Turning Negative Touchpoints into Positive Ones

Can sending an invoice actually enhance your customer relationship? Hear how to transform routine tasks into positive touchpoints and memorable experiences. In this episode, Jeannie Walters tackles the often-overlooked touchpoints like invoicing, providing three actionable strategies to infuse positivity and alignment with your brand's promise into these interactions. Whether you're managing a multinational enterprise or a small business, the insights shared will help you ensure that even the most mundane tasks reflect the exceptional service you aim to deliver.

By focusing on the tone and approach, Jeannie explains how you can turn necessary yet often neglected or negative interactions into opportunities for reinforcing customer loyalty. Listen in to hear how to keep your customer experience consistent and positive from start to finish, guaranteeing that every interaction, no matter how routine, leaves your customers feeling valued and satisfied. Don't miss these valuable tips that can help you enhance customer satisfaction and foster lasting loyalty.

Resources Mentioned:
Experience Investigators Website -- experienceinvestigators.com

Want to ask a question? Visit askjeannie.vip to leave Jeannie a voicemail! (And don't forget to follow Jeannie on LinkedIn! www.linkedin.com/in/jeanniewalters/)

Transcript

MC: 0:00

Experience Action. Let's stop just talking about customer experience, employee experience and the experience of leaders. Let's turn ideas into action. Your host, Jeannie Walters, is an award-winning customer experience expert, international keynote speaker and founder of Experience Investigators, a strategic consulting firm helping companies increase sales and customer retention through elevated customer experiences. Ready, set, action.

Jeannie Walters: 0:31

It's Experience Action. I'm Jeannie Walters and, as always, I can't wait to hear your questions. So, let's go ahead and listen in.

Listener Question: 0:41

Hey Jeannie, I'm curious about some of those negative touch points that we have with customers, such as when you send the invoice that needs to be paid. How can we make that a better experience and package that in some way as a message to the customer so they have a positive interaction with us instead of it being a negative? Oh yeah, we have to pay their bill now. Would love to hear your thoughts.

Jeannie Walters: 1:09

Another fantastic question from one of our listeners who is out there fighting the good fight around customer experience, and what I love about this question is that it's something that everybody can relate to, whether you're running customer experience for a multinational enterprise organization like those we work with, or maybe you are running a retail store in your hometown, or maybe you are simply trying to do the best you can in the job you have. Even if you don't serve traditional customers, we serve people. That's what we do in order to run organizations, and often that requires sending invoices or at least handing over a bill. This is how we have those transactions. This is how we decide if they're a customer or not. Are they paying us? It's really that simple. So what can we do about that specific touch point? But really, you can apply this in so many ways. So what I want you to do today is really think about what are those maybe neglected touch points that you have, things that, yes, they have to be done. We have to, for instance, have customers register for events or sign up and log in for certain accounts. Maybe we have to confirm information that isn't that fun to confirm. Things like health information if you're in health care or insurance, depending on the type of business you are running. All of these things can be somewhat inherently negative because, as customers, that's not what we signed up for. We didn't sign up to get an invoice. We signed up to experience something, to achieve a goal. The invoice is, yes, one of the outcomes, one of the things that we have to interact with as part of our customer journey. It's not necessarily something that we want to participate in. So let's talk about not just the big ways to handle this, but I want to give you three ideas that are simple, straightforward and, hopefully, extremely actionable, because that's what we're all about here at Experience Action. We want a bias towards action. What can we do about the customer experience, not focusing on what might be challenging or preventing us from moving forward?

Jeannie Walters: 3:33

So the first thing I want you to consider is the tone of the invoice. We spend a lot of time with customers, leading them to that point. We spend a lot of effort and ask ourselves questions about is our marketing material and the way we communicate with customers to get them to the sale? Is that living up to our brand promise? Is that really reflecting who we want to be? And if not, we make adjustments and changes. But then we move on to the invoice and often we just drop into what everybody else is doing. Pay this invoice, or else, right? We spend all this time telling them what a great experience we're going to deliver, how our service is superior, how our people are going to take care of them, and then we send an invoice that removes all of that tone and it says things like if you don't pay this invoice within this certain amount of time, this is all the stuff we're going to do. We're going to call a lawyer, we're going to have mediation, we're going to do all of those things, and the tone of the relationship shifts dramatically. So ask yourself are there things on your invoice, on your agreements, on those touch points that might not be so positive? Are there ways you can improve the tone? You can refer back to, "We want this to be a great experience for everybody, and so we want to set clear expectations. Let us know what we can do for you." If you are sending a regular invoice, maybe you send monthly invoices,

Jeannie Walters: 5:10

then think about if that is your only consistent point of communication with your customer, what can you do with it? Can you thank them in sincere and meaningful ways? Can you remind them of some of the things that you worked on. I think a great opportunity here is for coaches. We want those invoices to remind them about the value that they're receiving, not just how to pay you or all the things that will happen if they don't pay us exactly on time in the way that we prefer. So think about that. Think about how you can customize, how you can add that tone, how you can live up to your brand promise within the invoice itself. We also want to think about customization throughout the journey, especially at these sticky touch points.

Jeannie Walters: 6:03

What I want you to think about is how you can approach customization at scale. And you know this is where AI and machine learning can come in really handy because if you want to figure out, for instance, what certain segments of customers would prefer at these challenging points in the journey, then AI can help you with that. You can say, you know what, I know there are customers who prefer efficiency. I know there are customers who would rather do things on their mobile phones. What can we do to find out who these customers are? Let's take in the data that we know about them. Let's look for patterns, let's figure out how can we segment at scale so that we can customize. So the goal of this is customization, but if you have too many to do this with on an individual basis, then this is where you can really lean into segmentation, using AI to help you get the right data in the right ways to make the right decisions.

Jeannie Walters: 7:08

Now, if you can do this, you can start really offering different payment options for invoices, different ways to be efficient, different options to meet them where they are. Maybe some clients want to prepay, maybe some clients want to pay monthly, maybe they want reminders, maybe they don't. All of those different ways that people can customize the experience for them. That's a great thing to look at for these inherently negative touch points that are just part of the journey, and let's not forget about anticipating needs and reducing friction. Now, we often know that our clients have questions. We know where they get stuck.

Jeannie Walters: 7:49

This just happened to me as a customer. I was participating as a member of a community and I signed up for an event and then I realized, oh no, I can't make it. And I went back and I looked at the rules and I looked at all the information and it was very clearly stating you have until this date to cancel. But there was nothing in there about how to cancel. So I had to go through step after step after step, trying to find the right person who had the right email. And when I said I cannot figure out how to cancel, they said yep, we know about that. That's a glitch. That's not a glitch, that's a problem with communication. That is a problem with not anticipating my needs as someone who signed up for that and wants to know the best way to follow your rules.

Jeannie Walters: 8:41

So, anticipating needs and reducing friction we often think about this as part of the journey. That really only applies to sales or those service touch points. What I want you to do is think about every single proactive thing that you send out to clients and then ask yourself what happens if? What happens if things go wrong? What happens if they are not sure if their payment went through? What happens if they need to change their credit card? What happens if they want to pay on a different date? What can we predict for them? And if we don't know, if maybe you're early in the process, you haven't had a lot of customers and this is just starting for you, maybe you want to look at it and think about okay, what are those questions that we've gotten? Start a place to have a repository of questions so that you can move forward, starting to predict, act on and prevent those issues for other customers.

Jeannie Walters: 9:40

So think about these inherently negative touch points as opportunities. Yes, they are challenging. Yes, they bring their own unique set of issues that we have to resolve, but they're opportunities to really understand and deliver for our customers in meaningful and proactive ways. And is there anything better than that? I don't think so. So remember, we're going to really think about the tone of what we're sending out, make sure that it's matching our brand promise and our customer experience mission statement and the type of experience we want to deliver. We also want to take a step look at can we customize at scale? Can we make sure that we are meeting customers where they are, with the different options that they want and giving them those choices? And then, finally, we want to think about predictive analysis. How can we make sure that we are predicting issues before they happen, acting on them and reducing friction along the way? If you can do those three things every time you introduce a new touchpoint into your customer's journey, you will be so far ahead than your competitors, and that's what this is all about.

Jeannie Walters: 10:51

It's not just about delivering for customers. It's about staying ahead. It's about getting those outcomes that we want as an organization, that our leaders are looking for. So use these tools. Lean into customer experience strategy. Make sure that you are getting others to realize this is not something just to talk about. This is about action. Thanks so much for being here at Experience Action with me. I so appreciate all you do every day and, of course, we love your questions. Don't forget you can leave me a voicemail, just like this person did at askjeannie. vip. Until next time, stay true to your customers, look for ways to get ahead and keep doing what you're doing, fighting the good fight for your customers, because that will lead to better outcomes for your organization. Keep up the great work. To learn more about our strategic approach to experience, check out free resources at experienceinvestigators. com, where you can sign up for our newsletter, our Year of CX program and more, and please follow me, Jeannie Walters, on LinkedIn.