Are you relying too heavily on cost-cutting to boost earnings instead of supporting your customer engagement teams’ efforts to retain and grow existing accounts?
“Cost cutting works, but after a while, it hits a wall,” according to Gallup, “At some point, companies have to grow. Revenue growth begins with keeping the customers you have.”
Customer engagement predictably moves revenue growth across all industries, Gallup continues. They define customer engagement as “A feeling from your customers that you are an essential partner who adds value to their life and business.” They explain, “When your customers feel that you add value and care about their success, they buy more, transact more frequently, are less price sensitive, and are more likely to recommend (you).”
In fact, “customers who get some kind of measurable result stay six times longer on average than customers who don’t,” according to ChurnRX research.
This takes a focused effort from your customer engagement team. And under challenging economic and market conditions these measurable customer outcomes become essential to the longevity of your client partnerships.
Delivering measurable results of using your product or service is what it takes to retain customers, grow strong partnerships, and rise to trusted advisor status. This is what differentiates you from other vendors, making your company an essential partner to the customer’s business.
Here’s the challenge. Your business is navigating the same challenging economic and market conditions as your customers, making it likely that you won’t add more staff or resources. So, how are your account managers supposed to achieve superior customer engagement levels with the same or fewer resources?
Remove Account Management Roadblocks
Enable your account managers to step up their game without adding headcount or resources. This starts by removing roadblocks, helping them break free of their prior tactical actions and focus on strategic proactive planning and activities.
The challenges that hinder effective account management include an undefined process, data and knowledge silos, labor-intensive manual processes, and a disjointed tech stack.
This leaves your team wasting their time figuring out what to do next, managing numerous documents, toggling between applications, pulling data from various disconnected programs, and struggling to measure account health and progress toward customer goal achievement.
You can change all this by enabling account managers with a well-defined process and a single purpose-built technology platform that removes the roadblocks. This allows them to drive measurable customer outcomes efficiently and effectively and boosts retention, revenue, and growth.
How does this work?
A Single Purpose-Built Customer Engagement Platform
Implementing a single solution designed specifically to support the intricacies of customer engagement helps remove the roadblocks that prevent account managers from taking strategic action.
It’s essential to create a well-defined customer engagement process for your team to follow as you transition to your new solution. Then you can fully utilize the platform as the roadmap it is intended to be.
Purpose-built technology, like Kapta, includes all the functionality and automations needed throughout a typical customer engagement process, like our KAM process™. KAM stands for the three phases of the recurring customer engagement process: Know, Act, and Measure.
- The Know phase is where account managers gain a deep understanding of their clients and contacts, and their needs, challenges, priorities, and goals.
- Act is the phase where they take the insights gathered during the Know phase to create an effective account plan to help the customer achieve measurable results with your product or service.
- The Measure phase involves tracking and measuring progress toward goal attainment that is reported back to the client. This process repeats continually as conditions evolve and to pursue new results as goals are met.
The platform serves as a guide that ensures no steps of the cyclical process are skipped. It enables your team with a cohesive suite of tools and automations to increase efficiency and effectiveness.
Technology designed for customer engagement includes essential tools like:
- Interactive org chart and client profiles
- Voice of Customer and SWOT Tools
- Customizable Account Plan templates
- Collaboration Hub
- Customer metrics dashboards
- Account Health Score at-a-glance
- Whitespace analysis
- QBR management tools and automations
- Easy reporting tools for clients and C-Suite
Your solution should also include crucial elements like training, implementation and success support, best practices, new feature releases, and maintenance.
How does your organization benefit from implementing a single purpose-built customer engagement platform?
Benefits of Enabling Your Customer Engagement Team with Technology
Purpose-built customer engagement technology consolidates all the tools, documentation, and metrics your team needs in one place. This offers many benefits including:
One unified source of truth for account managers and everyone across your organization that engages with the customer. This keeps everyone on the same page and singing the same tune.
Streamlined processes with access to a complete set of customer engagement tools at their fingertips. What used to involve time wasted hunting down the right documents or labor-intensive manual processes are now completed more quickly, especially with incorporated templates and automations.
Accelerates delivery of measurable customer outcomes. Housing all documents, account plans, communications, contracts, and metrics in one central platform, shortens the timeline to achieving measurable customer results.
This feature-rich solution makes it easier to gather customer insights, review them, create effective account plans, store them and keep them current, and monitor and measure progress with real-time metrics. Easy metrics visibility is thanks to integrations and eliminated data silos.
Allows proactive risk management so account managers can monitor account health and risk factors to address issues before they get out of control.
Whitespace analysis at-a-glance allows account managers to easily identify growth opportunities to pursue without running excessive reports and research.
Enables a proactive strategic customer engagement approach. All this saved time allows account managers to shift from fire-fighting mode to proactive customer engagement combined with strategic planning and implementation. This frees your team to become the trusted advisor that customers want to partner with.
Facilitates retention and growth. All these benefits add up to greater customer retention and growth as risks are proactively identified and addressed and measurable results are consistently delivered to customers.
Boost Client Retention With Technology and More
It’s time to go beyond cost-cutting measures to achieve revenue growth. Customer retention and growth through customer engagement is the obvious method.
Support your customer engagement team by eliminating roadblocks and arming them with a well-defined process and purpose-built technology.
This allows your team to focus on delivering measurable customer results to increase customer engagement levels. When this happens stronger partnerships are built, advocacy rises, and revenue increases.
Go beyond technology with expert customer engagement insights. Register for KAMCon, taking place in Boulder, CO on April 24 – 25, 2024.
Interested in supporting your customer engagement team to boost retention and revenue growth? Schedule time with a Kapta team member to discuss your strategy.
