How to Avoid Being Dumped by Your Customer

Thank you for subscribing to this newsletter. I have been pleasantly surprised by the response to the first newsletter and engagement in the content. Given that number of people that signed up, there is definite interest in the topic and that certainly has provided the motivation to continue to share insights about customer management.

In this week’s newsletter, I am going to go back to a domain I have not been involved in for an exceptionally long time – dating! For many of us, it has been a long time since we were dating but the analogy works well when considering the approach to maintaining an ongoing relationship with your customers

Factors Keeping Customer Executives Awake at Night

?When you are dating, there is an ongoing vigilance to maintain the relationship and not be dumped. Well it turns out that this same concern seems to pervade the world of customer management.

?I was looking into customer related insights to determine the topics that they searched on the internet. I used Google Trends to compare the following topics:

• Customer Onboarding
• Customer Profitability
• Customer Acquisition
• Customer Experience Management
• Customer Retention

The obvious standout was “Customer Retention”, it was relatively closely followed by Customer Acquisition:

I have a few take-aways from the above: The first is that Customer Acquisition and Customer Retention dominate the thinking in the customer space. It fits logically that customer onboarding is a part of both Customer Acquisition and Customer Retention and the result should be customer profitability (a lower priority item).

So much of the narrative around Customer Experience Management is about the importance of ROI and yet both the above and my own searches show up that it is a “missing domain”. More about that later.

So let us dive into customer retention – and analyse what is important when thinking about customer retention.

I particularly like this quote from Maxi Schmidt:

The above statement encapsulates so many of the aspects of consumers today. To unpack those:

• The first key point is that customers have choice – far more choice than they have had before,
• The next point implicit in the above perspective is that the “worth” that customers feel is whether there is a perception of equitable value exchange. Simply put, the customer has money to spend and you as the corporate providing the offering need to not only offer value to the end customer but you must also make them feel emotionally that you have earned the right to be a provider to them

Back to the dating game. You might recall that when you were dating, you are constantly collecting signals. You spend time interpreting engagement from your significant other, you are sensing feedback from their friends and family and today it is normal to keep an eye out on social media. The key point being that not only do you want to offer the “best experience”, but you need to make sure that if anything goes wrong, you are on top of the relevant concern instantly and you need to resolve any issues.

The analogy works well when considering customer management. You must stay on top of the end-to-end experience of your customer and the minute anything seems awry, intervene to correct the issue.

To date, traditional CX has centred around the idea of getting customer feedback and as a result a whole industry of “Voice of Customer” platforms was born which added value for a while but then flaws started to show:

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• Feedback volumes have started to reduce (survey fatigue)
• I would argue the same problem that arises in quantum physics (ie the observer effect) arises with experience management i.e. the very act of a random survey request to the customers, itself negatively impacts the actual experience delivery.
• Feedback is often interesting but does not determine the resultant behaviour outcomes (To test this viewpoint, consider the question “are customers of the opinion that it is actually worth it to be a customer of your company”)
• The age old, failed promise of CX ROI remains elusive!

?It is well and good for me to be critical of the approaches used to date across the market but I guess you must be asking if there is an alternative. We think there is.

An Alternative Approach

Just as dating is no longer dominated by family introductions and religious gathering meetings but has progressed (regressed?) to online dating platforms, so too has customer experience management moved on:

Why we think Customer Journey Management is a much better solution to increase Customer Retention :

As outline above, we are convinced that Customer Journey Management (CJM) fits the bill in terms of its ability to deliver a superior retention outcomes as follows:

• ?It focuses on customer behaviour as much as understanding customer sentiment and unifies the two concepts through a unified analytics and underlying data model. This approach is used for all interactions of the customer across all channels and all points in the customer lifecycle.
• It provides sufficient granularity to be able to associate cost and revenue with the details of journey behaviour so that each customer’s profitability can accurately be determined and analysed.
• The insights and signals from the customer journey provide the signals to inform proactive customer engagement for high-risk customers that are at risk of leaving.
• CJM provides the means to determine when and how to reach out to customers to serve them better, resulting in proactive service rather than just responding to customer failure
• It accepts that the customer’s context is of vital importance to ensuring that the customer understands the value proposition being offered and that a drip feed approach to information sharing is a dramatic improvement to asking the customer to “drink out of a fire hydrant of offer information”
• The world has moved on and the ability to unify information from diverse systems is easier than it was in the past (enabled through a meta data mapping model). This means a unified platform that is able to provide that elusive single view of the customer and, in turn, engage with the customer using an accurate customer context. As above this is a vital input signal to identify ?“at-risk” customers enabling proactive engagement.

In our projects with customers, we have observed significant improvements in retention rates that not only justify the investment of customer journey management but also overall build a stronger business.

As always, I am keen to get input and challenges to our thinking – feel free to engage in the comments as we all have a lot to learn

Lets continue on the journey of learning

Have a brilliant week

Trent

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