Someday your customer is going to leave you. Churn happens to every business regardless of size or industry. After all, it’s the event in the customer lifecycle stage that the retention process was created to prevent.
You’ll ask yourself, “What happened?”, then try to rationalize, “…but our offering is the best in the market…we provided them with killer rates…we never screwed up / they never had a major CS issue.”
I get it, clients who leave without the occurrence of a “major incident” or without you being able to forecast their demise, are perplexing and simply seem unjustified. But they’re not. You’re just not in tune with their CX journey. The simple answer is this:
With the plethora of options presented to consumers today, businesses will need to compete mainly on their ability to deliver the best customer experience. Gartner predicted, “…by 2018, more than 50% of organizations will implement significant business model changes in their efforts to improve customer experience.”
This means that your delivery supersedes your price and product and is your brand’s key competitive differentiator.
As you start to reflect on your own clients and how they currently feel about your business, odds are you may need to to take a step back and look at the CX journey from your customers’ perspective.
Here are some questions to ask yourself to see how you measure up and help you recalibrate:
- Are you proactive or just reactive?
If you only focus on milestone events, you’re missing everything in between and with it, the opportunities to deliver a better experience. Being “in tune” with the journey involves discipline and regular outreach. Stay connected.
- Do you invest in the experience?
Make certain your support teams have the right process in place, as well as all the tools that allow them to easily stay engaged and deliver the best experience.
- Is it just CX / Support’s responsibility to deliver the customer experience?
No, it’s not. All departments “own” the responsibility of delivering your brand and the customer experience; even though CX may “own” the retention and revenue responsibilities. Every touchpoint that exists, whether face to face or behind the scenes, influences the relationship and in turn steers the course of the journey.
If you didn’t feel positive about your answers above, chances are your CX journey is on the decline. Don’t panic. The good news is you can fix it. No one’s perfect and getting it right the first time means you’ve probably learned from the mistakes of others (well done there). Just remember that your customers’ needs will inevitably change some day; so stay dialed in, respond quickly and support them through their journey.