As product managers, we are always on the hunt for the product feedback both positive or negative which helps us improve our product, build those features which can help the users solve their problem. But to get to this point, where we can get constructive feedback from our customers/users, it is important that they use it, and even before they use it they encounter two very important experiences which if not thought through carefully will leave with bad taste. This in turn can badly hit both your brand value and product experiences as a whole. Which might result in a higher bounce rate or an expensive adoption process.
In this blog I will be sharing my thoughts on two experiences which are part of the customer journey of a product and having them preconceived and well designed can definitely give an edge over the competition. More importantly delight your customers even before they start using your product.
I think I was able to get you curious enough, then now it is time to get rolling.
There are two experiences which are very critical for any product even before the customer actually gets his/her hands dirty with the product. And they are:
- Buying Experience
- Onboarding Experience.
In this blog, I will be writing about the buying experience and will be sharing my thoughts about the onboarding experience in my next blog.
At face value, we may think that designing this experience would be the responsibility of the sales. But with the entire customer journey going digital with human interventions for help at critical junctures, it has become essential for Product Management to think through and thoughtfully curate this experience for their customers. Because messing up at this stage can easily cost you the customer(s). The below anecdote will make the argument clear:
Buying Experience
I had pre-booked the latest model of Samsung Note series mobile phone and as I owned an older model of Note series, had opted for a trade-in. While booking it was mentioned that the trade-in offered price for the exchange of the old handset my change based on the condition. When the day of delivery the team which came to deliver the pre-booked new handset was also responsible for the pickup of the old one. They diagnosed an issue with the my handset and outrightly rejected it. This still looked logical, but with this was tied the delivery of the new handset. They could not deliver the new phone to me unless they can pickup the old one. I offered to pay the discounted amount to get the new phone, but according to them, Samsung did not offer this option. Poof goes the first touch point experience. Then to get the booking amount which was deducted from the actual handset amount, I had to write couple of mails and call the customer care, explain the situation and took more than a week to get the money back and then another few weeks to get the booking amount back. I still tried buying the phone offline from a store but after 3 unsuccessful attempts(either due to colour not available, or the issue with the offer code), I just got too frustrated and gave up. Eventually I decided to buy iPhone instead from an apple store. Samsung just lost a loyal customer and that was not because of the product experience, the stage which I could never reach, but due to an awful buying experience. I am sure some others might have had the same experience, and might have costed Samsung those many loyal or first time customers.
So now the question is, what could have been done to make the experience better?
The buying experience should have been well thought through. Right from the time, the customer buys/pre-books till the product is delivered to the customer. In the above-mentioned experience, two simple changes could have delivered a smooth if not a wow-inducing experience.
- Informing the customer transparently about the process, in this case about the trade-in process could help them take better decision.
- Giving customer an option to opt-out of the trade-in discount even at the last moment and pay the difference. Equip the delivery team with all options that they can provide to your customer, train and instruct the team to handle this scenario and make the customer feel comfortable instead of being anxious and ensure the delivery to smoothen the buying experience.
- Even the refund should be trackable in case the need arise, this is to ensure that the customer may be disappointed for a reason that he/she understands but does not end up the relationship with your brand in a disgruntled state.
- The store application should become the one stop shop to reach out to any support or queries related to order so that you do not make customers run pillar to post and in the process let associate horrible/terrible experience with your brand.
Now the question is, does this apply for the enterprise SaaS products?
The short answer to this is yes. There is no substitute for a good or delightful experience that you can provide to your customers, whether it is in the B2C space or B2B space. In B2B space this experience becomes even more important as it is generally not a one of transaction but a continuous relationship. In the cloud computing era, with more and more vendors having SaaS-based B2B offering and a well-thought-through digital buying experience your enterprise customers is the need of the hour. If a good digital buying experience is a recipe for a happy beginning of a relationship with your enterprise customers, then the three most important ingredients of the recipe are:’
Transparent and digitally tracked buying process with a single-window to guide buyers through the entire buying process:
Buying software for an enterprise is normally a calibrated decision with a long-term commitment and may have an impact across different departments/divisions in an organization. Therefore it may have involvement of both financial and legal aspects to it. So providing a single pane of glass for tracking things like receipts, licenses agreements, signing of any legal document by various stakeholders of both parties across different departments/divisions or even different geographies if the customer may so require, contributes to a delightful buying experience.
Communication touch points at conclusion of each logical phase in the buying life cycle.
The entire buying process should be broken down into more logically independent phases where the financial transaction is just one of them. And communicating the status, the next steps, the perquisites for the next action, and the point of contact for every phase of the buying lifecycle would go a long way to make sure that your customer is not anxious at any given point of time while the buying process is still in progress. This adds to your brand equity and brand loyalty in a big way.
Proactive identification of any anomalies in the buying process and action to help the buyer in concluding the process.
Last but not the least, however careful we are while designing the buying experience for our customers, there will always be corner cases, the anomalies. The chance of hitting these anomalies are even greater in the B2B business because, each organization is different in aspects of culture, structure, processes, and most importantly people. So having a digitally tracked buying process that tracks the key metrics like time spent during each stage of the buying process, queries raised by the customers during the buying process can help you easily identify the anomalies and take preemptive action to help the buyer in concluding the process.
Digitized buying experience designed to wow your customer and more importantly the customer-centricity being embedded into the DNA of the experience, would require a deep collaboration of the product, user experience, and sales teams and a deeper understanding of the buyer personas and the stakeholders involved.
Cheers!