"Customer" Experience
Is it truly “customer experience” if the party in question isn’t a customer? This week, we explore the advantages of finding clarity in defining who is and who is not a customer. Reply to let me know what you thought of today’s newsletter.
A small hobby I have is picking on how things are named. Usually when I pick on things named “customer experience,” it’s because a team that has branded itself as “CX” is really just responding to support emails all day, which, why not just call yourself “customer support”? Maybe it’s easier to recruit people to work themselves to death supporting luggage customers if you tweak the name? I mean, it’s not really a big deal. Naming things is hard, but still, the name of a thing should somewhat match what the thing is.
Earlier this year, I had a brief stint in a practice called Customer Experience Management. This was the language I used to describe the practice:
Customer Experience Management is the FullStory practice dedicated to ensuring that customers have a positive experience at all touch points in the customer journey. It’s our mission to get everyone at FullStory on the same page so we’re delivering a consistently positive experience to customers.
Seen from the perspective of the customer journey, that is, from the customer’s perspective of their relationship to our business, I think this is a fair definition. But one thing that’s been bugging me lately is how, technically, a customer really isn’t a customer until after they’ve, you know, agreed to pay money for a product or service. So is pre-sales “customer experience” really “customer” experience? Or something else?
Photo by Ben McCormack. Taken on a recent trip to Jekyll Island.
A technical definition of a customer
Before we go much further, I suppose I should propose and defend my technical definition of a customer:
A customer is a person or business who pays you money in exchange for a product or service.
By extension, if you have a relationship with a person or business and they are not paying you money, they are not a customer. A point I made in the first issue of this newsletter is that there are three stakeholders to any business:
Let’s sum up the relationship in terms of money: Shareholders invest money in hopes of generating a return on their investment. Employees receive money in exchange for their time and work for the business. Customers give money in exchange for a valuable product or service.
And yes, the model has to be summed up in terms of money, because without money, you can’t run a healthy business. So expressed in terms of money, your customers are the ones paying you money for what you do, and if they’re not paying you money, they’re not customers.
Pro: Why you should avoid equivocating on "customer"
If you’re too fast and loose with the definition of a customer, you may find it difficult to appropriately and clearly allocate resources to serve your customers, which could lead to a negative customer experience for your paying customers.
For example, let’s say you have 10 bugs in your product engineering backlog that all surfaced from the customer support inbox. Magically, they all have the exact same level of effort (they’re all labeled “child’s medium” because your t-shirt sizes are extra specific). To further the magic, the severity of the issues is roughly the same, all labeled with “kind of okay but really we should fix this ASAP”.
The problem is, you only have the resources to work on 5 of these bugs this week. How do you decide which of these escalations to work on first? You decide to look at annual recurring revenue (ARR) and prioritize the highest-paying customers first.
But wait! Upon further inspection, you realize that some of the high-ARR “customers” aren’t actually paying customers, at least not yet. They’re prospective customers. You dig a little deeper, taking a look in Salesforce for where you stand with the prospects who are in the list. The first one in the list, sorted by ARR, looks like a late stage opportunity. That seems pretty important. But the next one in the list doesn’t even have an opportunity in Salesforce. And you notice that sales has reached out 4 times, with no response from the prospect. Maybe skip this one for now. The third one on the list is from an actual paying customer (phew). Let’s work on that one. And so on.
If you equivocate on treating everyone like a customer, you could end up diminishing the experiencing of a paying customer in favor of not-yet-paying prospect. Not that you shouldn’t serve prospects! But if you’re not clear on how you allocate resources, you could end up with a dark pattern where you’re frustratingly providing a negative customer experience for reasons you don’t understand.
I think that if you choose not to equivocate in your treatment of customers and prospects, you can find clarity by trying to answer two questions:
What percentage of your product resources are you going to dedicate to serving prospective customers via the sales process?
If you choose to consciously limit the product resources that are available to sales (via the first question above), what minimum qualifications does a prospective customer need to have to jump in priority?
Answering both questions should help ensure your paying customers receive a more consistent customer experience while also ensuring the pre-sales experience is optimized for those prospective customers most likely to commit to becoming a paying customer.
Contra: Why "Everyone is a customer"
On the other hand, there’s often real value in treating everyone like a customer. It’s not like you train your team to treat paying customers like royalty and provide long wait times and rude email responses to those lining up to pay you money (I dunno, somebody is probably doing this—email me so I can write about it next week). If anything, you might be providing a little extra to woo those prospective customers across the finish line. You want anyone who comes in contact with your business (maybe via your super switchboard team) to have an amazing experience. You want them to know what it will be like when they become a customer.
In this sense, this is what Customer Experience Management is all about. You know that not everyone will become a customer, but seen through the lens of the customer journey, you’re treating everyone as if they could potentially become a customer. That’s why you have voice and tone standards, a common set of values, and perhaps a cohesive CX strategy to ensure you’re providing a consistent experience across all touch points in the customer journey.
Perhaps a more specific term that encompasses the common experience pre- and post-sales would be “Brand Experience”. Qualtrics has an entire Brand Experience Management product that’s separate from their Customer Experience Management product. But when I think about the actual brass tax work I was intending to do in CX Management, it definitely aligned more with the Customer Experience Management product than the Brand Experience Management product. I dunno. Naming things is hard.
At the end of the day, be clear about who is and who is not a customer, but provide a consistent experience at all touch points in the customer journey.
Etc.
Usually when I look for things I’ve read recently, I open up the Pocket app and look at the articles I’ve saved. But I was on vacation last week, and I mostly just continued reading the Alexander Hamilton biography. I just finished the section on the reaction in the United States to the Reign of Terror as part of the French Revolution in 1794. Aside from the atrocities themselves, what I found most astounding is how readily US citizens formed into factions either against or for the French revolutionaries, seemingly on strict Federalist and Democratic-Republican party lines, respectively. Hamilton was horrified by the reports he heard from France. Jefferson, on the other hand:
Far from being repelled by bloodshed, Jefferson awaited the day when “kings, nobles, and priests” would be packed off to “scaffolds which they have been so long deluging with blood.”
Other things I’ve read:
Bryan Stevenson on how America can heal. “If you don’t know your history, you can’t really begin to understand what your obligations are, what your responsibilities are, what you should fear, what you should celebrate, what’s honorable and what’s not honorable.”