The customer experience
The digital transformation has radically changed the Customer Experience. To stay competitive the independent distributor must find new ways to reduce operating costs, improve pricing effectiveness, transform evolving marketing methods, and meet other disruptors head-on. For example, focusing on building and sharpening your sales team is one way to do this. Sales enablement expert Mike Kundle’s recent article in Distribution Sales Strategy describes how to build a Customer Success Team.
Customer retention and loyalty
For handling customer issues and complaints in today’s business environment customer service needs to be reactive and transactional. In high-tech and software-as-a-service (SaaS) verticals, new product implementations are common. Additionally, to ensure recurring revenue and growth it is essential that customer retention and loyalty are developed by the sales team. This is especially true in subscription-based business models. The objective of today’s Customer Success Team is to expand this approach to customer service to other sectors. In brief, you need to provide proactive and personalized solutions to meet customer expectations and needs as they evolve.
Consultative outside sales
The digital transformation has significantly impacted the customer experience. Independent distributors must discover ways to reduce costs, improve pricing strategies, adapt marketing methods, and address other challenges to stay ahead in the market. Thus, customers in this sales model are typically looking for solutions, outcomes, and partnerships.
How to help
Your Customer Success Team for an engineered solutions business can help customers by:
- Understanding the customer’s challenges, opportunities, impacts, needs, outcomes and priorities (COIN-OP).
- Designing and delivering customized and effective solutions that meet or exceed customer expectations.
- Providing ongoing support, training and education to ensure customer adoption and satisfaction.
- Monitoring and measuring customer outcomes and demonstrating value and ROI.
- Identifying and creating opportunities for upselling, cross-selling and referrals.
- Building long-term and mutually beneficial relationships with customers and stakeholders.
Best practices for team success
To build a Customer Success Team effectively, distributors need to follow best practices.
Here are some important steps:
- Create a customer experience strategy that aligns with business goals and values.
- Define a clear customer experience vision that guides the customer’s journey and interactions.
- Broaden services and offerings to meet diverse and evolving customer needs.
- Be proactive and anticipatory in addressing customer challenges and opportunities.
- Invest in tools and technologies that enable customer success, such as CRM, ERP, e-commerce, analytics, AI tools, and automation.
- Monitor customer experience metrics and KPIs that track customer satisfaction, loyalty, and value.
- Train and empower staff to deliver customer success across all functions and departments.
- Collaborate and communicate with customers and partners to foster trust and engagement.
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