Customer Retention 360

Peter Armaly 

Without a Voice of the Customer program, you’re running really blind on those major business goals.

Ed Powers 

Taking a step back and saying, ‘Well, before we make a major investment, let’s make sure that we’re not missing something really critical here’.

Sheik Ayube

I would go as far as saying most companies actually get pretty far way down that road, without having asked some pretty basic, fundamental questions. The center of that kind of premise is, ‘What do our customers even want?’ I think you’d be surprised at the amount of companies that can’t actually answer that question.

Peter Armaly 

A Voice of the Customer program has that piece of the puzzle, that if it’s missing, means that your business is not operating at its full potential. And in fact, it’s more dangerous than not hitting its full potential: I think it’s going to be at risk at some point, if you’re not listening to your customers.

Sheik Ayube 

The really cool thing about this client specifically, is that is something that they valued: ‘Hey, we don’t want to get too far down this road without actually understanding what’s important to our clients to begin with. And then how do we ultimately help enable that through our Customer Success function?’

Ed Powers 

Many of the questions, many of the things that she surfaced for why customers had decided to switch to a different provider, had nothing to do with the client experience. They had to do with the product; the platform that they had grown past its capabilities; that the economics were no longer working at a certain size. So even though the reasons that their customers gave to them for switching to someone else, many of them had nothing to do with the experience itself. Both customers who had decided to renew their agreement, and those who had decided to cancel, all agreed that the service was excellent.

Sheik Ayube

This is a perfect example of where you also learn that, ‘Hey, that thing that we were thinking about doing, we actually don’t need to do that, because our customers are telling us we’re already pretty good at that’.  So that absolutely helps to organize all of the different things that you may need to do and are on your plate, and it helps bring some level of priority to, ‘Okay, well, what should we actually be focusing on?’

Ed Powers 

One of the most important aspects that Anita and her team can bring for a new client is understanding why customers decide what they decide. What are the factors that go into that decision? And what is their experience from their perspective? It sounds easy, but that is very difficult to get. And it’s very difficult to get if you are the company interacting with those customers, because everything that you look at is from your own perspective, and from your own biases. Having someone come in from the outside, to look at this from a fresh perspective, and to ask the kinds of questions that really uncover what’s important, why is it important and to whom is it important – that is incredibly valuable.

Those are skills that salespeople don’t have. Those are skills that marketers don’t have. Those are skills that customer service and customer success people do not have and even executives at companies. These are rare and very valuable skills that Anita brings to bear to work on these client projects.

Sheik Ayube

You go through one of these exercises, one of these projects, and you actually start talking to your customers, you’ll quickly learn that the surveying strategy on its own really isn’t adequate. And again, a lot of companies, they make it down this path of looking at spreadsheets and looking at data, but there’s no color that sits behind it. And that’s really what working with Anita has provided here: it’s provided all of the color and context around some pretty significant decisions that we’ve made, that change the entire operating model of a company.

Ed Powers

All good things come from customers and unfortunately, in the day-to-day work that we do with customers, we focus on tasks and activities and milestones and metrics. But we don’t stop to ask very often about context. What’s really happening there? What are the things that are happening behind the curtain that we don’t see that we would never imagine is going on? Those are the kinds of insights that that are incredibly valuable, that open the opportunity for us to add even additional value that we had never even considered, and to deliver an experience and a level of value that make customers, customers for life.

Sheik Ayube

All of the people we work with are really smart. These are our top performers. They’ve been top performers throughout their career. So their assumptions are oftentimes, right. But you’d be surprised by how many times they’re not.

Peter Armaly 

If you don’t check with your customer, if you don’t make the effort to check with them on what you’re thinking about, or what you’re doing; what their opinions are of these things, you run the risk of working on projects and initiatives that are missing the mark. And that won’t manifest itself, that risk won’t manifest itself until it’s too late. And usually it shows up a year or two later, when you’re really struggling to keep your customers. So there’s a retention issue, and you don’t even know why. Because you just know that your sales are not where they should be. Even when you keep customers, they’re not expanding. And you don’t know why.

You don’t know the answer to a lot of the stuff that’s bugging you at a really high business level: retention and growth. You can’t answer your Board, when some smart Board member might ask, ‘Okay, can you explain a little bit more why this retention number is so hard to move? It’s stuck. It’s stuck at 78%. Why can’t you get it to 83%? And if you can’t explain that 5%, what’s happening in your customer base, I think your job is at risk at that point. So you should be able to have knowledge and insight into the customers’ behavior, their ability to adopt, and what’s preventing them from adopting your products and your services. And what you’re trying to work on to improve those things.

Sheik Ayube

Part of what we deliver isn’t just a report, but we’ll go through and create a highlight reel of all of the great things that your client said, as well as summarizing some of the common things that were common friction points. And when we delivered that to the client, it caught on like wildfire. It was actually pretty amazing to see. I mean, some of the things that we got out of this project, rallied the company. This is something that literally was showing up in all-hands calls. And people were talking about it. There was a I lot of buzz about it, because it wasn’t just the CS organization saying, ‘Hey, look, we’re doing good here. Hey, look, we’re doing that here’. Now people are hearing it from the clients themselves. And that’s just super powerful.

Ed Powers

At the end of the day, what it will deliver is equal to, if not higher, customer satisfaction. It will deliver better alignment with their end customers’ goals and objectives. It will help to identify opportunities for expansion and growth. And it will help to build solid bonds of trust between the customer and the client, that should lead to higher retention and growth over the long term.

Sheik Ayube

Happier clients and happier employees. And happier clients, happier employees have a direct impact on your bottom line and your top line growth and have a direct impact to the Board and those that are actually in the most strategic positions at a company. And all of that converts into a positive impact on revenue, on profits and operating margin.

Ed Powers 

In today’s business environment, people are rewarded for making quick decisions not for making good decisions. And Anita helps you make good decisions.