While the importance of CRM is challenged by few, how many businesses can boast a truly systematic approach to managing the customer value or client experience? All too often, managing client experience is left in the hands of varying account teams, which are only held accountable if a customer defects or complains. This uncoordinated approach is not conducive to the strategic management of customers. In order to track (and influence) the customer experience, management needs a systematic approach, with a clear methodology and transparent KPIs.
Initiative builds on customer value
Being in the CRM business means that we have always had a systematic approach to account management. However, we wanted to get a better grasp on how our customers’ CRM activities are contributing to their business and their whole growth strategy. Hence, in 2015, we decided to set up a dedicated unit for managing our customer experience. This new unit was christened Customer Success and is tasked with taking a progressive, proactive and agile approach to improving customer experience.
According to our latest Benchmark Study, just under a third (31%) of companies are placing their CRM solutions at the very heart of their business in order to drive growth, customer satisfaction, loyalty and revenues – whereas the majority of SMEs have yet to set such objectives or reach this level of maturity when deploying their CRM solutions. Therefore, the Customer Success Team is dedicated to helping Maximizer customers overcome technical and business issues and achieve tangible business growth, through the development and mastery of their CRM.
Take, for example, an accountancy firm that was struggling with their internal data analysis – it became clear to the team at Maximizer that they were wasting far too much time on manually creating spreadsheets to house client data. The Customer Success Team saw that they were missing out on the opportunity to design and implement customised dashboards. Following their account review, the business has dispensed with spreadsheets altogether and now only uses Maximizer CRM Dashboards for analysis and forecasting; which in return is saving more than 60 hours per month of valuable staff time.
Process and methodology
There are, of course, hard measures in place for the Customer Success Team to quantify that this theory works in practice – namely, increased customer intelligence, issue resolution success rates and timings, customer loyalty and, ultimately, growth in customer revenues. Through the Customer Success initiative, each customer has the opportunity for an annual review, in which we track their usage, satisfaction, ‘maturity’ and business value being gained from Maximizer CRM.
The first element of our Customer Success review is a set of structured questions about how they are using their Maximizer solution, in order to understand at which stage of the ‘CRM journey’ they have reached – and indeed how that compares to where they want to be. It is critical to understand their company or organisational ambitions. For example, they may want to use their CRM to enhance operational productivity or to centralise customer data, to better manage remote sales teams or improve service call scheduling. In fact, according to the Benchmark Study, centralisation of customer data was the top operating benefit being gained from SMEs’ CRM solutions.
Recently, Maximizer conducted an annual review of an equipment distributor, where it became clear that the business was having issues with tracking their own customers’ activities and customer service requests. Following the Customer Success review they implemented an automated customer ticketing process within the Customer Service module. This benefitted the business greatly, as it reduced follow-up times by 70% and significantly boosted conversion rates.
The second element of our Customer Success review looks at strategic business objectives. Over and above operational benefits, what else is the customer looking to achieve with their CRM? This is a conversation in which we will suggest tailored possibilities that the customer may not have thought achievable with their CRM or at their stage of business development. This discussion can identify more strategic growth ambitions than initially realised by the customer. They may want to understand which areas of their business will most benefit from additional investment or analyse their centralised data pool to verify which customers hold the greatest potential for future growth. They may wish to capture emerging customer requirements to feed in to their own product or service development plans.
Delivering measurable value – the key benefits
The key benefit of the Customer Success initiative is that it helps identify points of value in Maximizer that customers really recognise and value. In fact, our recent research highlights the top benefits which SMEs are gaining from their CRM solutions. They are:
- Centralisation of customer data
- Improved data quality & value
- Improved visibility of communication & activities
- Improved customer segmentation
- Increased productivity.
We have many more examples of identifying customer’s challenges and needs through the Account Review which Maximizer has subsequently helped resolve, resulting in additional measurable benefits being achieved for the customer. For example, one of our customers, a language solutions provider, was spending a considerable amount of their staff time (all of which was conducted to an expert level and thus was consequently very expensive) on manually checking data quality. The Customer Success Team’s resolution was to adopt an automated web-to-lead form which resulted in the business saving more than 400 minutes per month of esteemed staff time.
Key elements
To sum up what made our Customer Success initiative work, I am highlighting four main points:
- Regularity of customer contact – engaging in conversations is essential to building deeper relationships.
- A systematic methodology during the reviews – examining tactical usage as well as business objectives and ambitions. This provides the basis for an intelligent benchmark that our whole company can use to develop customers, products and markets.
- The ability to examine and translate the discussions into identified and implemented resolutions and deliver measurable added-value back to the customer.
- Going beyond our product to examine the wider picture of the business challenges faced by customers means that the software support team becomes a fully-fledged pro-active business-technical advisor, assisting customers in meeting their growth and success ambitions.
This last point is perhaps the most important, because it is in step with where Maximizer believes pioneers in the software industry are heading. Real customer value nowadays comes from providers that help you extract value from the software.
The Benchmark Report is now available to view and will be discussed in more detail in forthcoming GMA article.
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