Every business desires to build the ultimate CX business model. You may have a plan to create your first Customer Experience model or perhaps you are in the processing of creating or modifying an existing CX model. If you are one of the few that already has a model in place that is producing loyal customers on a consistent basis, then I want to congratulate you; that is an accomplishment! No matter what stage you are at in pursuing a working CX model that creates repeatable customer success with quality and excellence, this may help you to understand how to drive over 90% of your customers to a higher health level than Green. It will introduce you to the new level of long term customer partnership; GOLD.
Customers have so many options these days with technology innovating quickly. It enables companies to may changes quicker with very little risk. Finding the hook to keep a loyal customer is still the formula we all seek. However, I have found one trend in my observations of thousands of loyal customers over the years. Customers really don’t like change and would prefer to find something that works, meets their needs and becomes entrenched into their day to day business processes and activities that makes an impact in how they operate.
The two elements that create these types of hooks are Engagement and Indispensability. Let’s talk about each of these relative to technology solutions.
Engagement is how well the technology is being utilized and adopted across the customer user community internally and/or externally, as applicable. An Engagement factor helps to understand how many users are using the product, how often and what specific product elements are being used.
Indispensability is how entrenched is the solution within the critical business operations. How it is solving the high value problems that create real value and ROI for the business. An Indispensability factor helps to understand what kinds of processes and activities the users are using the solution (product) for and how critical are these to their day to day operations that will make a high value impact in their business.
How you define these factors varies based on the target markets, type of solution and value or benefits the solution provides. Each company would define these specifically to meet the desired high value outcomes for customers in each market segment.
The concept is that the more your customers are engaged with using your product throughout their company and in a way that becomes indispensable to the users way of life in doing their job better, thus making an impact in the business effectiveness; the customers become loyal to your product. In a mathematical sense, it would a factor that you would assign to each element that represents a certain level of engagement and indispensability that would be based on what the definition is for the desired state of a successful customer . It would be the elements required to enable high value outcomes that solve high value problems that are critical to the business operations.
Once Customers have a high enough Engagement and Indispensability score they will be considered a GREEN Customer and have a high probability of renewing and expanding. However, to get to a GOLD state, those scores need to produce real value and ROI for the customers that is defined and acknowledged by the team, key Sponsors and Stakeholders and financial decision makers. Then you have a 100% probability of renewal and expansion and commitment to continued investment and in many cases multi-year contracts.
The following is an example of how you could categorize the customer base based on these scores:
Understanding where you customers fall in this type of analysis will help Customer Success teams to plan how to turn all the red and yellow customers into Green and then continue to the roadmap to a well defined GOLD state of value and ROI. It also will help the sales teams in understanding how to setup a customer in the sales cycle to become a green (Loyal) Customer that makes it easier and faster for the services and CS teams to get customers to the GOLD state.
There are much more details to this discussion, but I wanted to share some of the key concepts with you all and get your thoughts and feedback.