Are customer compromises putting your product at risk?

No solution is perfect. Even highly satisfied customers make compromises to use your product or service. Budget is the most obvious trade-off: your product competes against other priorities and needs for budget. Less obvious compromises include the work-arounds customers implement in order to use your product or achieve their desired outcome. For example, a customer uses an add-on reporting solution to compensate for inadequate analytics in its HR software. Or, they use a secondary distributor to acquire the product. Many customers accept—and may not even notice—these compromises until it’s brought to their attention by a competitor, new leadership, or another change in the business. At that point, the previously acceptable compromise can contribute to the loss of a seemingly “satisfied” customer.

Customer compromises can be challenging to spot. Customers themselves become blind to them. After years of using the same product or approach it feels easy, or the customer simply starts to accept the limitations of the product or service. A good example is an enterprise software solution with a cumbersome user interface. Power users know the system so well, they don’t notice that it takes four steps to do something that should take two steps. Only when an alternative comes to their attention, or a change in management spawns a review of existing processes and tools, do they start to think there might be a better way.

To be clear, work-arounds and compromises are rarely the primary drivers of switching and purchase behavior. If your product and service provide enough value, customers make the trade-offs necessary to use your solution. However, when customers see less differentiation between vendors, factors outside of core functionality influence their decisions. If they believe the same outcome can be achieved with less effort, competing solutions become appealing.

So how do you determine what types of compromises your customers make to use your product? The specifics will vary based on sector and product/service category, but examples of the types of questions worth asking include:

• Do customers have to take extra steps to use your product or service? Do they have to order more than they need? Do they have to manually integrate or migrate data?
• Do customers have to accept a poor user interface, customer portal, ordering process, billing process, etc.?
• Are customers giving up secondary features or services they could get from a competitor?
• If you serve multiple functional areas, would individual functional needs be better met by an alternative solution?
• Do customers have to use another vendor to meet their needs across regions? Product specifications? Product mix?
• Do competitors provide access to resources, categories of expertise, an ecosystem, etc. that would be useful to customers?

You may not have a significant problem in any of these areas today; however, an analysis of the trade-offs your customers make will help you identify blind spots and potential weaknesses that a competitor may be able to exploit. It’s better that you see the weaknesses before they do. The analysis can  also provide a holistic view of customer needs: customer satisfaction and VOC initiatives typically focus more narrowly on the specifics of the product or service.

Some of these questions are best explored with your customer advisory panel. Customers may not realize the extra steps or trade-offs they take, but you can recognize them as they describe or demonstrate their processes. Other questions may require a review of competitor products and services. Some questions may require more formal, structured market research with customers or prospects.

If you do find that customers make meaningful trade-offs, you can look for ways to address them directly or indirectly, e.g., if you don’t provide a service or product, you can explore partnerships or ways to provide the same benefit. This analysis can also be used to evaluate competitors and identify potential weaknesses to exploit. Can you address the work-arounds that your competitors’ customers make today?

The exploration and analysis of customer compromises can range from internal discussions, to exploring these topics in your VOC or NPS programs, to asking customers directly about them in a stand-alone research engagement. Regardless of the formality of the exercise, it will help to look at your customers’ needs, and how well you meet them, in a new light.