Let me tell you a story, the moral of which is that customer experience is everything and ignore it at your peril.
This is a cautionary tale, non-technology founders of technology business often think about the tech that they build purely from the perspective of the PRODUCT, and forget that the systems that support how the business sells and operate are important – perhaps even more important.
Some months back, I bought fibre broadband from BT. It serves a delicious 900Mb/s down, and something like 120Mb/s down. Like all modern sales processes, I did the whole thing online – didn’t speak to a single human until the engineer from Openreach came round to string a fibre to the house from a telegraph pole opposite. I did however, make him a cup of tea.
And all was good. But I remember the first day I had it installed I went to log into the BT business portal to set-up the Direct Debit but, guess what, whichever Tier 1 consulting chop shop they got to build this thing for however many million quid screwed up, and because the account was new, I could not log in.
I even was so bold to make an actual phone call to enquire as to why, to which I was told, “um, just wait a few days”. Meanwhile, the chair of the Tier 1 consulting chop shop that built it is tooling around Monaco in their Ferrai.
Which then me being me I completely forgot to ever go back and set-up this Direct Debit.
So from this point the service is great everyone loves it and every now and again I get an email from BT, which is sometimes marketing, and I’m also getting text messages from BT trying to sell me mobile phone services. The point is – BT is communicating with me. I’m getting a LOT of messages from them, because I’m a customer.
But every few weeks, I get a letter from the post, which has a BT logo on the envelope.
Now, I will open a letter if it looks official, but seeing as the only good letter I ever received was when I was about 10 and the envelope contained a £50 postal order, every single piece of post I have received since that junk has been junk mail. So I ignore the BT letter – and I wonder how many of you would do too.
Then at midnight this past Tuesday I get an email from BT saying my fibre service is being cancelled THAT MORNING, and I panic, find the last letter in the pile of unopened post, and yeah it’s a letter saying the service is being cancelled.
Cancelled because I didn’t ever remember to go back into the portal and set-up the direct debit, so I though the bill was being paid and it wasn’t.
BT had been merrily emailing me and texting me marketing junk about whatever idea popped into their collective heads for months, but this ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL CONTRACTUAL AND OPERATIONAL NOTICE, they decided to be the ONLY thing they sent through the physical post.
And they sent precisely zero emails or texts about the fact the invoices were going unpaid or that the service would be cancelled.
Look, I know what the lessons for me are in this, but the lessons for founders is that Customer Experience has to be an end-to-end, joined up, consistent journey. And what happened here was a classic customer experience fail. Because the parts of the journey that involved this exception case of non-payment didn’t align, dovetail, segue, was sympathetic with any other part of my customer journey.
Founders almost always forget to build out operational systems as they build their businesses. They take all the money they raise and give it to an agency to deliver JUST THE PRODUCT. So they risk the same as BT did here – i.e. having to amend and hack the customer experience by slapping in last minute, unsympathetic, minimum cost, minimal thought approaches.
This is one of those issues that’s wonderfully easy for founders to fix – you just have to be aware of the issue. Investments in systems to reduce friction in marketing, sales, and customers success can be done so inexpensively you could straightforwardly call them cheap to do. You just have to know that you HAVE to do it.
Specifically then, don’t sit down and design your PRODUCT. Sit down and design the whole CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE, that happens to include the product.