People talk about bad experiences, and they listen to bad experiences even more. It’s why negative headlines dominate the news. It’s not that people love hearing bad news, but 90% of people state that they want truthful and honest information, even if it’s negative.
This kind of thinking has created a culture where people look to control their conversations with businesses. They want to lead the sales process, rather than be led through it. In fact, 60% of customers stop doing business with a company after one poor customer experience, because above all they want to avoid friction.
What is friction in the commercial process?
Friction in your commercial process can take many forms. It could be a small hiccough like a missed customer support ticket or long wait times, or larger issues like shipping errors or escalated customer complaints. It could even relate to internal team issues — for example, if your sales team isn’t speaking with your marketing team or you don’t employ a CRM. These internal issues could result in you missing out on important prospects or frustrate inquiring customers.
Eliminating this friction not only allows your business to convert leads easier, but it also offers better opportunities to upsell or retain existing customers. The question is, how can you get started? How can you keep up with your customers? They’re smarter and more cautious than ever before, and they expect every business to employ the strategies that they see in global market leaders.
The answer to solving this lies in some practical applications merged with embracing new technologies, like HubSpot’s integrated CRM, CMS, marketing hub, sales hub and a customer service hub that allows you to consolidate your data, centralise team communication, employ automation, manage customer service with ease, and personalise your customer communication.
How HubSpot can eliminate customer friction
Merge Software & Platform Channels
Any friction that your staff might feel is going to filter down to your customers, and so you should begin by eliminating internal friction. Consider all points of engagement and management, from team communication, to software access, file sharing, and processes. Do you sales and marketing teams communicate? Do their goals support each other? Do they share information?
The great joy of a system like HubSpot is that it houses all of your company data in a central platform. You still get to control access, but this means that your employees don’t need to open up ten different apps or screens just to start their work day. With an integrated CRM, marketing and sales hub, it also means that your teams can speak to each other more easily, share files within the same network, and better understand each others’ roles. This leads to fluid communication between your marketing and sales teams, limiting silo approaches for both your employees and the customers they’re talking to.
Employ Automation
Another point of friction for employees is the admin surrounding manual processes and systems that waste valuable time. Not only does this cost your business money, but frustrations also filter down to customer communication, often leading to sub-par sales and support.
HubSpot’s free customer relationship management tool (CRM) and content management system (CMS) allows your employees to log lead and customer data in a central database, which can then be used to automate workflows, processes, and communication. Forget about manual data entry or setting up every customer email from scratch and let HubSpot’s powerful AI eliminate repetitive or admin-heavy tasks that not only waste your employees time, but lead to frustrated customers.
Customer support system:
Perhaps the point of friction you’ve heard about most regularly is to do with time. Customers don’t have it, even when they have an issue they’re trying to resolve. They want an answer now, and if they can’t get it, they don’t want to leisurely wait around until you answer it. That’s where the power of an automated customer support system comes in handy.
What is a customer’s experience when they need support? If an employee isn’t available, what happens? What a customer wants is options to control their own time. A customer cares nothing if you have a new fancy chat bot, if it’s not the way they want to solve their support issue. That’s it. Self-service support options enable customers to take control of their own support experience and allow your employees to spend their time on the customers who really need it.
In addition to self-service options, tools like ticketing systems and help desks give your employees and customers the ability to track their support queries in the system. Employees never miss a beat (or a customer query), and customers can always check in to see how their issue is getting resolved at any time. HubSpot’s service hub also offers automation workflows that let you distribute support queries to the employee best suited to solve them using AI logic, creating a system where no customer or prospect is ever unheard or unanswered.
Personalization
While HubSpot’s CRM power helps centralise data and team communication, when it’s integrated with the marketing and sales hub you can realise the power of personalization. Business longevity relies on the loyalty of customers, and that’s just what personalization promotes… loyalty. Why? Because utilizing personalization in your marketing and sales channels proves to your customers that you care about them. It proves that you take note of their interactions with your business—that you listen.
With HubSpot, you can personalize emails, ads, support queries and all other communication, with so much more than just your customer’s name. You can segment your audience by industry, job title or area, communicate with your customers based on what pages they’ve viewed on your website or when their last phone call with your business was, and even refer to their latest support queries in emails or landing pages.
Personalizing your customers’ and prospects’ experiences not only tells them that you care about them, but it forms a long-lasting relationship that, even despite the odd hiccough, keeps them coming back (and spending money).Yet, whether it’s automation or personalization, removing the friction in your conversion and buying process isn’t a single action. It’s an iterative process that requires regular audits of your processes and systems, which is why a software like HubSpot is so helpful.
One platform that acts as an end-to-end experience for everything you and your customers need enables you to consistently eliminate friction and delight your audience.
