Which part of dealing with you would you fix first, if you were the customer?

Draw the whole path a customer takes with you. First contact, quotation, order, delivery, bill, payment, and whatever comes after.

Now mark where your attention goes. For most businesses it is heavily on the first two steps, because that is where the selling is and that is what feels like it matters.

The problems are almost always after that.

Why the middle is where it goes wrong

Once an order is won, everybody relaxes slightly. The customer stops being a prospect and becomes a job, and jobs are handled by people further from the conversation.

So the customer who was replied to in ten minutes last week now waits two days for an update. He notices the change more than you would expect, because the contrast is sharp.

This is also the period when he is deciding whether to come back, and that decision is made on how the middle felt, not on how the sale went.

The three questions that find your weak point

Where does the customer have to chase us? Anywhere he has to ask twice is a step where you are not telling him something he needed.

Where does he have to repeat himself? That is where your business is not passing information internally.

Where does he wait without knowing how long? Waiting is tolerable. Waiting without an estimate is what annoys people, and it costs nothing to fix.

Most businesses find their worst moment is between order confirmed and delivery arranged, where the customer hears nothing at all and quietly starts to worry.

Draw your customer path and mark the stretch where he hears nothing from you. How long is it?

Closing the quiet stretch after an order, where the customer hears nothing, is one of the cheapest improvements available to most businesses. Ask us what it would take in yours.