Delivering Customer Value
What Drives Value in your Customer Experience?
Michael Porter describes the job of businesses as "value delivery systems". We fundamentally believe that relationships between an organisation and its customers only survive for as long as they both can derive value from each other.
Creating and delivering what customers really want and expect, and making it easy for them to interact with you is part of value delivery. However businesses need to balance the value they provide in the whole customer experience with the revenues and profit from customers.
Customer Strategy
Many businesses don't have a customer strategy. Deciding which customers you want to have, designing and delivering real value to them starts by understanding how they think, where they are coming from and where they are going, then building your customer strategy around their needs.
Behavioural Value
Having great staff who go the extra mile for customers can compensate for many shortcomings in a business. On the other hand, no matter how efficient your processes, how up to date your IT and tightly managed your cost base is, a poor culture, promoting the wrong attitudes and behaviour can really cause customer dissatisfaction.
Operational Value
If you know your customers and what they are trying to achieve, the next stage is to build the processes structures and channels that make it easy for them to do business with you. Many companies never successfully integrate channels effectively, and so customers have an inconsistent customer experience and this can have a negative impact on customer retention, customer satisfaction and may even affect your bottom line.
Financial Value
Understanding your acquisition costs (what you spend on sales, marketing etc.) and the cost to serve different types of customers is essential. Not all customers are equally profitable and if it costs more to acquire a new customer than to retain, up-sell or cross-sell to existing ones. There are compelling reasons to understand the value of a customer to you, over the lifetime of their business as this allows you to balance what you put into customer management with the revenues and profits returned.
At ICD, we believe that the key to delivering customer value lies in synchronising each component of value so that collectively they deliver real value to customers and encourage lasting customer retention. ICD can help you to raise the bar on the customer experience and customer service with a bespoke change programme that concentrates help where you need it first.