Customer Journeys: The Biggest Source of Friction Could Be You
Ten years ago Amazon introduced same-day delivery, probably the single most important feature in cementing their dominance of the eCommerce industry. They did this after 10 years of innovating on the online shopper experience - recommended purchases, one-click payments, experiments on how website latency affected conversion rates - and they understood that the biggest source of friction in their buyer experience was waiting for your package to arrive. We all have an idea in our head about what makes a great customer journey, a great buyer experience. When Francis asked me out of the blue, the first thing that came to mind was my experience buying an engagement ring last year, but I could just as easily point to the experience of creating a new Slack team. They are magical experiences. You never see what's going on behind the curtain, and you never have any downtime to think about it. Is my package already in Paris? How did Amazon know what I was going to order? Doesn't matter. It's already arrived before I can begin to comprehend how they possibly do that at scale. For SaaS companies today, increasing revenue is often about removing friction. The product team designs and improves features so that customers don't have time to wonder whether the competition is building a better product. Customer Success is looking at customer health metrics to identify customers before they even think about churning and improve their results. Marketing & Sales have a plethora of data & engagement tools so that they know everything about who their engaging with from Clearbit-enhanced Drift Bots to segmented Outreach campaigns encouraging prospects to signup for Webinars or jump on a call.
You are the friction.
So why is it that 90% of SaaS companies take more than five minutes to follow up on a request to schedule a demo? Francis suggests going through your own customer journey - ideally by signing up with a friend's email account, especially if your friend is a great fit for your product - to get the full experience. If it's not the ~48 hours of follow-up time that'll make you feel the friction, it's the ~5 days between the demo request and the phone call that'll make you rethink your process. What makes it take so long?
- Lead data enhancement
- Territories/routing rules
- SDR first-response latency
- Email back-and-forth to validate interest and find a time to talk.
It's easy to understand each one of those steps - after all, everything above (accept maybe the emails) feel very logical - the only thing that's missing in the equation is the customer experience. SaaS companies are eager to over-optimize for the sake of being fair, applying rigorous rules to lead assignment, and this often flies in the face of the customer journey. One of MadKudu's most popular features, the Fastlane - an enhancement to signup forms that allows highly-qualified leads to skip the form and go straight to a sales rep's calendar - is often difficult to implement initially because lead routing takes minutes. The customer eats the friction because of operational friction.
Remove friction. Prioritize customers.
It's easy to remove friction from the customer journey if you prioritize it. Calendly, for example, offers a great Team Scheduling feature that allows prospects to see an aggregate calendar for every potential representative and then choose a time that works for them, instead of displaying the representative's calendar after they've been round-robined with less available time slots. This puts the customer in the priority seat and sacrifices the possibility that Rep's who have less immediate availability in their calendar might get routed less leads. In fact, that's not a bad forcing function for making sure SDRs are prioritizing their time correctly. https://soundcloud.com/madkudu/madops-podcast-5-frictionless