Revenue Roadblock

Meet the business prevention department. It’s the place great opportunities go to die.

There are lots of ways that aspects of a business’s operations can interfere with the customer experience, preventing or inhibiting growth.

Where are your revenue roadblocks? 

roadblock

Every company has them.

If you haven’t shopped your business lately and you don’t spend a lot of time talking to customers, this phenomenon might be completely invisible to you. Hidden or not, it’s there. To unlock the full potential of your business, you need to ferret out the threats and deal with them.

Here’s an example from my own recent experience:

I attend webinars occasionally  so I can keep up with current trends and technologies. I had a couple of sessions scheduled last week, and the contrast between them was amazingly clear: one drove me away, the other captured my attention.

The first was a session hosted by landing page provider, Unbounce, with Copyblogger Brian Clark as the speaker. The content was great, but halfway through I needed to switch from my laptop to my tablet so I could be mobile. Sounds simple, right? I opened up my iPad and clicked the link to login, with no luck.

The webinar system, powered by GoToMeeting, kept telling me that my email address had already been used. Naturally, I knew that because I had just been in the webinar! All I wanted to do was get back in from a different device. In our omni-channel world, I’m sure this is a common activity among webinar participants.

Since starting dual sessions didn’t work, I tried completely logging out from my session on the laptop. I hoped GoToMeeting (aka GoToWebinar) would see that I was no longer online and would allow me to re-enter from a different device. I was wrong.

After several minutes of trial and error, I decided to re-register with a different email address. I did so, and was able to login. In the process, I lost more than 10 minutes of the conversation. Thankfully there’s a replay and I won’t miss the content that I was interested in, but that’s not the point.

The hassle of the experience made me unhappy as a user, and I made a mental note: don’t recommend GoToMeeting for my clients, or use it for my own sessions. Why would I want my clients and prospects to experience  the same level of frustration that I had?

Compare that with the experience I had the following day. Another great webinar, this time with Kyle Porter, CEO of Sales Loft and sales trainer John Barrows. Again, I needed to switch devices after starting the webinar (yes, I multitask).

Lucky for me, this webinar session was hosted by a difference provider, ReadyTalk. Making the switch from laptop to tablet? Seamless.

A few more differences emerged in the process, including the fact that one provider required me to download software before joining the session (guess which one), while the other did not.

To top it off, GoToMeeting’s response to the tweet I sent in the midst of my aggravation simply confirmed that they knew about the issue and didn’t care to fix it:

“Sorry, webinar links are single use only. If you left the webinar you’ll need to register again with another Email to rejoin”

GoToMeeting has a revenue roadblock. It’s made even worse by the fact that customers of the company inherit the problem: their customers’ customers have to deal with these issues.

Certainly there are greater aggravations in the world than losing a few minutes of a webinar you were looking forward to attending. As a host, you should ensure that the people you work so hard to entice to register and attend are getting the full value of your efforts. You want them to enjoy the event, learn something, become prospects and ideally, convert into customers.

With that in mind, why would you willingly subject customers and prospects to needless frustration, knowing that every little hurdle can send them to the competition?

Many meeting hosts may not even realize what the customer experience is like for attendees, unless they get complaints. For these firms, the roadblocks are hidden, but real. To unlock growth, you need to find them and remove them.

Think about all the little issues you run into during your day. You work probably around them, put up with them, or in serious cases, invest the time and effort to change vendors. Next time you bump into a wall along  your own travels, let it be a reminder: be on the lookout for similar roadblocks in your own company’s customer journey.

Listen for customer comments and mine feedback (social media, surveys, and informal channels) to see where the roadblocks are. When you see a minor irritation that has the potential to blossom into a bigger  problem, take action. Smooth the way for customers whenever you can and your bottom line will start to look a whole lot better.

Photo by Valeria Like via FreeImages.com

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