Avoid the Vendor Relationship Gap
By reducing assumptions about customer satisfaction.
Employees often make assumptions about customers.
For context, I’m part of a team that advises businesses in three ways:
The Problem
Winners consistently implement these three business intentions. The rest don’t. How do I know? Well, at the beginning of our advisory engagements, we assess how well employees know their customers. Hands down, we rarely find employees who can objectively answer simple questions about their customers:
- How have customers felt about your business over the past month?
- How do those feelings compare with the annual trend?
Our intent is to gauge the degree to which employee assumptions are affecting customer experiences and their likelihood to recommend. You see, most businesses assume their customers are happy — most of those assumptions are wrong!
Business Risks
Assumptions about customers lead to real business risks.
- An offering that lacks clarity.
- An on-boarding process that requires more than new customers want to invest.
- A user experience that falls short of customers’ expectations.
- Inconsistent customer support.
- Inconsistent customer perceptions of value.
- Customer reluctance to recommend the business offering.
Avoiding the Customer Delivery Gap
Our guidance has been leveraged across a range of industries:
- B2B: Healthcare, Medical Devices, Oil & Gas, Distribution & Logistics
- B2C: Food & Beverage, Entertainment, Packaged Goods
- The combined revenues for these businesses exceeds $300B.
Through these advisory engagements, we’ve learned that businesses must reduce the amount of assumptions being made about customers to avoid the Customer Delivery Gap. Here’s a checklist to ensure your employees make fewer assumptions about customers:
- Make the customer experience easy for employees to understand.
- Get on-going feedback about customers’ experiences.
- Make the feedback results easily accessible across business functions.
- Highlight the lessons learned from customer feedback.
- Highlight new employee behaviors that develop as a result of listening to customers.
If this post stimulates thoughts, please share.
@LawrenceMcGlown
chief executive officer
getSayDo
lmcglown@getSayDo.com
