The usual best practice for business owner is structured around delighting their customers. Front desk operation, call centers solutions and many more solutions have been designed and implemented world over.However can you ever neglect them? As a customer relationship management company, I am prompted to say NO. However after going through so many business transactions as a customer myself, I have to say it depends. On what, of course, is the next logical question. The answer is below.
Business Case when Customer Experience can be neglected
A. Industry / Vertical you operate in
Surprised aren’t you? Consider this as supporting argument. If you ever visited hospital recently, you would remember how long you have to wait before the doctor could see you. No one likes waiting. Even more so, if you are a customer.
However due to scarcity of doctors, it’s a norm that healthcare can make the patient wait without having to lose them.
The second example is the case of contract manufacturing and fabrication. Although they can’t be so insensitive about customer as the earlier case, yet since the margins are so less, the customer takes for granted that service levels will be low. More examples are recycled products, cheap toys manufacturers. So in nutshell the healthcare and those industry segments where margins are less can indeed think less about customer experience.
B. Monopoly
Business Monopoly
I still remember during my early childhood, we had monopoly in car manufacturing, sugar mills and many more industry segments. Due to lack of competition, there was far less innovation and even less focus on customer. No wonder all these companies have kind of vanished now once globalization came into play. So yes, if you have a monopoly the customer is going to come to you even if you don’t give them reasons for coming back.
What if the above are not applicable to your business?
So if you have competition and you are not in that segment of selling products at throw away prices, you better start building some differentiation on why customers may want to buy from you. Customer experience becomes important specially in the following cases.
- Intent buying for the customers
If you are let’s say buying an apartment, you would really want to check all aspects like credibility of builder, how he handles issue post possession, previous customer experiences on social media and much more. Another example is when you want to buy white goods again you would value feedback and suggestions.
- Too many options available
In a crowded segment, customer experience may itself be a sole deciding factor. If the industry does not have much of differentiation, people tend to buy products which have positive past reviews. I know of people buying a Canon camera just because they would replace faulty parts without any question.
- Products in premium segment
If you are buying things which are in premium segment, you are putting in a lot of money in the product. It is just the opposite business case of cheap products that we talked about earlier.
So what does it mean to business owners?
Following are the things which business owners must take care when thinking of putting in a good customer experience for their end customers.
- Put customer experience metrics in place
- Make it easy to drop in a feedback
- Have a helpdesk solution in place for timely resolution of issues.
- Monitor social media for feedback for and against and react quickly to them
Conclusion
It should be clear by now that having a good customer support should not necessarily be your business’s one point agenda. Support must be very much analogous to your business practices. Instead of investing redundant time and funds, it is more rewarding when you make an analytical decision towards advancements in your customer relationship.
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