A couple of weeks back I wrote about A Holistic Customer Approach and Why You Should Care.
The notion that opportunities are created for a company through its customer’s point of view.
That is, when a company understands fully what a customer is trying to achieve and how they best achieve it, it can anchor its operations on its customer’s total business.
Let’s take a look at a real-life example of this.
Instantly Increase License Usage Simply by Sharing Best Practices for Scheduling Training
A customer of DesiredPath sells medical equipment and software to hospitals.
The company is large and quite successful but it was finding that customer retention was becoming quite a problem.
The issue was that software licenses were going unused so come renewal time it was very difficult to demonstrate the return on investment, making negotiating a renewal agreement very tough.
When we started to journey map, it became apparent very quickly that the company was not considering their customer’s point of view.
Everything identified in the map until that point was from a product usage perspective.
In other words, the plays were organized around product implementation, training and support.
But when the reason for churn was analyzed, the biggest cause for licenses going unused was due to it being very difficult for hospitals to pull everyone out of an emergency room to take software training.
The problem simply was that hospitals were not scheduling their employees to take training so employees were not even getting started with the software.
Ironically, because the vendor was working with all hospitals, they were in the best position to share best practices on employee software training schedules.
However, it never occurred to the vendor to provide this knowledge to hospitals because this information had nothing to do with the product or how to use it.
It did however have everything to do with their customer retention.
After reviewing the journey from the customer’s point of view, the vendor realized that they were in the best position to offer best practices for scheduling software training and as such, added that play into their customer approach and instantly saw an increase in license usage!
Bottom Line: Opportunities are Created Through Your Customer’s Point of View
When an organization does not fully understand its customers, it cannot help but align itself operationally to help customers use the product, not leverage it.
The vendor is, in other words, inadvertently creating an inside-out approach to customer management, not a customer-centric one.
While this may work in assisting the customer to learn how to use the product (although arguably the more complex the solution is the less effective and more resource intensive this becomes), it does not address how a customer can leverage the product within their environment to drive greater return on investment (ROI) for their business.
Ultimately, the desired outcome – business results – and thus successful adoption and customer loyalty, are increasingly at risk.
By understanding its customers point of view, a vendor can align its business to its customers total business to drive repeatable success in the most efficient and proactive way.
A holistic customer approach that unifies both the vendor and customers’ objectives creates opportunities to ensure that everyone wins.
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