supported. They only see your software failing to provide value. Saying that something is “not our problem” assumes the customer understands those backing technologies when they shouldn’t need to. If one of your third parties fails, it is your responsibility to own that failure and communicate with customers, not forward them to a company they’ve never heard of. Your team or company may not own the solution, but you own the problem. A positive customer experience depends on being there for your customers when they experience problems, even if you cannot directly affect the resolution.
Success Assumptions
No News is Good News
Ensuring customers are successful means verifying they are driving value from your offering. Customers who aren’t using your product aren’t going to send you a note to say so, they aren’t going to provide negative feedback, and the certainly won’t give you a warning they aren’t driving ROI. It is so easy to assume that not hearing from a customer means all is well, but there is a danger it can lead to unforeseen churn. Speak with customers regularly, use analytics to measure their product usage to understand what is actually happening, and research usage patterns which you know lead to success or failure of a customer. Inputting the results of these actions into a single customer success management tool will help you to bubble at-risk customers to the top of your priority list.
High CSAT Equals No Problems
I believe the biggest fallacy within customer experience is how overstated the value of the customer satisfaction metric is as an overall CX indicator. CSAT is almost always a metric based on a specific event: Did you like your support experience? Is this feature useful? Was the onboarding process helpful? Did this knowledge article solve your problem? All of these questions are valuable to collect and trend, but none give you an indication of how the customers are doing overall. A customer can love the support they received, but still absolutely hate the product they are using. They can indicate a knowledgebase article solved the problem, but be frustrated they have to search for help every single day. Success is about ensuring the customer is driving value. Do not assume spot checks on individual elements of the customer experience are the same as an overall positive outcome.
Bonus Assumption
As a bonus to the eight assumptions promised: It is also a wrong assumption that these are the only assumptions you make that impact customer experience. Every person has biases or can make poor, even if well-meaning, decisions that affect the customer journey. When you lose a sales deal, or a customer churns, you should do a meaningful analysis. Avoid the temptation to over-simplify by using statements like “we weren’t a good fit” or “they never fully implemented.” Dig deeper. Did Sales understand the business need during the sales process? Did Onboarding set them up to solve those business needs effectively? Did Support own the customer’s struggles with the product? Did Success engage with the customer to guide them towards a substantial ROI? If you made poor assumptions along the way, they will be exposed through questions like these.
The Cost of Assumptions
The cost of all of these assumptions is measurable. Not only in terms of dollars, but in terms of poor customer experience. Failing to listen to your customers, and assuming you know what they are thinking results in a lack of alignment and understanding of your product’s value, increased confusion and frustration, and will lead your customer experience down a negative path. Most of all, many of these assumptions are not noticeable immediately and therefore are not accurately measured. Assumptions in the sales process can lead to serious problems for your support team and assumptions during onboarding can lead to churn after the customer doesn’t realize any value. Overall, the cost of all of these assumptions is a reduction in trust, a strained relationship, and lost business. No company can afford that.