Customer Value Consultancy
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 making it easy for them to interact with the business 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. Delivering real value to customers starts by understanding how they think, where they are coming from and where they are going, then building your straegy around their needs.
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 transact and do business with you. Many companies make the mistake of setting up channels but never integrate them effectively, or create processes that may seem efficient but actually make life difficult for customers, 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 and other efforts to acquire new customers) and the costs associated with servicing different types of customers is essential. Not all customers are equally profitable and if it costs up to 5 times 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.
We help organisations to understand value from the customer standpoint.
Behavioural Value
Having great people who understand and 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, the wrong kind of staff attitudes and behaviours can really cause you problems with customers.
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. Many activities designed to support good customer management fail to really raise the bar on either the customer experience or customer service. This is often due to a lack of integration across the business.
The ICD partnership will work with you to integrate your customer work programmes and thereby truly create a competitive edge with a designed customer strategy.