A Practical Approach to Increasing Profitability Through CX

Commonly, in sales, it is widely understood that is it easier and cheaper to sell into your base of existing customers than to acquire new customers.  Whether that be new products and services or more products and services.

Also, it is widely understood in sales that people who actively refer you – as in they are out actively evangelizing your business - are more powerful for your business than people who passively refer your business – someone mentions they have a need for your service and only then does this person mention your services.  They are not proactively evangelizing your business.

At the same time, now, small businesses are facing new challenges – increasing costs, increasing costs to borrow money, tariffs, uncertainty and buyers have tighter wallets for the same reasons. 

How do you improve the business without large capital investments?

The simple answer is analysing and improving your customer experience to improve the relationships, purchasing, profitability, testimonials and referrals coming from existing customers.  And to improve your service, communications, product/services, and strategic spending to service said customers. 

But many small and medium sized businesses lack the experience and leadership to get this done.  It is a lack of knowledge – know-how, processes, and methodology to get this done and orchestrate their teams to implement changes across business units to get this done.

This can include know-how on mapping your customer journeys, orchestrating and harmonizing all the customer channels - like digital, customer service, marketing, physical store, account management and all the sub-components of those channels like chat bots, IVR, call center, direct mail, mobile, account reviews, etc.

But if businesses can effectively do this, they can see measurable improvements in terms of decreased costs, longer customer retention, increased share of wallet, more testimonials, more referral and passive referring clients becoming active recurring clients.

And it is a practical move because, if you have the knowledge to do it, it is not expensive as it often just means improvements on strategy, tactics, pricing, communication and orchestration of customer channels.  Furthermore, it gives you more insight and control over levers that influence your customers, so they are stickier, buy more and leads to further new sales and improved brand in the marketplace.

A good process utilizes a good methodology of analysis, identifies all areas of the business that impact this – as examples sales, account management, customer service, marketing and operations – can make the various silos of the business understand the importance of this work to the business and can help orchestrate them to work together to perform this analysis and then implement the best changes. “Best” meaning changes that for most efficient cost of money and time lead to material results. This would include identifying what possible material results could be whether that be profitability, decreased costs, better customer retention, increased share of wallet or better product/services development and customer service/support.