A small, privately held CRM software company in the SaaS market space needed to put strategies in place to develop a positive customer experience across the organization, to increase wallet-share and retention and position itself to be a prime candidate for VC funding.

Problem

The company had an intense focus on marketing, sales, product and development, but had never found a way to integrate customer experience strategies, processes and tools into the organization. The company typically did not know about issues with the system or the product until customers phoned in; customer communications were reactive; issue handing was often comprised of one-off solutions or one-off interactions with membersof the executive team; the contact center had multiple channels that were not being used effectively; no one knew why customers were calling in; customer experiences were inconsistent and unpredictable; churn was not measured or managed; customer satisfaction and loyalty was not measured or managed; up-sell was not measured or effectively implemented. The hand-off from sales to service was not managed and expectations set during the sales process were not known by the service team; promises made during the sales process were difficult to fulfill on in any kind of scalable way. There were no mechanisms in place to gather feedback from customers on anything from the sales process to on-boarding to service to product.  No one within the organization had a clear, comprehensive picture of the end-to-end customer experience. No one knew who owned customer satisfaction, loyalty or retention.

Approach

In order to make this company a customer-centric organization we had to take a comprehensive look at the entire company, beyond customer support. Customer experience encompasses all facets of an organization – that means all the functions that lie upstream from customer support and service and have direct or indirect touch-points to customers. Our goal was to develop a roadmap for quick fixes that would almost immediately lessen the noise internally and from customers, and well as to detail longer-term strategies and tactics.

Enterprise Solutions & Results

·         Core Processes – We met with each department to identify the core processes, and map those out end-to-end, so we could highlight the critical touch-points between departments and the gaps. This was a particularly enlightening exercise in that we found several processes that were owned by multiple departments, or by multiple resources within one department, or, worse yet, not owned by anyone. Some critical job functions were being carried out in a silo, and not part of any overall process, and therefore not being done effectively or efficiently or with any necessary hand-off or interaction with other departments.  We were able to map out core processes across the company, identify owners, and related performance metrics to enforce accountability.

·         Loyalty Moments – We plotted the end-to-end customer experience and analyzed the Loyalty Moments that were impacting customers. Once we knew what the Loyalty Moments were, we were able to address those specifically and build out ways to make those positive, memorable customer experiences. For each Loyalty Moment we determined the metrics that needed to be in place and the owners for each metric. It is important to note that owners of Loyalty Moments and metrics spanned across all departments and functions. Loyalty Moments were reviewed in monthly company meetings, so everyone was aware of how the other departments were doing and once again reinforcing accountability and the importance of cross-department customer experience ownership.

·         Cross Department Collaboration – While the executives met on a regular basis, the directors and managers who owned many of the metrics and were responsible for the day-to-day operations were not meeting with each other. Having this team meet frequently was vital not only to engender a sense of community, but most importantly to talk about issues and develop solutions at a company-wide level. These meetings became an extremely valuable tool in understanding how what one department does effects other teams/departments in ways that were never considered. They learned to leverage existing processes and procedures, and to think about strategies and ideas, as related to impact to other departments and customers, before implementing them. 

·         Marketing Messages – With the Marketing team, we revamped most marketing material, including enrollment forms, special promotion material, and websites so that the marketing message was aligned with the actual product and services being delivered.

·         Offering & Pricing Assessment–We revised product and service offerings and pricing so they made sense based on 1) value they are providing to clients and b) the effort requiredfor fulfillment. We bundled products together to assist with the up-sell program and to assure that customers were buying items that made sense to purchase together, for the most value.

·         Sales Discounts & Incentives – We worked with the Sales team to approve discounts and incentives that could be used to help close the sale. There was a massive gap between what Sales was offering at time of sale versus what the company could actually provide. We needed to close this gap so that Sales was offering realistic incentives and customers were receiving what they expected and in the timeframe they were promised.  

·         Customized On-Boarding – We worked with Marketing, Sales and Service to develop different ways of on-boarding for different customers, depending which sales channel they came through. Previously all customers were told the same thing, about what would happen during on-boarding, however this was not realistic and was not happening, leading to disappointed customers in the first 7 days of purchase. With the new on-boarding options in place, everyone and everything (e.g. marketing material, direct sales team, event sales team) was on the same page in terms of what to tell customers about their on-boarding process, resulting in better educated customers with the appropriate expectations. 

·         Information Hand-Off - We put mechanisms in place that created a smooth hand-off between these sales and service. This was a substantial benefit to the service team and to the customers who appreciated the cohesiveness between sales and service, and the feeling that the company knew them and their situation.

Improvement/Benefit:  Hand-off information was provided 90% of the time (up from 10%); Implementation time reduced by 5 days

·         Loyalty Marketing –We revised add-on services and product offerings to make sure the company was selling what would provide true value to its customers and what could be successfully fulfilled on. Based on the revised offerings, we launched a loyalty marketing program where the company proactively sent information to customers with monthly specials and discounts, based on what that customer needed at that point in their lifecycle.

Improvement/Benefit: Up-sell program generated enough revenue to pay for itself; Accrued an additional 10% in revenue (up from 2-4%); Average customer monthly billing increased by 20%

·         Retention – We collected all cancellation data, trained employees how to handle cancellation requests, how to retain customers, how to target “at risk” customers, and how to be empowered to save customers. We put in place a monthly all-hands churn meeting where representatives from each department were required to attend. Each monthly meeting highlighted reasons for cancellations, trends, and mitigating actions that could be taken to lower churn. This was an especially important step in reinforcing the fact that all departments had a hand in owning the customer experience.

Improvement/Benefit:  Reduction in monthly churn from 20% down to 3%; Increased time on books from 1.2 months to 7 months among cancelled customers

·         Bug Management - We developed a set of priorities for bugs which determined their treatment and the required ETA for a fix. Priorities, ETAs and status updates were communicated to customers, so their expectations were aligned with what was actually going to happen. 

·         Patches and Deployments - We worked with the development team to ensure that patches and new feature deployments were scheduled according to a published calendar (dates and times based on low usage/low impact to customers). Everyone internally and customers had plenty of advanced notice, providing customers a sense of knowing when something would happen and feeling confident the impact to them would be minimal. 

Customer Service Solutions & Results

·         First Impression–We created the role of First Impression Coordinator who was responsible for welcoming new customers to the company. This was a huge critical Loyalty Moment that customers had made known to the company. They needed some kind of warm welcome from the company to feel valued from day one – something to fill in the gap they were feeling between sales and implementation.

Improvement/Benefit:  Direct reduction in<30 day churn rates

·         Welcome Campaign– All new customers were added to an automated follow-up sequence that further welcomed them to the company and provided them some valuable tools and resources for assistance, as well as insight into next steps and key contact information.

Improvement/Benefit:  Increased time on books by 40+ days

·         Support Channels – The company had a variety of inbound support channels, none of which were measured in terms of volume or effectiveness. Giving customers too many ways to reach the company, without any sort of process or management in place, was actually creating a negative Loyalty Moment and making it difficult for anyone internally to set appropriate expectations. We limited the inbound support to just one channel. It was important to replace quantity with quality and have just primary channel that we could monitor and measure to create a predictable customer experience.

Improvement/Benefit:  Reduced inbound customer contact by 1/3; Increase customer satisfaction by 10%

·         Tiered Support– Once inbound support was limited to one manageable, measureable channel and we had critical call center statistics, we were able to put a tiered support system in place to allow different levels of support for different types of calls and for different customers. Rather than “one size fits all”, calls were routed to different agents depending on the nature of the call or the customer’s level. 

Improvement/Benefit:  Reduction in AHT by 1 minute; increased first contact resolution rates; Decreased cost per contact from $44/contact to $17/contact

·         Knowledge Management – We allocated a resource to populate a knowledge base with the most common questions, answers and process, and to promote the knowledge base internally and with customers. It was a 24×7 source of help and designed to lessen the volume of calls to the call center.

Improvement/Benefit:  Reduction in inbound volume by 10-20% (varied by month)

·         Up-Sell on Inbound Calls – Service and support agents were trained on how to effectively up-sell during inbound contact with customers.

Improvement/Benefit: Up-sell program generated enough revenue to pay for itself; Accrued an additional 10% in revenue (up from 2-4%); Average customer monthly billing increased by 20%

·         Communication – We put in place a series of proactive communications, including downtime notifications, release notes, and new feature documentation. 

Improvement/Benefit:  Contributed to increase in customer satisfaction by 10%

What Customers Thought

·         Customer loyalty increased from 50% to 80%

·         Customer satisfaction increased from 70% to 85%