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Have you considered the consequences of an unhappy or unsuccessful customer? Think about it—just one unhappy customer can put a tremendous amount of strain on all parts of your organization—starting with your Customer Support team all the way to the CEO.

A number of our customers initially come to us because of a compelling event—ultimately, customer satisfaction is at stake. Not only are unhappy customers not fun to deal with, they also put an extraordinary drain on your team, including hidden costs (especially “Opportunity Costs”—wouldn’t you rather have your team focused on completing that new project instead of stopping production, taking a step backwards and trying to fix a problem that should have been caught somewhere well before this point?).

I recently spoke to a StrongMail prospect at a major brand who described a scenario that underscores this point. A customer orders something from your company’s web site, but doesn't receive the confirmation e-mail or the download link. At this point, the customer has invested considerable time searching your site, evaluating the right product, looking at alternatives, made a decision, chose your product, completed the pain-staking checkout process and hit the "Order Now" button. Now, she waits for the confirmation email that contains the download link for her software purchase. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. No confirmation email. Time to call a real person. This is not good for customer satisfaction.

Imagine the impact of this one customer (not to mention if things go really badly, a dozen or more unhappy customers):

• Confirmation email not received, but the customer entered credit card information to purchase product and wants to know the status of their purchase.

• The unhappy customer calls into your Call Center, which we all know is expensive. Service calls take time, resources and de-focus employees who could be moving your business forward, but must now stop what they’re doing (delaying the forward movement of your business), double-back to make sure that they address this customer’s concern.

• This requires time to chase down historical events (to make sense of what went wrong). Back-tracking stalls development of new products or even efforts to improve customer satisfaction.

• At some point, the issue is resolved, typically manually, and the customer is left with a bad taste from the overall experience, which may not bode well for your company in the future.

Do you realize how many millions of hours are wasted each year on correcting something that could have been designed into either the product or the deployment process?

One thing to strongly consider is putting the energy upfront to avoid this scenario at all costs. Understanding the underlying infrastructure of your business is key to building efficiency. Understanding your customer and customer threats upfront are key to building a long-term, viable and successful business. Build it into both the product and the culture of your company.