Are you hard to work with? It matters.

Do your internal processes pull customers and prospects closer to you or do they push them away?

Research shows that companies and individuals that find a vendor easy to work with demonstrate higher levels of loyalty and likelihood to recommend. They use the vendor more fully, e.g. buy more products, use more features. They will even use technically inferior products and services when a vendor makes their lives easier.

This point sounds obvious. But as vendors develop internal processes to improve efficiency and management effectiveness they can accidentally lose sight of how these processes impact customer experience, loyalty and even their brand image. For example: A sales process designed to provide consistency across a diverse sales team may force prospects through a protocol that makes them feel that the sales rep isn’t listening to their needs; or an invoicing protocol that is ideal for a vendor’s internal accounting needs may be confusing or maddening to customers.

So how do you identify the unintended consequences of your processes on the customer experience? You have several options.  Start with a common-sense review of your processes. A more systematic approach is to create a customer journey map for each process. And, if you want to be cutting edge, apply neuroscience to see what’s going on in your customer’s brain.

1 Common-sense, Self-examination

An easy first step is to engage in a bit of common-sense, self-examination of any given process (sales protocol, ordering, internal hand-offs, etc.). First outline the process’ broad steps and parameters; and then ask yourself two questions:

• Who receives the primary benefit from how the process is structured and executed?
• If you personally had to go through the same process with one of your vendors how would you feel?

If the benefits of the process primarily accrue to your organization or if you would personally find annoying or troublesome, chances are it has a negative impact on prospect/customer experience and perceptions.

This basic evaluation can highlight easy fixes. It can also help your department/organization start to think in terms of customer experience, rather than internal operations. A critical aspect of this is to consider is the emotional component a customer’s experience.  Negative emotions like frustration, mistrust, or anger stick with a customer much longer than the specific details of the experience.  These emotions become embedded in the brand’s perception, and are difficult to dislodge.

A simple way to formalize the investigation is to add a question to your customer experience surveys: How easy was it for you to… (place an order, get an answer to your question, etc.)? Alternatively, combing through the open-ended responses in your NPS survey may identify trouble spots.

2 Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey mapping systematically captures the broad steps customers go through in their overall relationship with your firm. The technique can also drill down on the steps associated with a specific process (e.g. sales interactions, customer support). Simply defining each of the steps a customer/prospect must go through can identify trouble spots that hide in plain sight. Perhaps there is a lack of official transition from being a new customer to an established customer. Perhaps in-person training is only available in major metro areas. Etc.

Defining the steps in a process may identify intuitive problems such as those above. However, it will not necessarily identify all of the areas customers find confusing or hard to deal with – something that seems obvious and simple to you may feel complicated and opaque to customers. Primary research with customers and prospects can bring the market’s perspective into your customer journey maps and ensure they reflect how the market feels, not what you think.

3 Neuroscience

Advances in neuroscience now enable you to literally see what is going on in your customer’s brain. Tasks and activities that are hard to navigate put a greater cognitive load on the customer’s brain. Neuroscience applications measure cognitive load in real-time to identify the specific points in a process where individuals struggle most. As promising as this technology is, the field is new; the viable applications of the approach are limited; and, the tools available are mixed. Buyer Brain’s Effort Assessment Score© is a good one to investigate to get a better understanding of how neuroscience is being used today.

Conclusion

Regardless of how sophisticated your approach, it’s worth putting some efforts toward evaluating how easy it is for your customers to do business with you. All of their experiences with you—not just your product/service—influence their perceptions of your brand, their loyalty and likelihood to recommend you to others.