Your Business Is Losing Customers Because You’re A Pain To Work With
Did I say that out loud? 🤭 let’s have a heart to heart about this.
I just had a conversation with my friend Jay Baer on The CTA Podcast and we had a great conversation about why the average marketing agency net promoter score of 15 out of a 100 and what to do about it.
The Problem Bullet Points
- Your service is 1 piece of 100 things that are on their plate and they don’t have time to deal with you even though they need you.
- Uncertainty creates anxiety and the lack of clarity about the process makes people extremely frustrated.
- When clients start to feel like a problem or a burden, the relationship becomes competitive and adversarial.
The Solution Bullet Points
- Customers want quick service.
- Clarity calms anxiety and reduces confusion.
- Kindness still matters.
What is Customer Experience?
In my conversation with Jay we talked about how “experience” isn’t really a thing. It’s not a lever that you pull, it’s not a positive or helpful attitude that you can have. It’s not just one thing, it is all the things.
The customer experience is the gestalt of what it’s like to work with you. It is what they feel when they interact with your brand and your marketing and your people, and your proposal and your invoice. It is all the small actions that add up to a feeling a certain way about your company and sometimes that has less to do with what you are delivering and more to do with how you deliver it.
“Most people make the mistake of thinking that customer service is about attitude. It’s not about attitude, it’s about action.”
— Jay Baer
More than 8 in 10 (82%) customers say that the experience of purchasing and using a thing is as important as the thing. It almost doesn’t matter how good you are at design or SEO, or strategy. Even if the experience is suboptimal, not necessarily bad, but slow, confusing, or strained in anyway, your agency is at risk of customers defecting.
The Coveted Customer Experience
With an average net promoter score of 15 agencies are uniformly bad at customer experience but how can they get better? Making the declaration that you’re going to be better at customer experience doesn’t do anything. It is the action and tactical response that builds up to a smooth experience.
“The coveted customer experience is when you exceed expectations so often and so noticeably that price and perfection are not required.”
— Jay Baer
When you deliver on experience, you are making deposits into an emotional bank account so that when things like an unexpected expense come up, or a deliverable doesn’t perform as expected, or you have a slip up, customers are more forgiving and they are more willing to give you a chance at solving the problem. And somewhat surprisingly, when you work with a customer on fixing a problem, they are more likely to recommend you to others than if the project went off without a hitch. The problems aren’t the problem, it’s the experience of how the problems are handled that are the problem.
So what does Jay recommend to improve the customer experience? Here are three things that customers categorically see as the primary ingredients of a great customer experience.
Be Quick
While your production efforts may take time to develop in order to get finished product that will drive results for your clients, the process of working with you is easy to make quick.
Getting ahold of you for a discovery call should be as simple as choosing a time on an online calendar and hopping on a 30 minute zoom call.
Your proposal templates should be easily customized and your pricing options standardized or better yet subscription model so that bidding is fast and effortless.
Your invoicing and billing should be automated so that nobody has to think about a thing.
Customer service requests should be fast response using an online chat, a slack channel, and a contact calendar for scheduling support calls after hours.
Be Clear
People who manage a business have 100 things on their plates. Your service is just 1 thing out of the 100 which means they cannot hold all of the information you are giving them in their head. Be super clear. Use those internal graphic design skills to show the process of working with you in the simplest and clearest terms possible.
If it’s overly complicated or confusing to work with them, they will lose trust in the process, simply because they don’t understand the process.
Be Kind
Jay said, “We’ve become empathy deficient as a society.” When someone is frustrated or becoming adversarial or even becoming a competitive negotiator, CHOOSE KINDNESS. There is no reason not to go the extra mile for the customer and treat them with absolute respect.
If going above and beyond is outside of scope or unprofitable, you are not charging enough money. Your project budget should afford them a few steak dinners on your dime. But more often than not you won’t need to go too high above or too far beyond, if you’re just a nice person and agreeable to work with. Being their guide doesn’t mean that you tell them what to do and how things are. It means you listen, show empathy, and share your experience as a way to help them trust the wisdom of the process. You’ll never lose for being too kind.
Check out the episode with Jay Baer on YouTube and Apple iTunes.
Torlando Hakes, is the author of the book Sprint and host of such podcasts as The CTA Podcast, The PaintED Show, and No Trade Secrets. Torlando is open to meeting new friends and building a community of like-minded peers. You can jump on his calendar for a 1–1 anytime for advice, to share networks, for podcast interviews, and for help getting more bookings.
This article is syndicated from the Periodic Knowledge Base, which is a repository of articles and videos created for Marketing Agencies who are certified Periodic Agency Partners. As Agency Partners, they have a license to sell the Periodic white label booking platform to their clients helping them increase conversions through their website. Advanced features such as complex booking, dynamic forms, and automated email/text messages add to their agency tech stack and help them set themselves apart from other agencies and get better results for their clients.
Check out the Periodic Agency Partner Program at Periodic.is to set yourself apart from the competition, book more appointments for your clients, and retain them for longer.
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