Experience the ROI of ‘Irrational Commitment’
Human capital includes customers, too. This Engagement Agency service helps organizations benchmark their customer engagement strategies across all touchpoint and tactics against effective practices and clear metrics aligned with organizational goals and, if necessary, identify the most appropriate solutions and implementation strategies. Unlike most solution providers, The Engagement Agency looks at Customer Experience and Loyalty as part of an integrated customer engagement strategy rather than siloed tactics, as is often the case.
Looking for new sources of profitability and revenues with minimal investment? Start with looking at your organization’s level of customer churn, revenue-per-customer, cost-per-customer, and willingness to recommend or actual number and value of referrals. If yours is like many organizations, you’ve baked a level of customer churn and dissatisfaction into your expectations that in fact are a source of potential short-term wealth.
Engaging consumers or business customers is the most challenging of all because in most cases people have multiple options and influencers. Making matters worse, many companies lack granular analytics about what factors truly drive customer trial, loyalty, and willingness to refer; the return on investment of customer engagement efforts, and instead focus primarily on what they would prefer to sell, at what price, and how. Customer experience design is often transactional, rather than relational in nature and focuses on a product’s or services’ rational features and benefits, rather than understanding how the product/service aligns with a target customer’s values and motivations. Neuroscience research has provided evidence that buying decisions are primarily made by the brain’s emotional center, and subsequently reinforced by rational evaluations of quality and functionality.
Rather than silo-ing the customer experience from brand strategy, employee experience and financial metrics, the Engagement Agency customer engagement advisory service looks at the entire customer acquisition, experience, and retention process using a strategic and systematic approach validated by extensive research that goes beyond the concept of the popular “service value profit chain,” model originally developed by Harvard professor James L. Heskett, et al. We apply the same strategic and systematic approach to customers as we do with all stakeholders to achieve measurable, sustainable results.
Profiting From the ROI of Customer Experience
Based on the fact that customer satisfaction has not wavered much above the low 70% in over 10 years, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Association, it is clear that extensive investments in the current reactive, ad hoc, and siloed approach to customer acquisition, experience, and retention has produced mixed results. While companies are gathering customer and employee feedback at a record pace, there is often little understanding of how to align customer feedback with brand strategy, profit goals, the competitive marketplace, and a service culture that enables employees to provide a great customer experience. Improving customer experience requires much more than reacting to customer feedback and subsequently trying to plug holes. Rather it needs to focus on aligning everyone around the company mission, values, and goals. Rather than chasing a ‘score’, the focus should be on evaluating how well the experience delivery fits the brand promise.
Many organizations often have less than expected revenues due to factors they cannot easily measure:
• Advertising, marketing, or salespeople creating expectations that are not consistently met (or cannot be met).
• Lack of a customer-centric culture that includes policies that serve the company’s needs, but which create customer friction.
• Lack of employee empowerment to resolve customer concerns at the first point of contact.
• Long customer service wait-times or difficult-to-understand customer service representatives due to a desire to reduce costs.
• Transactional confirmation procedures that eat up time and create confusion.
• Employees who are reinforced/rewarded for behaviors that are counter to the customer’s best interests.
• A lack of direct communication between managers and customers/customer-facing employees, let alone with the marketing and sales departments setting the expectations.
Why do so many companies tolerate these common experiences? The CEOs and CFOs can much more easily measure the money saved and that goes to the bottom line than they can the danger of aggravating so many customers. As long as sales go up, it’s easy to ignore the question—how much more would sales and profits have increased by if higher levels of customer experience were achieved?
Enhanced Revenues and Profits Through Effective Customer Experiences
The Engagement Agency is uniquely equipped to help enhance Customer Experience and Loyalty strategies based on:
• Alignment with the organization’s purpose, objectives, and brand strategy.
• Degree to which the brand is delivering on its promises to the customer.
• Evaluating the cost-benefits associated with customer experience enhancement.
• Analysis of customer turnover, the reasons, and the costs.
• Degree of brand alignment between sales, marketing, and employees.
• Level of customer and employee friction and at the various stages of the sales or service cycle.
• Effectiveness of the digital experience and engagement.
• Degree of alignment of communications, learning, rewards, and recognition, and measurement with the organization’s brand, purpose, and objectives.
• Utilization of customer feedback and behavioral information to provide prescriptive analytics.
The deliverables can include:
• Creation of a formal customer engagement strategy with a clear ROI tied to organizational objectives and values.
• Oversight of implementation and measurement.
• Managed outsourcing of customer analytics, technology, loyalty, or other engagement solutions, based on client needs.
Senior Advisors
Rick Garlick, Ph.D. Vice President, Magid
Dr. Garlick has extensive experience at the front lines of implementing the customer experience across the entire organizational value chain. He also has formed a strategic roadmap in which brand strategy, employee experience, incentives, etc. result in ‘irrational’ commitment, which is enhanced loyalty where customers will travel farther, pay a premium price, and ignore competitors to purchase your product or service.
Alex Mead, Executive Director, Customer Service Experience
Mead manages contact center, customer service and operations teams, driving CX innovation, delivering top class customer experiences, operations efficiency and customer loyalty. Skills include CX, UX, CRM strategy, digital transformation and hands-on leadership.