Think about your daily routine – you get up and check the weather, go to the gym and use a personalized work out application … in short, you don’t want to be bothered with things that are not relevant to you. You do, however, hope to gain valuable information that meets your needs.
To enable this, businesses are culling through data to surface the most relevant experiences for customers and prospects. In our work, we see that B2B businesses are investing heavily against the front-end of the customer lifecycle to deliver sales and even cross-sales but are not as heavily focused in using personalization to understand what customers want to engage, and why customers leave.
Assessing why customers stay or leave, and what they find compelling in competitive settings is critical data to gather when working to sustain, deepen and grow customer relationships. Through customer listening programs like customer advisory boards or online communities, you can gain invaluable information on the patterns of your customers behavior.
Here are some things to consider tracking to help you maintain and grow your customer relationships:
Know Your Data
Invest in analytics and spend time to know if you have data and spend time analyzing the data that tells you why customers stay and go. Where are there consistencies? Where are there gaps and how can you fill those gaps to enhance your understanding?
Customer Engagement Dashboard
Develop a way to measure and act on engagement milestones. Map the path from sale to cancelation and be clear on the breakage points.
Listen to your Customers and The Front Line Sellers
Listen to your customers and use tools that are deeper than email. Qualitative data from advisory boards can enable you to see the leading indicators of when an engagement will breakdown. If consistencies exist there, then you have a larger problem. Create internal forums for engagement as well to support the frontline of your organization.
Personalization requires a focused strategy that extends beyond the acquisition phase of the customer life cycle to ensure you understand engagement and churn rates.