How healthy is your organization’s ability to deliver a great customer experience and ensure that customers are successful with your product?
Companies all set out to design operations that support successful adoption and value realization of the product but that does not necessarily guarantee successful customer outcomes.
Businesses believe they are doing everything right but how do they know?
Metrics are certainly the way to measure this, but the problem is that many of them are lagging indicators.
Retention and churn rates, NPS and other similar customer satisfaction metrics do indicate business health, but unless the results are good, by the time a company reviews these metrics it has already slipped up in delivering on the promise to its customers.
The solution must lie in assessing how consistently the business can drive a solid experience and customer success.
What then are those intelligent and proactive metrics and what happens if they do not exist?
How can an organization assess its ability to deliver an exception customer experience, identify the gaps and address them sooner than later?
I have developed a simple diagnostic tool called the 4C Diagnostic Check™ that I use with clients to quickly and easily identify operational gaps that inhibit the customer journey.
It is an effective way at proactively identifying flaws in your processes for healthy customer success.
4C Diagnostic Check™: What It Is.
The 4C’s stand for Comprehension, Consistency, Clarity and Control.
The following is what each “C” tests for and what corresponding observable actions are required in order to be healthy (i.e. C [tests for]: Observable actions).
Comprehension [experience]: Setting customer expectations.
Does your organization listen to and understand what the customer is trying to achieve and use its experience guiding other customers successful through the journey, to set expectations accordingly?
Consistency [trust]: The promise to deliver.
Does your organization establish itself as a trusted advisor by acting consistently on its promise to deliver the value the customer is seeking as a result of buying your product?
Clarity [communications]: Is the value proposition clear? Is the messaging resonating?
Does your organization clearly communicate with customers to make sure they understand what the overarching objective is and how your organization will assist them in realizing value?
Control [operations]: Ensure that nothing falls through the cracks.
Is your organization’s operations setup to deliver customer success ensuring that nothing falls through the cracks in the process?
When verifying whether a company’s processes are supporting the customer’s journey simply run the 4C’s through the process.
If any of the observable actions are missing, an organization needs to proactively address those as soon as possible as the gaps will impede the success of its customers.
Gaps do not prevent success, but they do increase the likelihood of it being harder for customers to achieve their objectives, and operationally more inefficient for your organization.
Bottom Line
Well intentioned companies design their operational models to make customers successful with the product but that does not guarantee successful outcomes for the customer.
Organizations need to validate that their processes work at delivering on the promise.
Metrics are the common norm for testing business health however the metrics typically used by SaaS organizations are lagging indicators.
Companies must therefore find ways to assess operations proactively before it impedes customer success.
The 4C Diagnostic Check™ is an effective means of performing a checkup on your practice of customer success.
DesiredPath 4C Diagnostic Check™, it is not just a clever alliteration, it’s a critical and compelling component of competent Customer Success!
Stay tuned for next week’s article as I will walk through a real, life example of the 4C Diagnostic Check™ to illustrate how it works.