How to prove customer experience-driven revenue benefits.

Blog

Become a Member SIGN UP!
  • Contact us

    • 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

    Become a Member of The Petrova Experience for resources, templates, and discounts on coaching for how to make the business case for CX.

    Liliana Petrova

    Published on 10/23/2017
    leaders act on behalf of their customer - organizational culture quote the petrova experience

    Organizational Culture and Access to Information

    By and large, people perceive culture as an HR discipline. The most common perception is that culture covers the soft side of performance. Culture is about how you do things, not so much about what you do. This approach to culture could not be more wrong. In fact, organizational culture is about so much more than a few words in a performance review sheet.  It is about leaders expressing values, and the action guidance their cultural behaviors provide.

    by 03/21/2019
    Continue reading

    How a Personal Interaction builds Repeat Customers

    A customer-centric methodology is key to the successful outcome of my interaction with Hello Spud. It is the reason this story appears here, and not among the CX Big Fails! The company did not send an automated response. It did not deliver a message stating “sorry we couldn’t help you, would you like something else.” Instead, the company co-founder reached out to me personally across multiple channels (a handwritten note, followed by personal emails).

    by 11/28/2018
    Continue reading

    Price Based Country test mode enabled for testing Colombia. You should do tests on private browsing mode. Browse in private with Firefox, Chrome and Safari