Improving Customer Experience: Fixing Your Weakest Link

Your customer doesn't care who your weakest link works for

A business can get almost everything right and still leave a customer with a poor impression because of one part of the process it hasn't paid enough attention to.

And sometimes that part isn't even under your direct control.

I experienced this myself when I needed to replace some ceiling tiles.

I found a company online and sent them a photograph of what I needed. They immediately identified the tile, called me with the different pricing options and made the whole process remarkably easy.

Their website had worked. Their response was excellent. They clearly knew their stuff and gave me confidence that I'd found the right supplier.

Buying from them was a no-brainer.

Everything continued swimmingly until the tiles arrived.

Then somebody else took over

Outside its local area, the company used a courier.

Unfortunately, the driver who delivered my order clearly wasn't having a good day. He didn't want to carry the tiles into the office, wouldn't put them where they needed to go, threw them down, kicked other things that were in his way and couldn't get away quickly enough.

None of those people worked for the tile company.

But I was still their customer.

From my perspective, the courier was simply another part of the experience of buying from them.

That's the problem with outsourcing part of your customer journey. You can outsource the activity, but you can't outsource the effect it has on your reputation.

Where are the gaps you don't control?

Delivery is an obvious example, but there are plenty of others.

Your customer might interact with an installation company, outsourced call centre, software platform, finance provider, agency, subcontractor or another third party as part of buying from you.

Internally, the same principle applies across departments. Marketing might generate the opportunity, sales might win the business and operations might deliver it, but the customer doesn't experience those as separate functions.

They experience your company.

So it's worth asking:

• Which parts of our buying and delivery process are outside our direct control?

• Do those partners understand the standards our customers expect?

• How do we know what experience they're actually delivering?

• What happens when something goes wrong?

• Who takes responsibility for putting it right?

How you respond matters too

I called the tile company afterwards and told them what had happened. They apologised and said they would raise it with the courier.

That was a perfectly reasonable first response.

But it was also the last I heard about it.

I wasn't looking for compensation. I had told them because I thought they would want to know, and because their otherwise excellent service was being undermined by something they might not see themselves.

A follow-up would have told me they'd taken the problem seriously and done something about it.

And that's an important part of feedback that businesses sometimes miss. Listening isn't enough if nothing visibly changes afterwards.

Find the weakest link before your customers do

When something isn't working, don't restrict the investigation to the part of the business you own directly or the department you think is responsible.

Look across the whole process, including suppliers and partners, because that's what your customer experiences.

One weak link can undermine an awful lot of good work elsewhere.

If you know something isn't quite working but aren't sure where the problem sits, let's have a conversation.