How to uncover “hidden” customer experience issues in a scaled organization

When an organization is new and small, it’s relatively easy to spot problems with the customer experience. Everyone, from the CEO on down, is much closer to the customers. And in the early days, an organization hasn’t developed the silos that often cause blind spots in larger organizations. In short, the full customer experience is easier to “see” — including the parts that are less than optimal.

But getting the customer experience right isn’t a one-time exercise. What worked in the early days can easily fall apart as an organization goes through rapid growth. I’m going to share an experience about uncovering a “hidden” customer experience issue in a rapidly scaling organization — an issue that was having a major impact both on customers and employees and was hiding in plain sight.

Providing a great customer experience is of course an organization-wide effort, but it’s helpful to have a person or small team specifically focused on looking at the entire end-to-end customer experience, especially in a larger organization where silos naturally develop. The GM of the business division I worked for at the time recognized this and asked me to assemble a small cross-functional team with the specific task of identifying friction points and coming up with new and innovative ways to improve the customer experience. He knew that it was easy for an organization that had experienced tremendous growth over a few short years to lose the forest for the trees.

My team and I used a number of methodologies to identify where there might be customer friction:

• Anecdotal evidence from conversations with customer-facing teams. Not just the managers, but the folks who were doing the day-to-day customer work.
• Anecdotal evidence from customer conversations.
• Product usage data.
• Churn data, exit interviews, etc.

Once we had a customer experience hypothesis based on these methods, we would then use what in my opinion is one of the most powerful tools for quantifying the customer experience: surveys.

Surveys often get a bad rap. “Only angry customers fill out surveys!” “Almost everybody ignores them!” But that’s because the surveys organizations tend to send out are so generic that that’s the result you can expect. What I’ve found is that customers LOVE to fill out surveys and will do so in significant numbers, IF the survey is extremely targeted and personalized. And done right, it’s an incredible source of information.

So through the course of our explorations into the customer experience, we kept hearing one theme over and over from both internal teams and customers. And that was that customers often had a need for a type of help that we didn’t offer. These were customers who had been using our software for a number of years, where the folks originally involved in the implementation were long gone, and they knew they needed to take a fresh look at their system and evaluate how they might better use it to meet their current needs. They weren’t at the point where they needed a formal re-implementation from the services team, because they didn’t know what their requirements would be. And they didn’t need break/fix support, because things weren’t broken, they were just potentially not as optimized as they could be. How-to videos and documentation were not quite right either, because they didn’t know what they needed. I was aware of these issues because they sometimes made it to me as the head of customer success. But the problem was far greater than I realized once I had the bigger picture.

Based on this anecdotal feedback, we developed both an internal employee survey as well as a customer survey. The customer survey was designed to pinpoint the details of the unmet need and to quantify the impacts on customer satisfaction. It came back to us with the results we expected: many customers had this need and wished we had a solution.

But what we got back from our internal teams shocked us. We had asked similar questions as the customer survey, but also asked about how often they were seeing this, what they would do when they had this situation, and how much time it took them to handle it. Across the board, from sales to customer success to support, our customer facing teams were spending countless hours trying to help these customers, usually unsuccessfully given the lack of a protocol or solution. We had salespeople telling us they spent multiple hours per week trying to navigate the organization and get help for their customer — time they should have been using on new business. Their frustration and belief that this was the number one way we were failing our customers came across loud and clear.

It was right there in front of our faces, all along. But because the organization was so large and the feedback so anecdotal, we hadn’t realized the scope of the problem.

How we went about fixing the issue is a subject for another post. The take-away here is that to improve or maintain an excellent customer experience, make sure you are always listening to what the customer-facing teams are telling you, and if you keep hearing the same customer experience anecdotes over and over again, seek to quantify what you’re hearing. The results may surprise you!