The customer who just wanted a look around.
Every customer has to be screened before a sales discussion starts. To a salesperson with a keen buyer at the door, that know your customer (KYC) check can feel like the company turning away money.
The challengeKnow your customer checks that sales teams questioned
The client’s customer screening process is mandatory for every customer, whatever the amount and however long the relationship. It involves finance, export control and compliance, and it can be reopened whenever a customer’s ownership changes. Sales teams understood that it existed. What they didn’t always understand was why it applied to the small order, the friendly customer or the long-standing account. Without the why, people work around a process, or apologise for it to customers instead of explaining it.
What we deliveredKYC training told by the customers themselves
- 1An Alignment Brief with the teams who run the process: where it was being questioned, and what sales teams needed to say to customers.
- 2A Story Blueprint built on one idea: let the customer ask the questions people don’t say out loud.
- 3A short KYC eLearning course set at a gate, where customers arrive one by one and are told, politely, why they can’t come in yet.
- 4A walkthrough of the five steps of the process, a set of red flags, and key takeaways to keep.
The idea, and why it workedLetting the customer ask the questions
The course is a checkpoint. A customer arrives: “We want to buy your products. Can I come in?” They haven’t been screened. “Pardon? I just want to have a look around.” Another arrives whose colleagues have already met the sales team. Another used to be a customer and now finds the gate closed, because their shareholders changed. Each one voices an objection salespeople have heard, and sometimes made themselves. Each time, the person at the gate explains: what finance checks, what export control checks, what compliance checks, and what happens when a red flag appears. The last customer is cleared and welcomed in.
It worked because the objection was spoken by a character, not by the learner, so nobody had to admit they’d thought it. And the answers came in words people could reuse with their own customers.
