Making the Experience Great for Everyone—WITHOUT ANY HELP FROM OTHERS!
In the first blog in this series, I explained the importance of providing a great experience to your customers. I reviewed some statistics from a widely cited analysis that showed the competitive advantage you gain by providing the best customer experience.* [See Sidebar 1 from the first blog in this series.]
I also gave you two of the questions you should ask yourself to evaluate your current MLM software: Who’s your customer? and Is your MLM software helping or hindering you from making the maximum amount of money you can from your business?
With the next questions, We’ll go a little deeper into evaluating the power your MLM software should give you and the freedom you should have to customize the experiences you provide to your most important customers.
Can you customize your MLM software to do what you need and want it to do so it provides your distributors with the best experience possible?
Can you, or your staff, quickly and easily customize various parts of the software without having to submit a help-desk ticket to the vendor? A couple of problems arise if you have to enlist the help of the vendor. You’ll wait at least a week or two, and it will likely cost you dearly.
For example, let’s say you’re one week out from month’s end and Jane, one of your top distributors, calls you at 10:30 a.m. and asks you to run a special promotion for a certain part of her downline. She has run a report of her entire business and discovered that John’s downline is still $27,000 short of their group volume goal. If John’s line doesn’t meet their GV goal, he won’t be able to advance to the next rank. That’s a problem for Jane and she is counting on you to help resolve it.
Can you create today and deploy tomorrow a custom campaign for only the following segment of Jane’s business?
1. Only the northeast region of the US
2. English speakers only
3. Only for those in John’s downline with:
a. a personal volume of $1,000 or less, and
b. have been active for the past three months
If your platform restricts you from creating custom promotions like this—without the software vendor custom building and implementing it for you—you’re not providing the best experience for your most important customers: your distributors. Jane can’t wait even a week for the vendor to build her promotion; the month will be over and she won’t have been able to provide the best experience for her customers.
If that’s the case, you aren’t getting what you really need from your current MLM software to accelerate your revenue growth and expand your distributor base. It’s all about consistently providing a great customer experience so it keeps your distributors happy, selling and engaged in enrolling more distributors. So if you can’t provide that kind of experience, you need to look elsewhere for a solution that empowers you. Those are the experiences that will build your business.
Does your platform allow your unique enrollment process to be customized quickly and easily or does it involve that same help-desk ticket and a vendor team of developers from the last question?
Every MLM company has its own preferred way to enroll new distributors and try to keep them active. You should be able to build your own enrollment process the way you want without having to wait for the software vendor to build it to your specifications. They’d have to create a bid, get it approved and finally start writing the code for you, which inevitably takes longer than is scheduled—and it costs more money.
For example, let’s say you have a couple of methods people can become distributors in your MLM company. You’ll need a custom enrollment process for each one. The software vendor has also told you that it will take at least two weeks for each one, and that each one will cost about $10,000. Don’t you think that’s a hefty price for something you should be able to do yourself without getting the vendor involved?
This scenario reminds me of the story of Sisyphus in Greek mythology. He’s the one who was banished to the Underworld and made to roll a boulder up a hill just to lose control near the top and have it roll back to the bottom again.
Does your direct-selling software sometimes leave you with that same feeling of “kinda, sorta, not really?” It shouldn’t. The feeling you should get is, “Absolutely. Positively. I can right now!” But if you can’t with your current solution, you should look for another one.
Conclusion
There are as many ways to create a great customer experience as there are distributors in your company. But not all MLM software enables you to provide great customer experiences to those distributors, and only one empowers you to customize those great experiences—on your own. Your MLM software shouldn’t restrict you from enrolling new distributors in as many ways as you want. And it shouldn’t limit your ability to customize what you provide to your distributors. If it does, it’s shopping time; look around for a better solution that will help you maximize your enrollees and then provide them with experiences they can’t live without.
In the next post, I’ll give you one final question you can use to evaluate your current MLM software. I’ll explain some of the intricacies of attracting new distributors and helping them become productive. Then I’ll wrap this series up with my conclusions and advice. There’s a lot to it, so stay tuned.
* https://www.watermarkconsult.net/blog/2019/01/14/customer-experience-roi-study/