Have you ever questioned why, with regards to your organization’s Customer Experience, the results of your efforts haven’t met expectations?

Here are some missteps that I commonly see:

Your focus is in the wrong place

Many organizations believe that hiring Customer Success Managers or Account Managers will magically solve their customer retention issues. But customer retention doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with a customer’s success with your product. Instead, examine how successful your organization is at fulfilling a customer’s needs. If you are able to succeed at fulfilling a customer’s needs, you are more likely to retain them. Consider how your customers’ lives are improved by your products, not how successfully they are able to use your products. Successfully using a product doesn’t help a customer if it isn’t a product that they want or need.

Another frequent oversight is focusing only on the current sale rather than envisioning future sales. Each and every sales transaction is either establishing opportunities for future sales or killing any chance of them. By reducing your focus only to the sale immediately in front of you, you lose the forest for the trees. If that initial transaction is a positive experience for the customer, they may come back or not depending on whether you have given them a reason to return. A good first impression does not necessarily guarantee a life long customer. If a customer has a negative experience with your company, but you succeed in finding solutions for them, then the customer will feel more comfortable buying from you again knowing that if there is a problem, you will solve it. However, if a purchase experience is negative and your company does not produce an effort to make things right, then the customer is not likely to do business with you again. Focus on building a long-term relationship with a customer rather than just a single transaction.

You don’t know where to start

Too often organizations don’t think about their customers until the very end of a product development timeline, but customers need to be considered at the initial stages of product development and at every step along the way. They must also be thought of during every business decision or else you cannot claim to be “customer-centric.”  

Another common mistake is to create one “customer journey map” but every customer has an individual story with your organization. While it isn’t usually possible to create hundreds, thousands or even millions of individual customer journey maps, there are ways to analyze their specific journeys. CX isn’t ever linear. Customer journeys do not necessarily begin at the same place or go through the same stages in the same order. If you are able to integrate this concept into your CX strategy, it will undoubtedly improve the experience for all your customers.

You don’t have the right tools

Frequently, organizations rely on metrics to claim they are providing value for their customers. Yes, metrics have their place and data can be extremely useful, but numbers can also be skewed to show whatever you want or need them to show. One business claimed to have stellar survey results, yet their customer retention rates were dropping and their survey completion rates were incredibly low.

Another issue is believing that every customer has the same needs at the same time. CX is about building relationships. A relationship is something that must be tended to like a garden – it’s dynamic rather than static. If you build a brick structure, you can leave it there for years. A garden, however, needs to be watered and weeded with intention. Gardens will not thrive if you water each plant the same exact amount every day. Weather conditions and individual plants’ needs will dictate how much water to use. Similarly, customers will need different things at different times. 

Metrics and data analysis are great, but it’s what you do with that information that matters. Are you trying to make yourself look good or are you really working to satisfy customer needs?

You focus on “pain points”

If you hire someone to eliminate “pain points,” that indicates that, not only do you have customer pain points, but you’ve also allowed your organization to create them. Sometimes you do need to “see the dirt before you can clear it away,” but why allow space to create pain for your customers? Once you realize that a challenge exists for your customers, remove that obstacle immediately.

Also, if you only focus on where your organization is making mistakes with your customers, you will never find the missed opportunities to create a better CX. If you are too focused on putting out the fires, you will never find the opportunities to store the firewood somewhere else. The focus shouldn’t always be on removing “pain points.” It needs to be on doing a better job for your customers. 

Yes, you should eliminate “pain points,” but you should strive to build an organization that never creates them to begin with.

You see CX as something separate from your business

CX isn’t Marketing; Marketing is part of the CX; as is Operations, Finance, HR and IT. CX must be integrated into the business operations of an organization for it to have any impact. If one department is customer-centric and the rest are not, your CX strategy will fail. Everyone, including senior leadership, must be onboard with creating a customer-focused organization.

You don’t know what business you are in

Often, I find organizations miss the mark on what type of business they are in. Many businesses want to portray themselves as a tech company when that isn’t the case. Very few companies are truly tech companies. Facebook isn’t a tech company; they are in the business of connecting people. All business decisions are based on having customers connect with each other via the platform for the longest amount of time. Apple doesn’t see itself as a tech company, they see themselves as a lifestyle company. Apple is an identity, a tribe, not a widget. A cruise line isn’t selling a cabin on a ship; they’re selling a travel experience.

Your organization may have created software, but if that software helps customers lose weight, you’re a weight loss or lifestyle change organization not a tech company. And this disconnect is what causes your organization to lose sight of what it’s main goals should be especially when it comes to Customer Experience and Product Development. 

If you don’t know what business you are in or what products you’re really selling, how can you successfully serve your customers? You can’t. Do some soul searching and discover who your organization is and its reason for existing. Once you have those answers, the “how” becomes so much easier.

You believe you have the most amazing product ever

You may have created the next big thing but it’s no longer enough to create a good quality product as there are too many “good quality products” flooding the marketplace. Quality, these days, is a given. Quality products are a baseline - set your organization apart by creating an excellent Customer Experience. Give your customers a reason to return, not only to your product, but to your specific organization. Customer retention is a result, not of Customer Success Managers nor solely of a product, but rather of the positive experience a customer has with your organization.