Customer Experience: How It Can Increase or Kill Your Revenue

Why Your Customer Experience Could Be Costing You Revenue

Think about the last time a business made you feel looked after.

Not just served. Looked after.

Now think about the last time one made you feel like a number. You probably remember that one even better.

That's customer experience. And in this episode of May Contain Jab, Jab and May make the case that it's the most underrated thing in your business. Get it right and you spend less chasing new customers. Get it wrong and people leave without telling you why.

It's how people feel

May puts it simply. Customer experience is how your customer feels as they work with you. Not what you deliver. How it feels to get it.

Jab thinks it starts even earlier, before someone knows they have a problem. Most businesses jump straight to the welcome email and the thank-you message. But what did you do before that? Did you help them understand what was going on? Did you make it simple?

When the tech gets in the way

May was booking a massage for her boyfriend's birthday. The spa's AI chatbot was brilliant. Fast answers, all the detail she needed.

Then it asked for her email, phone number, full name and her partner's birthday before it would show her a single available time. She hadn't even decided to book. And they already had her number, because she was messaging them on WhatsApp.

She booked anyway. But plenty of people wouldn't have.

Jab's story hits closer to home. His local Starbucks in Bracknell is one of the top three in the country for app orders. He's stopped buying lattes there.

The wait is now around 15 minutes. He reckons it's quicker to drive out, buy beans, get home and make one himself. The staff he used to laugh with are too stressed to chat. The app was supposed to make things better. For Jab, it made them worse.

Walk it before you automate it

So where do you start? May's answer: be your own customer.

Go through your business the way a customer would. Write down every step. Then write down everything that could go wrong: the email that never arrives, the form nobody finishes, the question nobody answers.

"Only when everything is mapped out and very clear, does it make sense to start introducing automations," she says.

Because automations don't fail on the normal days. They fail on the odd ones you didn't plan for.

The little things stick

Some of the best examples in the episode cost almost nothing.

Jab had been using FreeAgent, his accounting software, for a while. One winter, a pair of socks turned up in the post from them. He still talks about it.

Loyalty works the same way. Jab ignored his Nectar card for years because the rewards felt miles away. Once the discounts became instant, he started using it again. The sooner people feel the benefit, the more likely they are to stay.

Or as Jab puts it: "It's a party if you get it right. It's a nightmare if you don't."

Try this before your coffee goes cold

Grab a pen. Sketch out every point where a customer deals with you, from first hearing about you to after they've paid.

At each point, ask yourself one question: is this making me money, or quietly costing me it?

Pick one thing to fix this quarter. Just one.

Want the rest? Listen to the full episode for the two-hour Amazon voucher saga, what the Mercedes garage gets right, and the line from May that Jab wants as a tattoo.