According to a Gartner study, companies that successfully implement customer experience projects begin by focusing on how they collect and analyze customer feedback. Data is becoming more and more important to the sales organization. Acquiring a new customer costs 7 times more than maintaining an existing one. Investing in your existing customers will pay off and it’s only a matter of time until you see positive results. That’s why retention can dramatically impact profit. Studies by Bain & Company, along with Earl Sasser of the Harvard Business School, have measured that even a 5 % increase in customer retention can lead to an increase in profits somewhere between 25 and 95 %.
What can it be used for?
Two succes factores you need to focus on in order to be excellent in delivering excellent Customer Experience:
- Don’t limit yourself by only talking to management. Improved and deeper involvement of the organisation result in better data and insights. We often see that the remainder of the organisation sees the focus areas quite differently than management, and leading employees. Involvement and data on the organisation are essential to have in place and ensure the best possible starting point for working with retention and customer experience strategy.
- Stronger data and continuously follow-up. If efforts are not measured along the way, you do not know whether you are on the right track or not, and you cannot take proper corrective actions during the process. The first Assessment is your baseline, your starting point. From there, you continuously measure with assessments to be able to document where you are progressing, standing still or declining. In that process, you receive continuous feedback and suggestions for improvement during the measurements.
You can use the Customer Experience Assessment to:
Besides getting insights to strengthen customer retention, you can also use the stronger involvement and insights to impact growth even further. Here’s how your current customer base impacts growth:
- Current customers are more willing to try your new product. Existing customers are 50% more likely to try new products and spend 31% more, on average, when compared to new customers, which translates to cross sells and upsells.
- You have the ear of your customer already, so they’ll be willing to truly listen to what you have to offer. The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60 – 70%, while the probability of selling to a new prospect is just 5-20%.
What does the company gain by using this assessment?
According to State of Sales, 60% of buyers do not trust the sales profession, and with an increasing number of customer stakeholders, it’s a very concrete challenge that must be addressed, as you can expect there will almost always be one or more stakeholders who do not have trust. 80% of sales reps experience an increasing number of stakeholders, and with 4-5 stakeholders, the probability of a sale has fallen by over 50%. We also know that 81% of C-levels have preferences for companies that do something extra, and 47% are willing to pay extra just to do business with this type of company (Edelmann). Conclusion, it pays to strengthen your stakeholder management in your customer relations. Trust is not something you get, but something you earn. Our starting point is the involvement of all relevant customer stakeholders in the assessments, generating new insights to qualify your customer dialogue, challenging the customers at a higher level, and addressing the consensus problem, which will always be there, both for you and the customer.
Practicalities
| Customer Experience Assessment | |
|---|---|
Five categories, 19 specific measurement points Language: UK, DK Receive comments on low scores Receive GAP comments The expected implementation time is 20 minutes. |  |
The five focus areas in Customer Experience
- Customer experience: To what extent are we good at creating a good experience in our collaboration?
- Customer understanding: To what extent do you think that we have a good customer understanding?
- Product usage: To what extent do our products create value for you?
- Doing business with us: To what extent is it easy to cooperate and do business with us?
- Future Improvements:
