Are Your Customers Surrendering Rather Than Buying?

A recent Tweet from ohh_la_la pointed me to a September 2009 study of the financial impact of poor customer service when shopping online either from a computer or mobile device.

The study was sponsored by Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Inc.

Bottom line impact: poor experiences resulting in abandoned buying sessions translated to a loss of 15.3 billion pounds (GBP) in revenue. (That equates to approximately 24 billion USD.)

The study reports that customers surrendered their purchase intentions due to:

• Having to repeat information
• Feeling trapped in automated self-service
• Being forced to wait too long for service
• Interacting with representatives who have no knowledge of the service history (or consumer value)
• Unable to easily switch between communication channels

With all the money invested on CRM, call center, and database applications over the past years, what's really causing customers to wave the white flag and surrender?

Too many customer touch points are designed to satisfy the needs of the vendor, not the customer. Granted, there is a cost to everything and creating an excellent customer experience is not "free". Vendors must at least look at the most egregious causes of "customer surrender" and improve those, if not eliminate them.

Here are a few basic ideas for eliminating "customer surrender":

• Use web traffic data to identify where in the purchase process customers are leaving. What's missing on those pages? What's confusing? What's taking too much time? Is the "call to action" clearly identified?
• Dial into your call center at random times of the day and present different challenges to service reps. Are they cordial, prepared, efficient and knowledgeable? Do they have easy access to customer history and an understanding of each customer's life-time value?
• Spend time at your website as a customer. Buy items. Try to cancel orders or add new items to orders. Ask for help.
• Shorten your automated self-service telephone menu to something manageable. Keep the descriptions brief and clear. Explain how callers can get to a human being if they are confused. Tell callers how long the wait will be for service.
• Don't confuse inside knowledge of systems and processes with the experience of your customers.
• Add a question to your order page that asks for feedback about the experience.

Need motivation to get started?

1. Calculate the cost of customer surrenders. An estimate of an average sale multiplied by the number of surrenders will suffice for this exercise.
2. Calculate the impact of reducing customer surrenders by 5% on the top and bottom lines.
3. Allot some portion of the financial benefit of reducing customer surrenders to fund the reduction efforts.

Get busy finding ways to cause your customers to put down their white flags and become brand standard bearers instead.

Let me know what works for you.