One of the problems organisations face today is that many have lost their focus on customers and customer experience in favour of profit. This conflict between customers and profit causes us to be short sighted, profit driven and to treat customers with contempt. The effect of this is that we develop business models designed to ensure customers are profitable, such as locking them into contracts, without any regard for what they really want in terms of price and customer service. Due to this inside out thinking, we believe customer loyalty is a thing of the past which causes is to wrongfully believe that it is not our fault when customers leave. There is something terribly wrong with this picture yet it is typical of business in the 21st century. But what can be done?
How can we increase revenue?
In order to change our business perspective, we need to focus on what is important to our customers and reduce the level of importance of what is important to our business. Once we have identified what is important to our customers, we need to align our strategy, our business and our processes to deliver the successful customer outcome, every time. We should design every customer interaction and ensure that every customer interaction is a successful one. Through this alignment, we eliminate our customers desire to leave. With this reassurance, we can not only reduce costs but we can ensure that significantly more customers will provide us with greater revenue as they will remain our customers for now and well into the future.
With the rapid expansion of social networking, our organisations need to be extra careful about bad publicity. We need to make sure we treat customers right because if one customer has a bad experience with our organisation, this experience could soon spread like a bad publicity virus throughout social networking sites resulting in the loss of many more potential customers.
In addition to keeping our customers satisfied by delivering successful customer outcomes, we should question where the customer experience process starts and ends. By answering this question, we may find many more revenue opportunities along the customer value chain. Apple considered this in their approach. They realised that the iPod was not complete without a simple way to deliver the rich media content, and the result was iTunes, a digital media application providing seamless access to the iTunes store where digital media is sold. This made customers lives simpler, easier and more successful by making the acquisition of digital media for users very simple. This also opened up a new business channel which has been a significant source of revenue for the Apple company.
The CEMMethod
The alignment of our organisations to deliver successful customers outcomes has many benefits, to the customer it makes their lives simpler, easier and more successful and to our businesses it reduces customer promiscuity by eliminating reasons for customers to leave. The short term benefit of this strategy it increases revenue and profitability. The long term benefit of this strategy is that it increases market share, to the detriment of competitors. The techniques used to achieve this strategy are available to you through the CEMMethod. So if you are looking to increase your revenue and profitability, then our consulting and training services provide you with the techniques to achieve your goals.