How great cx can boost business revenue

As an ops leader, you’re tasked with not only keeping everything in your company ticking over, but making sure your organization can thrive – which, in the current climate, is no mean feat. A great many operations leaders are being asked to make cuts of up to 20% in light of current economic uncertainty. While for many companies, the customer experience (CX) function is a prime candidate for the chop.

Giving your time, energy and limited resources to any strategy without a clear ROI can feel needlessly challenging – which is why CX is often surpassed by more immediately lucrative initiatives. But axing CX to save on costs is a definite step in the wrong direction – and in this blog, we’re going to tell you why.

CX is a reflection of operations

The customer experience demonstrates how well you’re delivering on your brand promise through your operational activities. It’s your job, as an ops leader, to create more opportunities for growth – and during a downturn, that role is more important than ever.

As companies struggle to plan in the face of an uncertain future, and customers keep their cash far closer to their chests, the pressure is on to boost revenues, spend less, and get better results. It’s a tall ask for anyone – and ops leaders are bearing the brunt. But if you want to support your P&L while improving performance across the board, you need to know where to place your focus. And while CX may not feel like the most natural of bed fellows for operations, the pairing is far more compatible than you might think.

One of your biggest challenges as an operations leader is to increase revenue and grow new revenue channels. Your organization wants to safeguard its future, expand its market share, and ultimately, keep making more money. So what problems are you up against?

The most common challenges surrounding revenue generation include:

1. Limited product or service offerings that fail to meet customer needs.
2. Poor sales execution, leading to inconsistent results and sub-par performance.
3. Low topline growth or declining market share.
4. Reduction in customer retention rate.
5. Difficulties in cross-selling and upselling due to low understanding and adoption of products and services.

But what part does CX have to play in all of this?

Meeting revenue growth through CX strategies

1. Limited product or service offerings that fail to meet customer needs.
   
   If you want to grow your revenue channels, and you want those revenue channels to be successful, you need to understand what your customers actually want from you. A well-executed CX strategy can help you to get to the heart of your customers’ needs, allowing you to focus your time, energy and resources on the areas that stand to make the biggest material impact.
2. Poor sales execution, leading to inconsistent results and sub-par performance.
   
   One of the biggest mistakes that organizations make is thinking that CX is only about the customer, when in fact, it’s as much about your employees as it is about anyone. Every last member of your team needs to be aligned with the company vision companies and living the company values. If your employees aren’t delivering a great sales experience, your customers aren’t going to be having a great journey – which means less revenue, and lowered performance. To really address CX across the entire business, you need to invest in training for your people, and empower them to deliver a standout customer experience.
3. Low topline growth or declining market share.
   
   If operations aren’t growing in the way they should, CX can help with that. By listening to the VoC (Voice of Customer), and analyzing data across every channel, you can glean the precise insights you need to understand where you’re going wrong, what your competitors are doing better, and what steps you can make to claw back your share of the market.
4. Reduction in customer retention rate.
   
   It’s harder to keep hold of customers when the economy starts to tank, but customer loyalty becomes even more crucial during a downturn. If you find you’re losing customers at a rate of knots, there’s absolutely no shying away from the very simple fact that your customer experience strategy just isn’t working – if you have one at all. The customer journey needs to be smooth and friction-free if you have any hope of holding onto your customers in turbulent times.
5. Difficulties in cross-selling and upselling due to low understanding and adoption of products and services.
   
   If your customers don’t understand the breadth of what you can offer them, and your employees aren’t doing a good enough job of selling in your products and services, you’re always going to struggle. This circles back to the importance of investing in training for your staff, but also of dedicating resources to understanding the end-to-end customer journey, identifying points of friction, and pinpointing areas for improvement. By activating all of the data that comes with a successful CX program, you can easily identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities, while real-time decision-making empowers employees to improve the customer sales experience.

Ultimately, a CX strategy done well will give you clearer prioritization of both the investments and initiatives you need in order to drive revenue growth. But that’s not all.

CX reduces operational costs and improves operational efficiencies

As well as helping you to meet the challenges surrounding revenue generation head-on, CX can also lead to reduced operational costs and improved operational efficiencies.

As an ops leader, you’re up against everything from increased labor costs, unforeseen expenses, and heightened customer acquisition costs,to rising employee turnover, conflicting KPIs across organizational silos, and missed opportunities for product and process innovation when data isn’t capitalized on.

A CX program that draws data from a single platform – like Forsta – can give you a unified view of company-wide operations – allowing you to optimize the customer experience, prioritize the highest value improvements, remove inefficient processes, and reduce operational costs while you’re at it. This also leads to greater alignment of KPIs, and improved communication all-round.

A greater understanding of your audience can only be a good thing, right? Retention is absolutely critical in our current climate, and the only way to get there is by giving your customers a seamless – and highly personalized – experience across all channels of engagement. Disjointed and inconsistent customer journeys just aren’t going to cut it anymore; people won’t stand for inefficient processes and poor response times.

If you want to keep hold of your customers – both now and for the long haul – you need to be able to make data-driven decisions, take timely action to improve experiences, and understand how to allocate spend in a way that drives customer loyalty.

How Forsta can help

Listening to the conversations that are happening around your brand will give you clear direction over where your company ought to be focusing its attention. But while you can’t be in all places at once, our software can.

Forsta’s Voice of Customer (VoC) capabilities uncover the insights that matter. Whether you choose self-service or fully managed, our end-to-end platform illustrates the entire customer journey – helping you to understand what actions are going to impact your bottom line and equipping you with the tools to make change possible.

Spanning every channel and every device, our software reaches your audience where they are – before breaking down siloed data sources, consolidating all your data in one place, and showing you where to save time and money. And with interactive dashboards that allow you to track performance by product, region, or any category you care to think of, you can make decisions based on the most accurate customer and operational data.

Read to see how our technology can help you to hit profit growth, meet KPIs, and even make cost efficiencies? Book your free demo, and let’s make CX work for your ops goals.