Chapter 24
Inbound Service
Today, your service organization is more important than your sales organization when it comes to generating net new customers. This may be somewhat controversial, but in the age of modern buyers doing their research online, examples of tangible customer success matter more than empty sales promises. Potential buyers trust current users who have gone through a recent purchasing experience more than they trust a new salesperson who has a vested interest in closing a deal. Most businesses invest in new sales talent to get net new customers. For inbound organizations, investing in a better customer experience to create a legion of loyal customers, who share their success with others, is a better investment.
Inbound service is about applying inbound principles to your service organization. It includes all the resources that support a customer after the sale, including installation technicians, onboarding consultants, technical support, trainers and education teams, and even account managers and customer success managers.
Inbound organizations define success regarding the individual buyer's goals and expectations. They identify and discuss these goals and expectations during the Consideration and Decision stages of the inbound sales process. Inbound service organizations take the hand-off from the sales team, review the pertinent information, establish control of the customer relationship, and outline a plan that delivers results to ensure ongoing customer satisfaction.
Inbound service does not wait for the phone to ring. They use a centralized view of the customer to recognize a milestone, due date, or other critical event to reduce the effort required for buyers to accomplish their goals. An inbound service organization understands that the average customer is busy, doesn't spend all their time engaged with the product, and welcomes insightful information and advice. This means responding to a problem in minutes and hours, rather than days and weeks. Inbound service respects the customer's time and doesn't keep them endlessly on hold. Modern buyers want companies to use technology solutions like chat, instant messaging, and call me now buttons that provide trained services personnel 24/7.
Inbound service is a series of activities, processes, and tasks that result in the buyer feeling like they are treated the way they want to be treated with their problem solved in the way they want it to be solved. Inbound service reduces cancellations and dissatisfaction, improves customer retention, drives vendor loyalty, and creates an opportunity to cross-sell and upsell by solving for the customer's success first.
A survey by Harvard Business Review found the following:
First, delighting customers doesn't build loyalty; reducing their effort—the work they must do to get their problem solved—does.
Second, acting on this insight improves customer service, reduces customer service costs, and decreases customer cancellations.1
The story from the survey goes further: “But our research shows that exceeding their expectations during service interactions (for example, by offering a refund, a free product, or a free service such as expedited shipping) makes customers only marginally more loyal than simply meeting their needs.”
And it gets worse. The study found that “customers are four times more likely to leave a service interaction disloyal than loyal.” So satisfied does not mean loyal. Typical customer service makes loyalty worse!
And if that is not enough how about this quote from a recent Accenture survey:
Our research revealed that consumers are increasingly likely to have a negative reaction to a company's attempt to earn their loyalty.
And one more quote from the same survey:
That means calibrating investments to focus on retaining customers with highly satisfying experiences and leveraging their connections to acquire new customers. That's where the hidden pools of loyalty returns lie.2
Traditional companies ask their customer service people to fix a problem, address an issue, or figure it out. They manage to response times, not to outcomes. They view the goal of customer service as fixing the customer's immediate problem while minimizing the financial impact to their company. The problem with that approach is that it rarely addresses the more critical issues facing the customer.
Defining the Customer Journey
The customer goes through a journey (similar to a buyer journey) where they transition from the purchase to product installation, to seeing the potential of the product, to starting to use the product, to solving the problem the purchase was intended to solve.
This journey is defined in four stages:
- Activation
- Day Zero
- Time to Value
- Value Loop
Activation
The Activation stage begins with the buyer's first interactions with your product or service. These may include activities like logging in to the software or account, setting up the payment method, receiving delivery of physical product, opening the box the product came in, receiving confirming emails, scheduling training, or product set up. Inbound organizations have a seamless integration from the buyer journey to the customer journey to capitalize on the initial enthusiasm of getting started and maintaining the positive experience.
Why is this handoff essential? Because in the age of the modern buyer, customers have a very low pain threshold for dealing with unanticipated problems, and the seller is responsible for creating an efficient initial startup process to make sure the customer gets off to a good start. Is there anything more discouraging to a modern buyer than deciding to purchase a product or service and then stumbling right out of the gate? Or the chilling realization that buying the product may not solve the problem you intended it to solve? Or coming to the conclusion that the organization that was helpful and attentive to your needs during the sales process is a bit less enthusiastic about helping you after you have paid the bill?
Day Zero
Day Zero is the second stage of the process and is “the moment when a customer has completed the necessary tasks, so they start to realize the full value of your product for the job they are hiring it to do.”3 A buyer that fails to reach this point, or takes too long to reach this stage, runs the risk of churning, burning, or indifference. The goal of Day Zero is to get everyone to the point of being able to extract value from your solution. Day Zero marks the transition from startup to usage.
Time to Value
The Time to Value stage is when the buyer is starting to be successful using the product or service. An inbound organization understands the Time to Value timeline for each category of user and prescribes a project plan that defines the optimal customer journey. This plan describes the work involved and the maintenance of the product, sets the right expectations for frequency of usage, and explains the specific details of what to do. First, the organization defines how to get help if the customer gets in a pickle, and they show the customer how to stay on track.
Time to Value is the interval it takes from Day Zero to the first time customers begin to extract value from the product or service and begin on the path of reaching their goals. For some products and services, the Time to Value stage is seconds or minutes, while others may take months or years. An app that you download to your mobile phone and start using immediately has a short Time to Value. A complex ERP system with significant layers of implementation and integration, development and end-user training, technical customization, and hundreds of rollout steps may take many years to reach the Time to Value stage.
Value Loop
The last stage in the customer journey is the Value Loop. A Value Loop starts at the point where the customer recognizes they are being successful and are open to investigating additional products and services from your organization to solve other problems. A Value Loop ends when the customer buys additional products, add-ons, or services. Inbound service creates Value Loops when they present buyers with better solutions to new issues and the buyer accepts and implements them.
The Value Loop stage creates an excellent environment for buyers to try before they buy because of the familiarity and trust established in the customer journey. Offering options to evaluate new features, makes sense because customers have a basic understanding of the product.
Marketing to existing customers is often misunderstood. Companies pour the majority of investment into sales teams with the goal of generating net new customers. Inbound organizations know that the best way to drive revenue, at the lowest cost, is to focus on existing customers and offer opportunities to help them even more.
HubSpot's Value Loops occur when the user is leveraging the product on a daily basis. HubSpot recognizes that activity and periodically presents a special offer to the user to test an advanced software feature or application that would enhance the buyer's experience. Another example is a customer showing interest in paid advertising based on their behavior within HubSpot: the software then suggests a paid add-on application upgrade or third party integration.
How Do You Build the Ideal Customer Journey?
Start with the ideal buyer persona and work backward, understanding how your most successful customers reach their goals using your product or service. Study the actual customers and see what steps they took, assistance you provided, and roadblocks they encountered, and begin to build a detailed map of the stages in the success journey. Analyze which customers entered a Value Loop, bought again, or added to their original purchase, and where customers get hung up and just stop engaging with you.
The next part of this process is to define Day Zero. Figure out when the customer reaches the point of being able to use your solution on their own. Next, list the steps customers must go through to complete the Activation stage.
Once you complete those steps, you can map out the customer journey. Data and analytics are crucial to understanding exactly how the customer journey is laid out. There is usually a difference in retention rates or repeat sales for customers who reach Day Zero before or at the projected date versus those who take longer. Understanding why specific customers get stuck in the Activation stage should help you identify common bottlenecks and help you improve the Time to Value. If you know the expected Time to Value for your ideal buyer persona customers, you can give better guidance about success rates and activities.
What Buyers Expect from Inbound Service
Inbound organizations recognize and provide quick, efficient, proactive service to meet the modern buyer's expectations. Buyers are more impatient than ever and expect personal responses immediately. Proper planning enables speed of response and alignment between all departments. If service correctly anticipates and staffs for new clients, then they rightly plan and prevent a slow response.
For most modern buyers, self-service is excellent service. A unique way to provide information is a service knowledge base. A service knowledge base consists of a public posting of the most frequently asked questions, training videos, customer feedback, and helpful hints. Posting an open knowledge base provides several crucial advantages. First, it allows everyone to research and educate at their own pace. Second, it allows for 24/7 access. Third, building up a knowledge base of questions provides underlying data about potential potholes in the customer success journey.
Some inbound service organizations even let partners answer questions in the knowledge base for the broader community. By providing a knowledge base, you are providing more information while reducing your service costs. From travel arrangements to grocery store checkout, modern buyers expect and appreciate self-service options.
Inbound service teams have a unique perspective on the buyer journey. In the age of the modern buyer, identifying, planning, and executing an effective customer success journey significantly impacts retention and new business development, often to a greater level than efforts to add net new customers to increase revenue.