Business Challenges

We at CustomerImpact know that ultimately, whether a public company or privately held, the goal is to deliver value to customers and all stakeholders. These two are inextricably linked; some say they are identical. If customers are not satisfied with their experiences, have negative perceptions of the brand, and do not feel they are receiving value, those thoughts and feelings will translate directly into behaviours that will significantly harm the organization. Customers will leave or spend less with their current vendor. Referrals will decline. These actions all are damaging to revenue growth, and they put pressure on productivity and profit margins. What business challenges must companies overcome if they are to achieve the business outcomes their stakeholders expect?

Retain Customers

Revenues are at risk when customer defections are neither understood nor controlled. Defections are a result of dissatisfaction with products, services, systems, or personnel interactions. You have an opportunity to right these real and/or perceived wrongs when you listen to what customers are telling you through survey feedback and other communications with the organization. It is critical to understand what is most important to customers, what the key drivers of satisfaction and loyalty are. CustomerImpact works with clients to assess the current state of customer relationships, analyze survey results, evaluate operational efficiencies, and put plans in place for improved performance management

Identify Business Opportunities and Prioritize Investments

Although there may be many opportunities for new and enhanced products and services, the key is to let customers drive those decisions rather than Engineering and to base those decisions on sound analysis rather than anecdotal evidence. We work with clients to help them listen to customers identify and prioritize what improvements they want and what value they assign to each. We help clients make these important investment decisions, taking into account other factors such as technical feasibility, corporate strategy, availability of appropriate resources, competitive environment, market trends, operational costs, highest expected returns, and time to achieve value.

Understand and Respond to Competition

How do you stack up against the competition? What are your strengths and weaknesses compared to their strengths and weaknesses? How does the marketplace in general, and your customers in particular, view the value (quality versus price) of what you deliver compared to competitors? Do they excel in areas that are considered important by customers and prospects? Through Win/Loss studies we help clients understand which factors were important in their decisions, which competitors they won against or lost against, and why. Through Customer Churn studies, we help clients understand why customers have left, what competitor they went to and why. Customer strategies can then be fine-tuned to optimize relationships with current clients and to maximize new sales.

Streamline Operational Processes and Reduce Costs

Executive and departmental dashboards monitor the health of the organization and demonstrate the relationship of key performance indicators (KPIs) to operational, financial and customer data. Operational problems can be identified and addressed before they cause too much damage. By targeting those areas that represent the key drivers of satisfaction and dissatisfaction, costs are reduced through streamlining of tasks and elimination of non-productive and unnecessary steps in the process. And, with performance improvements, customer satisfaction goes up, which is typically accompanied by lower cost of sales and support.

Leverage Loyal and Profitable Customers

While overall customer retention is a respectable goal, in truth, successful companies know how to segment customers by loyalty to the company, the depth of their commitment, profitability, and strategic value (potential for future profitability). They are thus in a position to manage and grow the relationships of their most valued accounts because they know how to listen to customers and to leverage the insights gained. In order to do this, customer data (attitudinal and behavioral) and costs must be immediately available and accessible to all with a need to know. With the insights gained, they are able to continue to serve their loyal and profitable customers with the care required to keep them happy. And by understanding the drivers of loyalty in the less satisfied but strategically important customers, these companies take actions that will turn around those less loyal customers.

Performance Management

Decisions made by executives, managers, and front-line employees across business units and regions all impact the company’s performance. What do they need to make the best decisions? Timely, relevant, and accurate information. And therein lies the challenge. The required data can come from a wide variety of places—different databases, emails, spreadsheets, financial statements, customer survey applications. Companies typically are sitting of mountains of operational, financial, and customer data that is spread across many areas of the business and throughout many reporting tools.  And, in the face of growing demand, companies continue to gather more data than ever.

Depending on the functional or business area, pertinent data may need to be pulled from more than one of these sources and integrated into a personalized dashboard that highlights the relationship between the key data elements. Customer behavioural data and feedback are critical components of the dashboard, driving the insights and actions that should be taken. Customer Performance Management dashboards have indeed become the new face of reporting.  In order to turn information into higher business performance, there are two vital components:

Selecting the key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics to display and track

KPIs are quantifiable measurements that reflect critical success factors of the enterprise. They are those measurements that will reflect the corporation’s strategic goals and track progress in meeting them. The key is to limit these measurements to those factors that are truly significant. Through CustomerImpact’s Consulting Services, we can help those organizations that have not selected the KPIs, either at the enterprise level or at the departmental level, to select the KPIs and supporting metrics that will be accessed through the dashboard’s drill-down capability.

Presenting the data in a way that conveys clearly the significant information

CustomerImpact’s dashboard technology allows the user to quickly identify problem areas, drill down for more detail, and plan appropriate actions. In order to quickly grasp the key findings, the data has to be presented in the most visually arresting manner. That’s where CustomerImpact’s team of experts comes into the picture. They collaborate with clients to build the most effective dashboards, applying best practices, for example, in the use of color, positioning of graphical material on the screen, and use of the most appropriate  graphical format for specific types of data.

CustomerConnect™

It is essential in today’s fast-paced and competitive market to retain current customers while bringing on new ones. Understanding what is most important to your customers and their perceptions of your performance in those areas should underlie all efforts to meet your targets for customer satisfaction, retention, and spend.Measuring customer attitudes will help you:

• Identify issues at both the system and account levels
• Create and prioritize processes to solve these issues
• Establish goals
• Develop corporate strategies that support those goals
• Identify additional business opportunities
• Prioritize investments with highest potential payback
• Build customer relationships
• Increase customer satisfaction and loyalty

CustomerImpact offers a well-defined customer feedback process, based on sound methodology, resulting in a flow of accurate, timely, and actionable feedback. This information is provided to all levels of the organization from all categories of customer surveys on behalf of all customers. Our powerful combination of technology and services helps you to make the correct decisions in designing your feedback programs, including the preferred way to:

• Learn about your customers—who they are, where they are, their role in the purchase decision
• Establish the appropriate channels of feedback to use for each customer segment—online, phone, in-person
• Select the types of engagement, such as Relationship surveys that indicate the overall health of a business, providing a holistic overview, and Transaction surveys that monitor the quality of specific events
• Know which questions to ask each customer
• Design the questionnaire, including optimal length, order of questions, clarity of questions, scale

A well-designed feedback program generates real-time analytics and verbatim intelligence through sophisticated text analysis that categorizes comments by theme and sentiment (positive or negative). Responses can be filtered by customer segment (e.g., business unit, region, functional area, call center, service representative). Key business drivers, scores that are dropping, scores that are not meeting targets, overall satisfaction, suggestions for improvement, likelihood to repurchase, and likelihood to recommend provide strong indicators for future success or failure and can be tracked over time.

We design dashboards that include key customer intelligence metrics, along with related operational and financial metrics. Hypotheses can be tested. For example, does overall satisfaction track with corporate revenues? How does overall satisfaction with customer support track with number of calls to resolve an issue? Rapidly communicating this information in a clear and compelling way across the organization will ensue that decisions can be made quickly and results subsequently tracked in a continuous closed-loop process of setting objectives, collecting feedback, taking action, tracking financial outcomes, and iteratively redefining corporate strategic goals and objectives.

What we offer

Business today operates in a rapidly changing environment, where the rate of technology advances is accelerating, competition is fiercer, markets are continually evolving, and price pressures persist unabated. In order to survive and grow, companies must constantly monitor their performance and listen to their customers. They must be prepared to move quickly as needed. In order to drive the best decisions, they must have access to relevant information that identifies what their key business drivers are, points them to where they are falling short, and provides the necessary insights that allow all users across the enterprise to focus on actions that will ensure strategic goals are met.

CustomerImpact’s solutions leverage company performance data and customer input to optimize performance management.

Solution Capabilities

• Leverages vast amounts of data from disparate data sources, including financial, operational, sales, and attitudinal (customer perceptions)
• Tracks critical metrics over time, with data automatically updated
• Creates alerts when conditions change or targets not met
• Delivers consistent view of business performance throughout the organization
• Offers dashboards tailored for different users
• Delivers vital information graphically that is quickly and easily understood
• Starts with top-level view of key metrics and offers more detailed analysis at transaction level through real-time drill-down capability

Benefits

• Simple and intuitive, designed to increase user adoption across your business
• Communicates corporate strategy and emphasizes accountability
• Places powerful customer analytics solutions directly in the hands of the people who make critical business decisions, connecting managers with other managers
• Grows customer satisfaction and retention,
• Saves at-risk customers before they defect
• Increases revenues and reduces operational costs, contributing to increased ROI
• Offers a cost-effective solutions