Introducing: Customer Success Tenets

It’s been 12 months this month since I joined Commerce Vision and started working with you. The time has gone at warp speed, and I hope for those of you I've engaged with I've been able to add value. 

At a personal level, the last 12 months has very much been a time of getting to know you, your businesses, and of course how Commerce Vision can help. Over the holidays I've been reflecting on my role and the Customer Success Program. 

To that end I've been working on a strategy that I'd like to share and hopefully get your feedback on. 

After a lot of whiteboard sessions with the CV team, and some much appreciated help from a few of you, I've distilled my focus down to what we could do in 2017 to help your business. More specifically, what we could do that would have the biggest impact on growing your profitability. 

I came up with this:

Pretty simple, right?

Too simple? Let me take a step back and explain:

In an ideal world, companies move their prospects down a sales funnel. Prospects become customers, and customers hopefully become advocates.  Advocates encourage others to use your products/services and they forgive you when things go wrong. They do this because they are LOYAL.

So, once we recognise the nucleus of the strategy as loyalty, we then need to consider what will create and keep loyalty in a world of hyper-competition. My theory looks something like this:

The idea is that each “piece of the pie” makes up a portion of what converts someone from a customer into an advocate. So, if a customer has what they want (information), how and when they want it (personalisation), and feels good about interacting with your company (customer experience), you have the building blocks of one very happy camper. Only with a good balance of all three can you make this happen, but that’s ok - knowing is half the battle!

So now that we have the basis of our Customer Success Tenets, how do we turn them into something actionable? I think our action points should fall into two categories. To illustrate, I’ll borrow Stephen Covey’s theory on Area of Influence and Area of Concern, but adapt it slightly for our situation.

The first section I call the ‘Area of Direct Influence’, and it looks like this. Here is where I come in. The Area of Direct Influence encompasses the changes I can help you make, or suggestions for changes you might not have thought of. Changes such as displaying product availability on the web, highlighting price breaks, and using layers. Effectively, these are the things that Commerce Vision (and by extension, I) can directly influence.  

Still with me? Good.

Next comes the second category – the ‘Area of Indirect Influence’. It looks something like this:

Actions within this sphere might be a little less obvious, but are still incredibly necessary for a good overall strategy to grow customer loyalty. These are things that Commerce Vision, as your partner, should know about but can only indirectly influence. Some examples could be in-person customer interactions, EDM’s, or product content. The more we know about your business and its goals, the more targeted we can be in our help.

And there we have it!

This is how I believe the Customer Success Program can have a positive impact on your business. By focusing on each tenet and its individual, achievable goals we can make real inroads on your business strategies.

So what do you think? I’m really excited! So excited, in fact, that I've done a webinar to walk through the ideas with you. If you missed it you can view the recording below:

But in the meantime, I’m keen to understand whether you believe this model will help our engagement going forward. The idea is that I can grow this model with you, so whether it’s good, bad, or ugly, I’d love to hear what you have to say about it.