Business owners don’t (often) sit there thinking about “customer experience”. In fact, I don’t think most business owners really think about ‘customer experience’ at all ( unless they are in big corporate firms with a dedicated team!).
Business owners are thinking about sales, revenue, getting new clients in, keeping the ones they’ve got, and trying to make sure everything is running as it should. And more often than not, they’re doing a lot of the right things. The team are busy, work is getting delivered, conversations are happening.
But there’s still that feeling that something isn’t quite working as well as it could. On paper, everything looks like it should be ok. But the results you need aren’t happening.
And often it falls at the feet of the people that talk to the clients / customers. Customer Success. Customer Service. Sales.
It’s not usually one big issue you can point to. It’s more a sense that things take longer than they should, customers ask more questions than expected, or the team are having to step in and pick things up more often than they’d like. Or worst still, payments are late / withheld causing cash flow issues.
When you look a bit closer, it tends to come down to lots of small moments that don’t quite join up. Things might not be fully clear at the start, or a handover isn’t as smooth as it needs to be, or people are working in slightly different ways without realising it, or systems are not working together well or the data that’s being fed into them isn’t quite as it should be.
None of it feels like a big problem on its own, but combined, over time it creates an experience that feels a bit disjointed.
And your customers do notice that. It shows up in the way they hesitate, ask for reassurance, take longer to make decisions, or sometimes just don’t move forward at all.
At the same time, your team feel it too. They’re answering questions that could have been avoided, chasing things that should already be in place, and stepping in to fix issues that didn’t need to happen in the first place. So, everything starts to take a bit more time and a bit more effort than it should.
What’s interesting is that this doesn’t really sit in one part of the business. It’s not just a sales issue, or something for delivery to sort out, or something you can hand over to customer success to fix. It’s in how everything connects, from the first conversation through to the work being delivered and beyond.
And that’s the bit that often gets missed. Particularly if your business has grown quite quickly (well done if it has, but fast growth comes with its own issues!).
When things don’t feel quite right, the natural reaction is to try and fix a part of the business. Adjust the sales approach, tweak how things are delivered, or ask someone to “look after the customer better”.
But the experience your customer has is shaped across all of those moments, not just one of them.
There are a few easy ways to start spotting where things might not be as joined up as they could be.
One of the simplest is to pick a recent customer and just walk through what actually happened from their point of view. Not how it’s meant to work, but what really happened. Where did they need to ask a question, wait for something, or get something clarified?
It’s also worth asking your team where they find themselves stepping in or picking things up more than they should. Those little moments where someone says “I’ll just sort that” are usually a sign that something earlier in the process isn’t quite working.
And then just look at how things move from one part of the business to another. Where something gets handed over, passed on, or picked up by someone else (which includes looking at the systems and processes). That’s often where things start to feel a bit unclear or inconsistent, both internally and for your customer.
You don’t need to fix everything at once. Even spotting one or two of those areas and tightening them up can make a noticeable difference.
And if you need advice, these are the sorts of problems I help solve for businesses, get in touch for a chat.
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