How to talk to your CFO about customer experience and revenue growth
Last month we introduced the topic of Customer Experience ROI and the complexity of building a good business case for it. The Customer Experience business case is strong, but not easy to prove. Today we focus on two big wins of a successful implementation of your customer experience strategy – revenue and customer growth of your business.
Revenue Growth
Proving customer experience-driven revenue benefits is a challenge you can win. It involves team members from each level who need to engage cross functionally. You need to build a comprehensive analysis with many assumptions and commitments in the future.
While the doers build financial models, senior leaders need to get buy-in from peers and put on paper the process and policy changes required for the desired impact of the future employee and customer experience.
The first step is to quantify the current customer experience. Do you offer any self-service? If you do not, do you expect call volume to go down once you implement self-service channels and products? How much in vouchers and credits are you giving out today to irate customers who had bad customer experience? How much will that number go down if you build intuitive experiences and frictionless customer journeys?
Break Down Silos
To do this, you need data from different systems governed by siloed teams. Once you get all the access you need, the fun starts! Structure and connect the discreet data dumps to bring actionable customer insights to life. So, arm yourself with patience. And start those conversations.
Revenue benefits are not the only financial impact of a successful customer experience transformation. Explore cost benefits as well. Redesign of customer interactions with your brand naturally drives redesign of existing roles. It includes the introduction of new tools for employees to deliver seamless experience. These changes bring cost benefits, too. Quantify the transactions you will eliminate. And quantify the value of the new services that employees will be enabled to offer customers in future state. This analysis requires “future-thinking.” It is valuable for the design of new customer experiences and the quantification of benefits. As a bonus, new processes and tools bring transparency that increases financial controls and reduces cases of fraud.
Customer Growth
Customer growth is a less linear benefit to prove. Cross-functional collaboration is key to quantify it. In her book Chief Customer Officer 2.0 Jeanine Bliss lays out a customer experience framework that begins with “managing and honoring your customers as assets.”
Bliss urges customer experience leaders who build organizational trust in the value/imperative of customer experience investments to prove the “right to customer-driven growth.” And to do this by connecting the value of customers to business metrics. Often, senior leaders focus on survey results. This is too myopic. Jeanine Bliss concludes that, without the extra cross functional work, customer experience is seen as another cost. It is a “nice to have” bells and whistle, not a successful growth strategy.
How can you persuade your CFO to invest in customer experience?
Build the connection between effortless and memorable experiences and customer growth with an actionable CRM.Customer information software should informs about customer characteristics and past interactions with the brand. Actionable CRM is not a database without user interface that you can access from the web. Actionable CRM is accessible. It is an easy to use tool that analyzes previous paths to purchase and the customer’s journeys that you can use as a baseline for the new journeys that you implement for the customer. With those insights in hand, you build the connection between CX and customer growth.
Revenue and customer growth are strong arguments for the success of the customer experience business case. However, do not believe those who tell you they are obvious. Clearly, they have never tried to prove the link between customer experience and revenue and customer growth. Instead, arm yourself with good analytical resources. Cuild a CRM solution that can feed your business case for the foreseeable future. In other words, create a mechanism to produce real customer insights, not data dumps that nobody understands.
In part 3 of our Customer Experience ROI series, we cover how to quantify the positive customer and employee engagement ROI of the customer experience business case. Higher employee engagement drives better retention numbers, lower churn and happier customers. Happier customers spend more money with your brand and drive up ancillary sales. Show me a CFO who does not want both.
Make the Business Case for Customer Experience
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