Reasons Why So Many Of Your Potential Customers Fall Through The Net

You’ve done all of the hard work. You’ve built a relationship with your potential customer via social media or tempted them in with a brilliantly constructed ad campaign. Alternatively, they’ve read that informative article which cements your brand as the expert in their mind, and they are ready to become a customer – then at the final hurdle, they disappear, never to be seen again.

This can be frustrating and confusing for every single business owner, but to many, it still remains a mystery as to why this happens. After all, they’ve been over and over their sales process time after time, making tweaks and doing all of the A/B testings they could possibly think of, so what actually is the problem?

Look at the onboarding process

The answer clearly does not lie in the sales process, as with the time and attention that has been dedicated to that means it’s going to be running as smoothly as it possibly can. However, if the same care had been taken with the onboarding process as the sales process, far fewer customers might be falling through the net.

It’s no surprise that a business usually spends more on sales than it does on operations, and it is this lack of continuity that makes potential customers walk away before signing on the dotted line. They go from a slick process to one that is markedly less well thought through. The website may be slow and ask all of the same questions the visitor asked before they got to this point.

The process feels disjointed, and any of the momentum and goodwill that was built up by the sales process can quickly evaporate, and the customer will often click away, making the massive investment it has taken to get them to this point worthless.

By investing in the onboarding process and making the transition from sales to customer service more seamless, the number of customers leaving will decrease massively. This can be done by ticking just a few but significant boxes that cut down the lag between them (figuratively speaking) coming in the door and leaving with their purchase.

ID verification and other delays

One of the major hold-ups is if any type of ID verification needs to take place. Typically any identity verification service is a slow and clunky affair that takes the customer off-site and disjoints the process even further. If this is replaced with a newer, faster identity verification service, then this is one major obstacle that has been removed.

Even when the customer has made their purchase or subscribed to a service, many of them do not make it past the introductory or ‘trial’ period. This is often because the after-sales process has received nowhere near the same amount of attention as the sales process. If a customer feels abandoned after making a purchase, whether that be due to lack of follow-up or poor service, if there is an inquiry or complaint, they are likely to refund or cancel their subscription at the earliest opportunity.