Delta CX Behavior Triggers™

Category: Delta CX Models
Tags: models
Published on: March 31, 2023

Where Are Metrics Failing Us?

Metrics can show us that customers stopped at a certain point in a process, chose not to buy, or didn’t make it through an important task. Yet the metrics rarely know why. We can spin up qualitative CX research to learn the whys, but what if we could save that customer from ever ending up in the failure pile?

Additionally, companies love to send out customer satisfaction or NPS surveys. Will unhappy customers fill them out? Will you learn which customers are considering leaving you or are already in the process of moving to a competitor? And is it too late by then?

Delta CX Behavior Triggers is a model that disrupts how companies perceive and handle struggling customers. The model allows us to be more proactive and predictive, increase sales and solve problems before we damage our relationships with our customers.

 

Imagine a Struggling Website Visitor or App User

Your potential customer is on your website or in your app, and ready to buy… but it’s not working. They’re trying multiple credit cards, they even logged in to other browsers. They’re really trying to buy this thing, but they can’t. Unhelpful error messages block them.

Your reactive cart recovery tool catches this, and emails the customer the next day to remind them they still have something in their cart. The customer tries again, hits the same dead-end, and can’t make the purchase.

What conclusions might marketing and sales have?

  • The customer didn’t have enough money for this item.
  • The customer changed their mind.
  • The customer’s demographic doesn’t always buy these items on their first visit to the site.
  • The customer is just a tire kicker and never intended to buy.

Unfortunately, these guesses don’t match the reality of the example. That customer had the money, didn’t change their mind, wasn’t kicking tires and didn’t abandon the cart. They hit CX and/or technical problems that prevented them from checking out.

 

Introducing Behavior Triggers

Behavior Triggers are algorithms that proactively find problems and put processes in place to help customers, just in time. They are designed to keep customers from falling through the cracks or later becoming just another unfortunate metric. Behavior Triggers might include:
  • If someone fails at checkout twice (possibly even once if the reason isn’t that their card was declined).
  • If someone logs into the same account from different browsers within X minutes (and perhaps if they also had at least one failed checkout).
  • If someone puts item X in their cart, clears the cart or removes the item, then puts item X in their cart again.
  • If someone’s purchase fails on the website (and they’re logged in so we know who they are) and then they call our support center (and we access their account so we know who they are).
  • If someone’s checkout failed today, they tried again within X days (on their own or in response to a cart recovery email), and it failed again.
What do you do in response to those scenarios? Don’t call people (too creepy) and don’t use chatbots (too impersonal, and the technology isn’t there yet). Currently, the best option would be to peek something in the bottom right corner to offer a live chat with a real human, preferably one who can “see” the page the way the customer sees it, or at least see what they are trying to buy and what price the system gave them. They can try to save the sale in the moment where we still have the customer on the site or in our system. Keeping that momentum going gives you a better chance than after they have left your site. Once they are gone, they might be on a competitor’s site trying to buy. Behavior Triggers must be approached strategically with the cross-functional team. Triggers will require a lot of testing and refinement so we are sure we are more likely to help people than to annoy them. Additionally, make sure that even if someone sets off multiple triggers in one session, we don’t bother them more than once.

 

Sounds Expensive? Let’s Do The Math

You might think implementing Behavior Triggers are too expensive or not worth it. Maybe these people are just “edge cases.” Time to do some math.
  • Example 1 (B2C): Imagine you are selling a $3,225 cruise package. If 5 people each day had trouble checking out and couldn’t make the purchase, that would be 1,825 customers per year who possibly never bought or chose a competitor after failing on your site. This leaves nearly $6 million on the table each year.
  • Example 2 (B2C or B2C): You have a few different price points, but your average website hosting subscription costs people $249 per year. If 5 people per day were confused by your pricing tiers and package differences – and they gave up and walked away, you’ve left over $450,000 on the table annually.
  • Example 3 (B2B): Imagine an enterprise SaaS that would cost a team of 50 people over $12,000 per year (and plenty more for larger teams). If even 2 people have trouble purchasing each day, this company leaves nearly $9 million on the table annually.
They may have lost even more if frustrated non-buyers tell friends or post online about their purchasing struggles. Everyone is a micro-influencer now. Also lost is the possibility of a loyal customer who now wants to buy more cruises, more SaaS licenses, or renew for another year. What would a Behavior Triggers project cost to research, design, test, iterate, build and release? Even at a possible internal cost of $500,000, wouldn’t we say it’s worth it to try to save as many of those lost sales as we can and decrease the negative micro-influencer word of mouth? Example B could certainly spend less since their Behavior Trigger might simply be to suggest a live chat if they see people pausing on the packages page for more than X seconds.

 

Make More Sales, Lose Fewer Customers

We will still need to assess damages after we have incurred them, but we should be proactive about how we can lose fewer sales. We must monitor customer actions in the moment, and stop using assumptions about customer behaviors or cart abandonment. Guessing at why we had failures wildly increases our business risk. We can also use Behavior Triggers in other areas at our company.
  • Did you post a job for a team manager but nobody on the team applied for it? HR should notice that nobody on the team wanted to get a potential promotion; this might indicate that the team is unhappy, and some or all of them are flight risks.
  • Considering the example of the website hosting company above, what if a Trigger noticed that someone moved their hosting off of our servers? Did a customer threaten to cancel in a support ticket? Now is a great time for sales or support to reach out to this customer and see if they can be saved. Do not wait months until you happen to send a customer satisfaction survey, which ex-customers might not bother filling out.
We’ll need a lot of collaborators on this one, with at least one CX Data Scientist on the team, but let’s work to create Behavior Triggers in our products. Help people before they become “just another ugly metric.” Proactively find CX/UX and technical bugs, save sales and increase customer satisfaction.