What your customers are actually reacting to

Someone has told you that you should work on your customer experience. Possibly a consultant, possibly an article, possibly your own nagging sense that something is leaking.

The trouble with the advice is that nobody says what it means. It arrives sounding like a suggestion to be friendlier, or to buy software, or to hire someone whose job title contains the word experience. So it goes on the list and stays there.

Here is a more useful version. Your customer experience is the total amount of work a customer has to do to get what they came for. That is it. Everything else is detail.

Effort is the thing they react to

People rarely leave a business because the staff were rude. They leave because dealing with it became more trouble than it was worth.

Think about the work you put a customer through. Finding the right person. Repeating their details to the third person they have spoken to. Waiting without knowing how long the wait is. Chasing you for something you said you would send. Filling in a form that asks for information you already hold. Working out which of your three services they actually need.

None of those is rudeness. Your team can be lovely at every step and the customer can still finish the week feeling like your business was hard work. That feeling is the thing that decides whether they come back, and it is almost never in anybody's job description.

Which is why being nicer does not fix it. Friendliness is a thin layer on top of the actual experience. If the underlying process makes people work, a warm phone manner just means they are being made to work by someone pleasant.

Why this is a money question, not a soft one

There is a piece of arithmetic worth having in your head.

Losing one customer takes roughly three new ones to replace, once you count what it costs to win them and how long they take to become as valuable as the one who left. That ratio moves by industry, but the shape of it holds everywhere.

Now compare where the attention goes. Most businesses have a number for what it costs to get a customer. Very few have a number for how many they lost last year, or why. The budget goes to the front of the funnel and the leak is at the back, which means a lot of businesses are working about three times harder than they need to.

Research across industries keeps landing on the same point. The bulk of the value created by companies that grow well comes from their existing business rather than from new customers. Not because acquisition does not matter, but because it is the expensive half and it is the half already getting all the effort.

Start at the number, not at the experience

This is the part that separates work that pays from work that ends in a report.

The usual approach is to start with the experience and hope it turns into money. Survey everyone, collect a long list of things customers dislike, improve as many as you can, and wait to see whether anything moves. It almost never does in a way you can point at, which is why this work has a reputation for being unmeasurable.

Flip it. Start with the financial outcome you actually want, and work backwards.

• Name the number. More repeat work from existing customers. Fewer people dropping out between quote and start. A bigger average job. Pick one.
• Then ask which part of the customer's experience decides that number. Usually it is a much smaller part than you expect, and it is often a single moment rather than a stage.
• Then look at that part, and only that part, in detail.

This keeps the work honest. It also stops you doing the thing every business does at least once, which is spending six months improving something that was never affecting anybody's decision to stay.

The test you can run this week

Pick your most common type of job. Walk through it as a customer would, from the first attempt to contact you through to the invoice, and count the number of times the customer has to do something.

Count every form, every call they have to initiate, every wait with no update, every time they supply information twice. Do not count the things you do. Only the things they do.

Most owners are surprised by the total. Not because the business is badly run, but because no single one of those steps looks unreasonable from the inside, and nobody has ever added them up.