Creating customer loyalty is a race against time. It’s been said that after 90 days a business only has a 10% chance of making the customer loyal. Therefore, once that clock starts ticking, value realization must occur quickly or a high probability exists that you will lose the customer.
Customer health is a prediction of future renewal/growth likelihood. Visit SuccessHub to learn more.
Gartner says that today, 89% of companies expect to compete mostly on the basis of customer experience, versus 36% four years ago. We see this in our personal lives as consumers and it is now showing up in our work lives. Many companies realize that driving customer health and loyalty is all about managing the entire lifecycle of customer experiences from onboarding to renewal.
Adoption as the Antidote for Customer Health
Just like your organization, Cisco is on its own journey to transformation. As we move from a sales strategy heavy on landing new logos or franchises in existing customers, to a full lifecycle approach, the focus has shifted to maximizing product utilization and expanding the footprint within the customer. Adoption services should be “job one” to help the customer get the value out of what they purchased. Implicit in any adoption practice is a significant opportunity to drive customer health and grow the relationship. The rewards of a lifecycle approach are undeniable: they include dramatic reductions in the cost to serve the customer and increases in recurring revenue.
How Do You Measure Success?
Data and analytics are the catalysts for building customer loyalty and understanding customer health. When you pave the way to understand what clients are experiencing, you can help them achieve their business goals and the outcomes they expect and deserve. As we shift strategy to focus on the lifecycle of customer experiences beyond the initial sale, our metrics have to change as well. This means that many of the old measures of bookings, revenue and customer satisfaction—often referred to as rear-view metrics—don’t work any more. These metrics tell you what’s happened in the past.
Instead, to get a good read on customer health and the likelihood of future renewal or additional wallet share, metrics should be built around recognizing what the customer will do in the future. This requires ongoing analysis of customer health and consistent monitoring of net promoter scores and other market-driven measures to understand what will be said about your company when you’re not there and if the customer will recommend you to others. These forward-looking or windshield metrics will also reveal future predictive buying decisions that your customers will make as a result of your relationship with them and will fuel effective customer engagement that will capture more expansion opportunities.
On-Demand Webinar: Delivering on the Promise of Customer Health
Cisco is committed to helping you deliver consistent customer engagement and the experiences customers want. The goal is simple: drive value realization and grow the relationship over time. Visit SuccessHub to learn more about how to digitize, automate and scale your own customer engagement practice with a focus on improving customer health.
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