How many of your clients are bored customers? Midlife crisis customers represent a subtle shift in how current clients perceive you, your products, services and organization.
There is a point in the client maturation process where customers experience a mid-client life crisis. As a result, they start looking around for new solutions and new suppliers. Just because of where in the client lifecycle these clients happen to be.
From your perspective, everything is just fine.
After all, the majority of your clients continue to award new contracts to your organization and renew existing ones. In addition, customer experience survey feedback remains positive, quarter after quarter.
So, for the majority of your clients, things are humming along nicely, or so it appears. Consequently, you feel you are doing business with the right clients and creating the right type of outcomes which should sustain business. While you do not feel you are being complacent, you just might be.
And if you are not doing business with the clients who are the best fit for your growth, expansion and sustainability strategy, download my Client Assessment Tool. Figure out where the gaps are.
Alternatively, when it comes to bored clients, are you speaking with the right user segment?
Quantitative surveys only do so much in terms of providing feedback on customer experience (CX). Unless you have a well-constructed CX program in place, chances are your company sends the survey via email to the contract signer. Which metric on that survey warns you that the client is bored? And just what attributes contribute to their midlife cycle boredom?
While your company may pride itself on sticking close to customers, where do end users of your products and services fall within the CX continuum? These client segments are peppered throughout your client’s organization. What’s more, the length of tenure within that organization – their own lifecycles – may exceed the contract signer’s. Think about it.
Consequently, end users have more breadth and depth of experience with every vendor’s products and services. And while their midlife cycle experience of your deliverables remains steady, competitors’ offerings just may be more exciting, flexible, interoperable and even fun to use, than yours are.
As a result of their experiences using other benchmark-worthy products and services available in their ecosystem, end users are becoming bored with the same-old of yours.
Stick close to the voice of bored customers to improve your deliverables.
Your bored customers are not dissatisfied. Yet. So they will not defect. Yet. And that scenario opens the door for your company to improve.
Consider that midlife crisis clients just may enjoy articulating what makes their experiences with other products and services so engaging. Compared to yours.
That scenario presents an opportunity for product and service innovation, if you take the time to have those customer discovery conversations. Chances are your competitors are.
Do you know who your bored customers are, before they defect? What programs and processes do you have in place to capture the customer’s voice? Would you like to develop a practical program tailored to the size of your business? Contact me to learn more.
Take the next steps towards customer retention:
- Read these related posts on professional innovation, workforce engagement and customer retention.
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Babette Ten Haken serves organizations as a corporate catalyst and innovative speaker, strategist, coach and storyteller. Babette’s One Millimeter Mindset™ Workshops and Speaking programs leverage collaboration to catalyze professional innovation, workforce engagement and customer retention, especially in challenging Industrial Internet of Things environments. Babette’s playbook of IIoT team collaboration hacks, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon. She is a member of SME, ASQ, SHRM and the National Speakers Association.
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