TLDR: As subscription business models become commonplace, customer retention is something you maintain by making proactive investments in CX. To keep customer confidence high, your RevOps team should consistently collect customer feedback, discuss it cross-functionally, and strategize how best to solve customer pain points.
Typical sales and marketing strategies Businesses often prioritize generating as much revenue as possible, as fast as they can. This encourages Sales and Marketing to pursue quick wins and short-term goals. Measuring Sales against quarterly quotas, for instance, drives Sales and Marketing to focus more on leads from which they can quickly close deals.
“To sustain revenue long-term, you want to be equally dedicated to client retention.”
The logic to this short-term thinking: To keep costs low and be as profitable as soon as possible, pursue business you can easily win. But to sustain revenue long-term and maximize the ROI of each client engagement, you want to be equally dedicated to client retention.
What’s in this article for you? In the age of subscription business models, customer churn has never been a greater existential threat. Retention’s something you maintain by making proactive investments in Customer Success and quality customer experiences. In this Tough Talks Made Easy, we’ll help you explain what good CX looks like and the value it provides to your business.
➡️ Prioritize customer retention
➡️ Optimize CX at touchpoints
➡️ Use cross-functional feedback
➡️ Invest in long-term CX
➡️ Embrace RevOps for CX
Enhancing customer experience
CX is all about how your business engages with customers at each point of interaction.
Every instance where Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success interact with a customer is an opportunity to build goodwill and keep people interested in your brand, from campaign ads and content to the sales process to customer service and relationship management.
Businesses typically fall short with CX when customers have already signed a deal.
👉 For self-service products where users sign up independently, invest in an accessible UX with support channels and documentation to address more complex use cases. Make it as easy as possible for people to use your service, and they’ll probably continue to do so.
👉 For managed products and services, where clients have specific needs to address, Customer Success reps play a vital role in encouraging retention by regularly checking in with clients, listening to their goals and challenges, and helping them use your products and services to achieve their aims.
“Quality customer support will encourage them to stay.”
Even if a customer isn’t using your product for all its intended features, quality customer support will encourage them to stay. Where Marketing gets peoples’ attention and Sales gets them to sign, Customer Success is why people remain loyal to a business.
Strategies for effective CX
You want to discover and resolve any issues before customers lose confidence.
✅ Collect customer feedback through NPS surveys or simple Q&As integrated into products. It’s important to understand where you’re succeeding and what improvements to prioritize in your roadmap.
✅ Monitor social media channels Siloed communication limits how quickly you can solicit and react to feedback. Work with Marketing to gain visibility into social channels and use the data to improve products/services and respond to customers.
✅ Budget time for collecting feedback Give your RevOps team time to collect and integrate feedback from every channel and discuss it regularly as a team. Include BDRs and Product teams for a full scope conversation. Strategize together on how to address the issues clients have. Whether that means tweaking customer support or creating content to clarify certain processes and technical capabilities of your product.
Turn criticism into trust
Ultimately, your customer retention, business reputation and ROI from each customer engagement are threatened less by complaints than by failure to engage with criticism.
Each of your channels and customer touchpoints should be conceived as an opportunity to collect feedback.
“It’s more costly to rebuild your reputation than to deal with issues at the root.”
As long as business memberships to sites like TrustPilot cost tens of thousands of dollars each, it’s more costly to rebuild your reputation than to deal with issues at the root.
Listen to what your customers and prospects are saying at the first possible opportunity and here on after.
You’ll find out from their feedback where you need to make investments, and can rehabilitate potentially-damaging issues into demonstrations of care that inspire greater trust in your business.
The value of CX
The beauty of RevOps is its capacity to focus on CX in a proactive, planned manner.
Take every opportunity to collect customer feedback, discuss it cross-functionally, and strategize how best to solve customer pain points. Make CX a dedicated, long-term investment, and you’ll enjoy greater customer satisfaction, retention, and ROI.
For any guidance you need in RevOps, get in touch.
