The CEO in our focus group complained of having her personnel wait two hours in a warehouse to pickup a product that the sales person confirmed was in stock. She moved her business to another firm that offered easy purchase and pickup. One focus group participant even viewed the daily presence of delivery truck drivers as key to doing business easily. The good news is that operations staff looked into the process and discovered opportunities to reduce this wait time and improve customer satisfaction dramatically. So how many hoops do you make your customers jump through after they’ve already decided on your company’s product? Play customer for a day and tell your VP of Operations what you experienced. Can you cut out steps when weighed against all the effort that went into the point of purchase?

How easy do you make it for customers to handle price negotiations?

We wince to see nine months of selling cycle end in a flurry of price negotiations gone bad at the eleventh hour. One transaction we examined had a Fortune 500 buyer and a small software vendor both willing to do a deal at a certain six figure price tag but all the posturing and second guessing of motives on both sides became too personal and ultimately cost the deal. What happened in between the decision to buy and the action of cutting a PO? Neither side had a well mapped out concession plan. For example, when the buyer asked for a 30% price cut the seller didn’t quickly lay out the other knobs to turn in the negotiation such as shorter payment terms, reduced feature set, longer contract length, marketing support, etc. By winging it, the sales team put the customer through too much work to evaluate counter offers. Negotiations are often adversarial especially if it involves procurement managers. But they don’t have to be burdensome and inefficient to the customer. Put your sales reps through a role play to see how they handle this.

How well do you handle a last minute change to the order?

Here’s a consumer example. I recently attempted to change wireless service providers based on a promotion promising a new, cool phone with a nice monthly package. After deciding to go for it, I went through the wireless provider’s website to place the order, gave them my credit card number, answer a bunch of marketing questions, then hit submit. Minutes later I realized I forgot to add my second phone to the order. I called the company and went into voicemail hell followed by customer service reps who didn’t know how to handle a minor change. I ended up canceling the entire purchase and going back to my original provider. Ironically, I made an even worse error with them by forgetting to request my old area code. They handled the post-purchase change request cheerfully, quickly, and professionally. I’m a customer for life! How do your people and your system handle a customer change post-purchase?

These are but three simple examples to demonstrate weak links in the whole buying process. We strongly encourage you to play customer for a day and experience for yourself what you put your customers through day in day out. You might be very surprised to find a handful of changes you can make quickly that will improve your customer retention. And if you’d like a customer buying process audit, just contact us at sridhar@pacifica-group.com.