Three Ways To Close The Experience Gap for Digital-touch Customers.

There is a lot of content online that covers how to build experiences for customer acquisition from websites and all sorts of landing pages. Not much has been shared about experiences for paid customers. It’s as if the holy grail is all about converting free users to paid and then businesses can sit back and enjoy the fruits of their labor.

In reality, a lot of businesses are struggling to retain existing customers given the pandemic landscape, and continue to prove ROI. As a subscriber to several SaaS products, both at work and home, I find myself peppered with ads, pop-ups, and all sorts of notifications until I make the so-called purchase. If I glance at an ‘Online Preschool’ page on Instagram, rest assured that the business will throw ads at me no matter where I go. From my Facebook profile to YouTube to every other website, it’s like the ‘Cookie of Conversion’ follows us endlessly. Make the purchase! Poof! The cookie is gone and now you’re left to figure out the product on your own. Especially, if you bought the lowest tier license.

This is the first in the many Experience Gaps that a consumer will face. Beginner and novice users of SaaS products are often left on their own to ‘figure it out’. Those who understand this problem, companies such as CloudApp, Outreach, Chorus to name a few go above and beyond and take the extra step to start you off on a nurture path. More often though, you’re bombarded with marketing content and eventually forced to unsubscribe.

As a global leader responsible for retaining customers and building a trusted advisory journey that is meant to be scalable and digital touch, I’m often prioritizing between adding more humans, more automation, or more policy and process improvements. No one size fits all and there is certainly no magic bullet.

So what are some things that solution providers can keep in mind when building experiences for paid customers?

1. Empathy and personalization — This does not mean targeted advertising. It simply means putting yourself in the shoes of your customers. What are the problems they’re trying to solve? Are they from a certain demographic and what industry do they belong to? Are they tech-savvy or typically only checking emails on their computers? Understanding customers is under-rated and segmenting them is under-utilized. I’d recommend starting there. There are lots of articles online that cover both topics. The key here is to start with an analysis of the most common problems and pain-points that your customers are looking to solve and not, the highest frequency use cases that you deem will generate revenue.
2. Metrics Matter — Beyond just converting leads, MQLs, and SEO conversions, the world of paid customers is highly zoned in on ‘product engagement’. It sounds straight-forward but, an often overlooked metric when it comes to retention is ‘Product engagement’. I’ve read a ton about churn rate, renewal rate, revenue churn, growth rate, repeat purchase ratio, and a bunch of other $$ metrics. In reality, if your customers aren’t deriving value from your product, if they’re not meaningfully engaging and logging in and ‘getting stuff done’, you have not unlocked product value and will likely not see them repurchasing again.
3. Great customer experiences are a combination of what your employees can deliver, how your product is received, and the value that customers can derive. In short, it’s the trifecta of employee experience, product experience, and customer experience that creates the glue between what you put out in the market vs. how the market receives it. Underinvesting in the teams behind the scenes that build a paid digital customer experience or even undermining the ROI that one can receive by automating a good chunk of customer engagement tactics is a classic mistake. While it’s easy to hire customer advocates, success managers, and sales development to be the brute force army, a simple question defogs this dichotomy. How many times have you picked up your phone to be annoyed by a customer rep who is trying to ‘help’ or ‘advise’ you? Almost never! And yet, somehow there is a belief that calls and non-stop barraging of customers especially ones that are barely vested in a small paid license will yield stickiness and renewals.

Invest instead in a thoughtful amalgamation of out of product campaigns and webinars with in-product experiences that make it intuitive for customers to unlock value and solve business problems. This means breaking the silos between product, engineering, marketing, and sales and building cohesive features that integrate the human-touch with the digital-touch.

Source: Qualtrics

It’s about time we stepped out of the blind volley of digital marketing campaigns, SEO optimization to take a more rounded approach to build experiences for customers and users alike. Spotify’s ‘Skip Ads’ feature which gives customers the freedom to skip ads in the free offering is a great example of customer empathy. Building personalized surveys or touchpoints with employees in special situations is another way that Qualtrics is pioneering the employee experience methodology. Being fully conscious of experiences that customers will go through is the first step to solving this customer experience gap.